on a happy shift in our world

The apartment was hot on Wednesday night.  The fans in each corner of the livingroom only succeeded in moving stale air around and the curtains didn't budge from their place in front of the open windows.  The day before I had broken out in hives, a new allergy I've developed from sun exposure, and I sat on the couch itching my skin and cursing the small bedroom air conditioner for not being strong enough to cool the whole place.  But I pretended to be calm, pretended to not be bothered, because Mike was at the computer attempting to stave off the meltdown of all meltdowns.

Earlier that day he had received a call from an Assistant Principal at a High School in Brooklyn asking him to come in for an interview the next day.  With less than 24 hours to prepare, he was googling teacher portfolios and interview tips as I was sifting through his lesson plans from his student teaching days to find something compelling and brilliant so there would be no doubt that he should be hired.  We were not excited, we were anxious.  This was the first phone call in nearly 100 applications.  The first shot and it felt like it was happening too fast, like there should be more time to make him into the applicant they wanted.

The next morning Mike drove out to Canarsie and was interviewed by a group of students, then faculty, then the Assistant Principal, and two hours later he called to let me know that it had gone well.  I could hear it in his voice, in his retelling of his interview answers and their comments, I could hear that he had it.  Or at least had a strong chance.  Twenty minutes later he called again to say that while driving home a call had come in from the Assistant Principal asking him to come back to meet with the Principal on Tuesday.  I was ecstatic, told him that was great news, that he had made it to the second round.  He cut me off, "They want me to come in to meet the Principal on Tuesday because I was just offered the job.  I got the job.  I'm a teacher."  And with that I shouted and the tears came.  My closest friend at work burst into my office and hugged me, yelled her congratulations into the phone so Mike could hear her, and after we said goodbye I ran around the 11th floor for a victory lap, stopping only for hugs from managers who knew what this meant for us.  Two years of full time school, then a year of a temporary staff position (making a salary so low it matched his first out of college job a decade earlier), and then all those resumes before the call from Brooklyn that changed everything.

August is hard.  We lost Mike's mom, Mike's dad, and both of my grandfathers in this month.  But we were married in August and now we have this news to help the balance of joy and grief.  I have found myself unable to hold back tears these past few days.  While cleaning the house this morning I stopped and let a cry out into the broom handle.  It feels like a release valve has been opened, like three years of worry and wondering and waiting has built to this and I am finally allowed to let go.

It was worth it, Mike is a teacher.  I have never been so proud.

on the non-believer

I was not raised in religion.  Faith, tradition, sure.  But religion, as a practice, no.  It made things confusing at times but at an early age I knew what I believed and didn't believe.  But when you grow up in a town (or let's face it, a world) where nearly everyone belongs to something, not belonging can prove difficult. 

I grew up on Scudder Place.  A walk down to the end of the block, a left onto Vail, and a right onto Church led you to Main Street.  At the southern corners of Church and Main stood a large brick Catholic Church and a tall white Protestant Church.  These things were important, you could tell, there were two of them.  A majority of my town could be found at either one on Sunday mornings.  Instead, on Sunday mornings I was having long, lazy breakfasts or canoeing through the marsh at Crab Meadow or walking the paths at Twin Ponds.  There was a sort of religion there in the quiet and comfort of the migrating warblers and my Dad's whistle, but not the kind of religion my friends were learning. 

One summer afternoon, just a few weeks before we entered middle school, I took my friend Liz to the beach.  We swam and played and laughed and towards the end of the day she told me about the Virgin Mary.  I can't remember how she came up, Liz had just finished her CCD course and so perhaps she was on her mind, but I told Liz that it was an important story but that she probably wasn't a virgin.  I wasn't trying to be blasphemous, I didn't know enough to recognize how important this was to my friend, it was just that I was newly sex educated and there were things I didn't think I could believe. 

Liz looked shocked and plunged beneath the water to get away from me and my words.  She popped up for air about ten feet away and found her way to our blanket on the sand where she stayed, silent, until it was time to go home.  I didn't understand why my opinion had hurt her so much.  I didn't understand why not believing made me different, bad, but it did.  Liz didn't speak to me for a few months after that.  Her mom took up the cause and a few years later when my parents separated Liz was no longer allowed to sleep at my house.  Maybe if we were one of the families who gathered outside on Church and Main on Sunday mornings, maybe if we had just tried to show that we were sorry we weren't like them, things would have been different.  But we weren't sorry, so they weren't different. 

Liz wasn't the only one who didn't understand.  My Grandma, my Dad's mom, used to send me small, delicate crucifix necklaces on birthdays and Christmases.  My Mum, my mom's mom, used to clip the Catachism class schedule out of her church's weekly circular and leave them out for me to find.  And now Mike, the man I've decided to spend my life with, looks pained when I tell him that I don't want my children raised in a specific religion.  

It's our biggest argument to date, and one that hasn't been solved.  Whether he admits it or not, Mike must feel that he has the power in this argument.  His view is backed by 2000 years and millions of like-minded believers.  Mine is all my own, shared by others I'm sure, but mostly a created adaptation of several pieces of several religions.  It doesn't have a name, a beautiful structure attached to it, a day of the week set aside to worship it, and so I'm sure he thinks my argument doesn't carry the same weight.  

But not believing can be as powerful a conviction as believing.  I haven't lost yet.

from the car, over the Triboro

on the power of two

The summer after my sophomore year of high school was the summer of me and my mom.  The year before had been rough and the years after would prove tricky, but that summer, those few months, we were settled, relaxed, and had started to understand the new world that was life after the end of the nuclear family.  It wasn’t perfect, that new world.  I grew up a bit too quickly, knew too much about the inner workings of my parents' marriage and divorce, but she was mine.  It was during this time that I started to joke that I had become the proud parent of a 46 year-old divorcee: every Sunday I moved from one place to the other and we parented each other, grew up together, she was mine.

It was a year of firsts.  The first time my mom did the grocery shopping she called me from the payphone outside King Kullen to tell me how proud she was.  The dinner that night may have been a pint of Cherry Garcia and some spaghetti with a jar of sauce*, but she had done it.  In the years before the divorce my Dad had been the grocery shopper, the most nights of the week dinner maker, and always the highway driver.  I remember the first time she drove the two of us out to my grandmother’s on the North Fork.  The merge onto the LIE from Deer Park Avenue was something she never had to do in that old life of her and my Dad, me and my brother.  In this new life the responsibility was hers, I was too young to drive, and instead of staying home and accepting that she was scared, we did it.  She picked me up from lifeguarding class on a cloudless Friday afternoon, windows down, Indigo Girls blasting, and we merged.  I loosened the seatbelt and turned all the way around to get a better view.

“Slow down, not yet, slow, slow, ok go go go merge merge merge!” 

She slammed her foot on the gas and it felt metaphorical even in that minute, even then with no presence of afterthought to help it along.  I knew as we sped through the cars with the volume up and our voices blending with the wind from the open sun roof that we were going to be ok.  I knew we had passed some test, some sort of challenge for how we were going to move through this new world.  And we would do it together.  We didn’t always play nice or fair, there would be plenty of angry hang ups and emails and words we wished to take back along the way, but she was, will always be, mine. 

"...chase all the ghosts from your head,                    
I'm stronger than the monster beneath your bed,
smarter than the tricks played on your heart.
We'll look at them together then we'll take them apart,
adding up the total of a love that's true,
multiply life by the power of two..."

*disclaimer:  The Ben & Jerry's for dinner years were short lived. 

on being back

I was just struck with a total sense of panic.  Not for anything real or serious, but rather because I realized that May was ending and I was about to let an entire month go by without writing one word here.  Blogger tells me that my last post was on April 13th.  As I write that sentence I feel like I'm in a confessional, even though I've never been to confession, saying, "Bless me father for I have sinned.  It has been six weeks since my last post."  Irish Catholic guilt is with me even without being raised Catholic.  Now that's something. 

I panicked because I loved writing here.  I don't want to let this go.  But as the space between posts grew I started to feel that it was a silly endeavor to start with and I was not cut out for keeping up with it.  And once that tiny nagging thought crept into my head I let go of writing and have not been back to this page since. 

But here I am.  Back again.  I am not sure what will come next but I thought enough time had passed without any words.  

photo from here.

And a very happy unofficial start to summer to you.  My annual welcome summer party begins momentarily with an afternoon with a friend and a weekend at my grandmother's.  It's good to be back.

on the voice

Last month my brother called to tell me that he was coming down to audition for the next season of The Voice.  He asked if I would join him and after a day of thinking I couldn't because I would only make a fool of myself, I decided the experience of it outweighed any doubts.  I thought of how we could talk about it years from now, about that time he came down to New York and we stood outside in the cold for hours just to sing in front of a TV producer, and changed my mind. 

And so the Saturday night before the audition he got off the bus from Boston and made his way out to our place.  We walked to pizza and then practiced, him coaching me on my chosen song, each of us anxious and tired but too excited to go to sleep.  The next morning the cab dropped us off at the back of the Javits Center, far behind thousands of others.  We huddled in the cold and willed the sun to move faster up the back of the building in front of us as the Hudson kept things bitter behind us.  By nine we were ushered inside to the perfectly choreographed registration and then waited in our seats as would-be divas tried to out belt each other in the corners of the huge room.  It was around that time that we realized we would be auditioning in groups of ten, by row, and that we would get to audition together.

I didn't take the process very seriously for myself but I wanted this for my brother.  I thought he had the audition nailed before we even went in the doors and was already thinking of what we'd do for the rest of the day after we learned of his inevitable callback.  But the producer behind the desk didn't look up for my brother, or me, or the seven other auditioners until the 16 year-old Bieber look-alike started to sing.  He sounded sweet, but certainly was no Voice (just watch, he wins the whole thing next year), but within seconds of opening his mouth her head snapped to attention and we knew he had it.  And then it was over.  After the ten of us finished she announced that he and another young woman would be called back and then we were thanked and told to have a great day.

That was it.  All those days of preparing and hours on line just to have it end in a two second sentence.  The speed of it was too much.  Shouldn't there be an appeals process?  Another producer to try out for since this one obviously had a "type" in mind?  But there wasn't.  We found our way out of the basement audition rooms and only after we were through the revolving doors and onto the street did it hit my brother.  He had wanted this.  And it was over.  Even if it was just a TV show, something we'd joke about at some point down the road, in that minute it was more than that.  I put my arm around him and we stood with our backs to the sun as we watched the pool of hopefuls behind the Center's glass windows below us. 

So in honor of my brother, of his voice (which doesn't need the approval of some twenty-something producer on an early Sunday morning), here he is singing at our wedding.  His taking the mic was a surprise for everyone in the room and his voice is my favorite sound of that day, of any day.

on so it goes (April 11, 2007)

Written in April 2007 for the friend I never knew: 

Kurt Vonnegut has died and I feel like we have lost a friend.

It's a very strange thing to feel so affected by someone you've never met.  But he was my friend too.  When my mother tried to end it for the first time, I found him.  He too knew that strange loss of sharing a space with someone who is still living but doesn't want to be.  And I remember the summer when I was 19, when I moved up to Albany and into that empty place three months before all of my other housemates.  Living in that creaky house by myself, with the drug dealers outside on the corner yelling up to me that they knew I was alone and didn't I want to come out and play, Vonnegut kept me company.  I read Slaughterhouse Five on repeat that summer and the voices became so familiar that my journal entries from those months are cluttered with phrases of "so it goes".  

He lived to be 84 but died from a brain injury after a fall in his Manhattan home.  And that death just doesn't seem fitting.  It's too normal.  I think that maybe he should have simply disappeared.  And for years we'd wonder if the folks from Tralfamador had come to take him away and all of the not-knowing would be fantastic.

But he is gone.  And I am sad.  So it goes. 

on the leap revisited

So about those leaps.  They're scary.  And they feel huge.  Even when they're not.  Even when they are just small things to the rest of the world, if it's your leap, it feels monstrous.  I took one.  And I didn't land so softly.  But it wasn't a disaster.  No broken bones, but maybe a little bruised?

I auditioned for a band.  The next day they called me back for a followup.  There were two of those follow-ups over two weeks, each time just one on one with the guitarist.  Then there was the final followup with the full band.  And then a few days of silence.  Afterward, a tentative acceptance email.  "We like you, we like your voice, but... "  It was decided we'd give it a shot.  A probationary measure so no one would be investing too much in the other.  That probation ends today.

The thing is, I'm not a blues singer.  I love the blues, at 12 I even named my hamster Albert in honor of Albert King who died on the day I got him.  But I'm not a blues singer.  I like melodies, I miss singing them.  I'm not tough enough, gritty enough for these.  Maybe I should have taken up a whiskey and cigarette habit because my years of choir-trained vibrato give me away every time.  So earlier this week, when I could tell the band wasn't as happy as they should be about how things were progressing, when I could tell I wasn't as happy as I should be about being a part of it, I wrote and said that I thought they should find another singer.  Even though I know there's really no such thing as a mutual breakup, I think we came close this week.  I wasn't happy.  They weren't happy.  Let's end this now before we stop liking each other.

I'm proud though.  I tried.  I leapt.  I didn't land as softly as I would have liked, but I landed.  And now I know I can do this.  Just not in the way they wanted.  But now I know I can do it on my own.  In the way I want.  Not a bad ending for a first time leap.

on some maybe's

Last night I found myself on the Department of Defense's website.  An unlikely place for me to be, but I was there with Mike as we looked into teaching positions overseas.  Maybe just for a year or two.  Maybe just for a break.  A chance at a teaching job for Mike since there are none to be had here.  Someplace new, different, away from all the things that keep us at a stand still here.  And it was a good daydream, a good talk.  We imagined a baby there.  A new language.  A community abroad.  I said out loud my fears of being away from my family, don't I need them so much?  But then there is skype, and email, and visits, and how many times do we really see everyone in one year anyway.

It's just a daydream for now, made a little more real by the application submission and the country check list:  Ireland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Iceland, Netherlands, check.  It's just a daydream, but last night our words felt a little more real.  About what we want our life to look like, to feel like, if we really want what we thought we wanted.  The house with the yard in the nice neighborhood with good schools and a place to swim so our kids could grow up knowing the water.  Yes, the water part is always important on my list.  But the checks have changed, maybe it's just a family somewhere we feel at home, doing jobs that make us feel good, and just like that the suburban cul-de-sac that had occupied my vision of the future turned into a thousand what could be's and maybe's instead.

from here

on the highline

Spring arrived a few weeks early (of course, now that I've said that, we should expect a blizzard in April) and so last week I made my way over to the Highline before work to celebrate it:

 

on Our Town and Mary Ann

Emily's lines at the end of Our Town, when she says goodbye to clocks ticking and new ironed dresses and sleeping and waking up.  When she asks if human beings ever realize life, every every minute and the stage manager tells her no, saints and poets, maybe, they do some.  That.  That is my favorite.

And then this:  Justin and Mary's recent post about Mary Ann.  The words and the video below feel like Emily's lines in action.  Do human beings ever realize life, every every minute?  Saints and poets and Mary Ann.  They do some.

Justin & Mary. Mary Ann. Really Live. from Jeremy White on Vimeo.

on darkness visible

In 1994 my parents separated.  A year later, after a considerably bluesy period, my mom spent some time in the psychiatric wing of North Shore Hospital.  My Dad said she was tired and needed some rest.  But I knew it was more than that.  Her life had exhausted her and she wasn't sure she wanted to be here anymore.  

I'm not sure what triggered the idea, but a few months later she decided to call William Styron at his Martha's Vineyard home.  At the time, the Vineyard was the only place where famous people still had listed numbers and finding it was as easy as dialing the operator.  She left a message on his machine, knowing that it was off season and he would most likely never hear it and, if he did, never return it.  But she spoke into the recording just the same, told him that she had been feeling helpless but that his work in Darkness Visible left her with some hope.  That the past few months had been a struggle but she was trying to find her way out.  When she hung up I told her that if he ever heard it he was going to think she was a crazy person.  And then we laughed, because wasn't she just a little.

An hour later the phone rang and I answered.  The voice on the other end asked for Laura and when I asked who was calling, William Styron told me that he and his wife Rose would like to speak to my mom.  I ran upstairs, found her marking papers in bed, and whispered his name to her.  She asked me what she should say and I nervously shoved the phone into her hand. 

She called him Mr. Styron.  He told her to call him William.  He said that his daughter had called him at their home in Connecticut to relay the message from the Vineyard of a woman who sounded like she needed him.  And then he told my mom that she shouldn't give up.  She had heard this before but she listened because this was Stryon, an author, a writer, he had suffered too, and she respected him for all of it.  She thanked him for his work and asked him if it ever got easier.  They talked for an hour and I sat curled beside her on the bed in quiet thanks for the man on the other end of the line.  

The bluesy times came and went and come and go still, but seventeen years later there is hope that it gets easier.  And I can't help but think that it springs from that afternoon, from that call, from his words:

“For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as ‘the shining world.’ There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.”

John Curley, flickr

on a leap

The funny thing about having a public place to write (even if I still haven't made it really public) is that once I hit publish I feel as if the words become truth.  Like I owe them something.  So the other day after I wrote that I needed more music in my life, I decided I should do something about it.  Seeing the words there made the need, the want, feel huge, obvious, real.   

Last night I clicked around on some ads in the musicians section of craigslist until I found one that sounded like I might fit.  And then I sent an email with some song clips.  Ten minutes later a reply came in that I should come by the rehearsal studio today for an audition.  Now this might not seem like much, but I don't do this.  I do this in the shower, I do this when no one is home and I think the neighbors won't hear, I do this in comfortable and friendly settings once every three years.  

But then something changed.  And last week when my friend Mary wrote about fear, about stepping into it, about making the big things happen, I felt as if she were speaking directly to me.  So a few hours ago I walked into Studio B on 30th street and sang a few blues songs for a band.  There was a woman in there before me and I'm sure they'll see a few more before they make a decision, but at this point, as much as I want them to choose me, I feel like just going there in the first place was big enough.  Because at least I tried.  I said hello to the fear, called it out from it's lurking place in the corner, and leapt right into it.