And to All a Good Night

It’s my first Christmas in Washington. I may have mentioned that the whole state looks like it’s ready for the lights and tinsel.

Today I helped the girls decorate Christmas cookies. John baked the rest of my chocolate-chocolate mint cookies. Sparkle and I wrapped the last of the gifts while John and Bee went to the grocery store for a few last necessities for tomorrow’s Christmas dinner. John will cook salmon for the kids, while he and I will eat polenta with asparagus and red peppers.

I’m starting to find things I like about Washington. We’ve had a string of decently clear days that reveal otherwise hidden mountain ranges – the Cascades to the east and the Olympics to the west. Seeing Mt. Ranier from Seattle has a fantastical quality like the double setting suns of Tatooine.

Riding ferries is fun. The girls and I went last week to meet my friend Anita and her two kids. Her daughter Fei Fei spent her first year in the same SWI where Willa lived in Zhuhai, China. We went to the International District and had dim sum in a wonderful, totally packed little restaurant. The girls were in awe from the minute we drove into the neighborhood and they saw the lucky fish painted on the columns under the freeway. It has been a long time since they were in a “Chinatown” sort of area, and this experience reminded me that they need to go more regularly.

Tonight, they are sleeping as Santa makes his way to our house. Tomorrow will be a good day – a respite from the stress and difficulty of being in a new place. I may not take off my pajamas all day.

I hope you are able to do the same if that’s your inclination. I hope you find a deep, quiet sense of wintry peace. I hope you find merriment. I hope you are surrounded by all of those who love you.

Welcome to Washington

So far, my first impressions of Washington are clouded (get it?!) by the difficulties of the move. At 7:30 it is barely light outside, and by 4:30 it will be growing dark. I’ve never been a bronzed sun worshipper (stop, stop laughing), but this is ridiculous. And my viking bones tell me it will get worse before it gets better. I have not, as so many people predicted and as my husband has done, fallen instantly and madly in love.

One major difference between New York and Washington is how green it is here during a time of year that, back east, is already scrubby and grey. The whole state looks like a Christmas tree lot. I am hoping that, at some point as I shake off the exhaustion and weariness of moving and the sadness of leaving friends and family so far behind, I will find some comfort in being surrounded by life that is both so old and so eternally fresh.

The drive west was difficult for many reasons, not the least of which was snowy and icy weather along the mountain passes of the Rockies and the Cascades. It’s spooky passing signs that tell you to return to the previous town when the light is flashing. At one town, we had to detour off the main highway because winds were gusting at 60 miles an hour that day, equivalent to a tropical storm.

I’ve never been particularly enchanted by the idea of The Great American West. My enchantment has always been for New England. When my brother and sister-in-law moved to Massachusetts for the first time many years ago, I had an almost lustful envy for their Salem, Mass., zip code, which started with 01-. The fact that their house number was a single digit drove me into wild fits that could have gotten me burned at the stake in another century. I love the cobblestone streets lined by colonial buildings.

My appreciation for the mythology of the West has always been intellectual, instead of visceral. I get that other people get it.

Then I drove from Billings to Missoula, and something happened. I saw how the sky can make a seamless arch between mountains in a very particular way that can only be called “Big.” I felt the ancient, heaving rumble – older than any Massachusetts zip code – that pushes rock miles into the sky. In the backseat, my 6-year-old daughter Sparkle pointed ahead. “I see myself on top of that mountain!” she marvelled.

I saw her, too. And I saw myself. I was light-headed in the icy clouds. I sprouted wings and took a free-falling dive into a river for fish. I prowled on all fours. I heard the squeal of saddle leather. I rode the range. I bellied up at the saloon. I had a showdown. I built a railroad. I chased down a roadrunner and ate that fucker whole.

Now, nearly as far west as a person can go without being in the Far East, I am calling on that vision of myself on top of the mountain, reins in hand, ready to push on to the next town no matter what lights are flashing.

It’s All an Adventure

For two months, I have thought about this trip. Strike that – for almost 20 years I have thought about this trip, ever since I realized that Generation Dad feels about the Pacific Northwest the way I feel about the Northeast. Once upon a time, back when we were in our early 20s and just married, we hatched this plan to move to northern California. We were going to pack the equivalent of hobo sacks into our tiny cars and drive from Florida to Eureka, Calif., camping along the way. I even bought a pair of shorts* for this road trip, so you know it was serious.

*Real, actual shorts. The kind that reveal portions of one’s leg above the knee and are not to be worn fashionably with a pair of opaque black tights.

This trip has not been anything like the trip I envisioned. Not one bit.

When I’ve been telling people what we’re doing – driving across country with the three kids, three dogs, a cat and a 26-foot moving truck, the universal response has been a wide-eyed, horrified “Whew – well, it will be an adventure!”

And it has been. It has been exactly the sort of life-altering
adventure that a trip across the country should be.

We started a day late. Or two days late, depending on how you look at it. After spending three days loading the truck, we piled into our vehicles, buckled up and … Nothing. The truck’s battery was dead. It was already dark, so we ordered Chinese food and camped out in our living room for another night.

Nothing has really gone according to plan. The drive has taken longer. Unexpected things have cropped up.

But it has been a good trip. We have seen the country. We chased the sunset through Illinois. We cursed the Iowa/South Dakota border and its easily missable exits. We cruised through twilight over the snow-covered moonscape of the badlands.

Today, we are taking the kids to Mount Rushmore, where we will line them up for a family photo to send out as a Christmas card. What a sweetly conventional, normal family thing to do. I think this will be the first time we have done such a thing. Our first family holiday card. Generation Dad is right – it’s a brand new life, full of things we haven’t tried before. If this journey is any indication, it will be beautiful and scary and unexpected and will come at you from new directions with a minifridge in the room.

Goodbye, Cooperstown, It’s Been Swell

The truck is almost completely loaded, and we are ready to roll out. Already the weather has changed our route. There is a storm system blowing into the PNW today brining rain to Washington and snow to the mountain ranges we must cross to get where we are going.

I dont write a lot in this blog about pain, which is a constant presence for me because of a hip that needs replacing. I refrain from writing about it mostly necause I know that my pain is largely temporary, I know lots of people who deal with daily pain without the benwfit of knowing that it can be alleviated one day.

When I am not posting via my mobile, I will link up information about joint necrosis. The short version is that I survived cancer, but one of the trade-offs has been that the drugs caused my hips to die and crumble. It feels like you think it would. I have what turns out to be a high pain tolerance coupled with a stubborn Scandinavian insistence to push through, which has come in handy in my effort to prolong the space between replacements 1 and 2.

All of that is to say that the packing process has been painful, and I know that the driving will wreck me. I am putting on my horned helmet, grabbing my axe and heading into the fray.

Boxing Up, Moving Panic and WTF: Twilight?

We are six days from our anticipated moving day, and things are going along well, in spite of two little girls with sore throats. I’m packing in earnest, trying to get as much done before Mr. B gets back to New York on Friday to help load everything on the truck and drive across country.

Both of the girls have been incredibly stoic over our past two months with Mr. B in Washington. They are always delighted to talk to him, of course, but we’ve had remarkably few tears. Then, two nights ago, a feverish Sparkle broke down at bedtime, climbing into my lap and moaning, “I miss my daddy. I want him to come home now.”

I reassured her that he would be home in just a few days, and that we would greet him at the airport with gigantic hugs. It wasn’t good enough.

“I want him home now – tonight,” she cried.

It broke my heart. And I know that Bee, with her natural reluctance to cry, must be grieving for him even more profoundly. Just a couple more days, and we’ll be back together.

Vampire, um, Love?

Although I am not coming anywhere near the daily word count targets, I have been writing almost every day on my NaNoWriMo project. I’ve also been listening to the audio version of “Twilight,” because I decided that my protagonist would be a fan of those books.

The writing is the kind of writing that assumes YA audiences are pedestrian readers. And some of them are, of course. But what is more disturbing about the book’s popularity is that the relationship between Bella and Edward is rife with the kinds of red flags for abuse that teenage girls should be running from, not aroused by.

In spite of the sparkly Edward’s supernatural ability to drive and park a Volvo, as a boyfriend, he’s the douchiest kind. The kind who tells his girlfriend that he has a jaw-clenching, sexy temper problem. The kind who never lets his girlfriend forget that he could kill her – that his natural impulse is to kill her – but that he’s always exercising the self-control to resist that urge. The kind who eavesdrops on all her conversations and watches her every move, you know, so he can “protect her.” The kind who laughs at her notion that she would be capable of protecting herself.

I read somewhere that Stephen King’s assessment of the difference between Harry Potter and Twilight is that Harry Potter is about confronting your fears and standing up for yourself, while Twilight is about getting a boyfriend. I would add that it’s about getting a bad boyfriend.

This works well for the purposes of my story and for my protagonist. But I don’t think I can stomach the other two books, even in the name of research. Maybe I’ll just catch the films.

NaNoWriMo – Day Two

My NaNoWriMo is off to a decent start. Although I haven’t yet hit my target word count – something about which I am less than worried – I have organized the scaffolding and done some of the plotting and sketched the major characters. Most importantly, I’ve solidified my corollaries between the source story (written in 1793 and set earlier than that) and my own story, which is set in contemporary America. A modern American college freshman wouldn’t, for instance, have a faithful manservant escorting her hither and yon, so I have to figure out what kind of character will fit the same bill. I’m not revealing the name of the source story yet, although I will say that it is Gothic pulp fiction. It’s not Austen – although Austenites might be able to figure it out.

There’s an ingenue, a madwoman, ghosts, witches and a couple of truly evil villains.

I’m working in the Scrivener application, which a friend recommended. I love it. I got the free NaNoWriMo trial, and I probably will buy it once the trial is over. It helps my drunken monkey brain keep all my ideas, notes, research, etc., organized. And it has a cool visual editing mode complete with index cards and a corkboard.

There are a few glitches I’ve found, but I can’t believe how much easier it is to use than plain old Word documents.

Back to writing…

NaNoWriMo – Go!

I’ve got a story. I’ve got a working title. I’ve got to write some 1,700 words before midnight.

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo this year, find me and be my writing buddy. I’m etbwrites on the site.

Some Friday randomness.

We had our first snowfall of the season last night. This morning it’s all sunshine through snow-covered branches, the beauty of which is mitigated only by my terror at the weather that lies ahead of us for our cross-country move. C’mon, Old Man Winter, linger wherever you are for just a few more weeks. Let me get safely unpacked in Kingston, and you can bluster all you want.

While the snow fell outside, we carved pumpkins at the kitchen table. Sparkle-the-Child-Formerly-Known-As-Posey was goofing around in her typical dramatic way, trumpeting like a horn, “Pumpkin GOOOOOOO” every few minutes. Then I turned on my phone’s video camera and, so strong is her instinct for various performance media, she immediately began hosting a television segment on carving pumpkins. When I tried to prompt her to call out her catchphrase of the evening, she refused to take my bait.

If you are carving pumpkins this Halloween, I have discovered more great tools. First, as usual, we gutted the pumpkins with a melon baller, which works wonders. Nothing I’ve tried makes it easier to scrape down the inside of the vegetable and get the wall of the pumpkin thin enough for good carving.

I’m still on the hunt for the best type of cutting instrument. Over the years, we’ve used those carving kits with the tiny saws with orange plastic handles. And over the years the quality of those tools has gotten increasingly crappy. I used to be able to save the tools for several years of use. Last year, every saw we bought was bent or broken before we finished carving all our pumpkins.

This year, I bought a smallish punch saw from the hardware store, which worked incredibly well for two young ladies who still favor designs heavy on the bold triangles. For more intricate work, it would have been too big. I recommend it highly, however, for cutting off the top, or the bottom, if you roll that way.

I also ganked an idea from Martha’s magazine this year, and used a cookie cutter to punch out shapes in my small pumpkin. Somewhere or other this year, I had acquired a small bee-shaped cookie cutter, which was the perfect size for punching out bee shapes. The mag instructed hammering the cookie cutter through the pumpkin wall with a rubber mallet, which I don’t own. Instead, I used the back of a rather heavy ice cream scooper. Then I went back with the small end of the melon baller and cut out circles around the bees, not going all the way through the flesh of the pumpkin. I’m hoping those dots will glow once the jack o’ lantern has a candle inside.

Tonight is the annual Pumpkin Glow, sponsored by the Cooperstown Art Association. The CAA invites everyone in the community to bring their carved pumpkins to the expansive front porch of the colonnaded stone building on the Village’s Main Street that houses the CAA, the Village Library, the Police Department and the Village offices.

It’s one of my very favorite parts of one of my very favorite holidays in a community that celebrates Halloween in a way that seems scripted for a movie about quaint New England life. (Technically, I know we’re not New England. But you know what I mean.)

Recall any scene of Halloween splendor from film or television. Cooperstown beats that, hands-down. Plus, it’s real.

I’ll miss that.

Pumpkins 2011

How can you run when you know?

Oakland did me in.

When I first heard the words – Occupy Wall Street – I thought, Yes! Of course! What a perfectly elegant idea. After spending most of this year watching people all over the world gather in public to demand freedom from oppression – and what’s more, to actually get somewhere – to see people in my own country do the same thing filled me with a hope that is more than just a T-shirt-ready marketing slogan. And while critics denounce the protesters based on their lack of a cohesive message, I admire it. I admire the homemade signs, the messy lack of a corporate tagline. I would, indeed, be suspicious of a slick message, knowing first hand exactly how that sausage is made.

But I haven’t joined up. I haven’t gone to any local meetings. I didn’t get out and Occupy Oneonta with the rest of my friends. It’s not a lack of solidarity or support. It’s the fact that I am feeling a deep sense of community limbo with one foot edging toward Washington and one toe still here in New York, where everyone who sees me at the coffee shop asks, “I thought you were moving?”

Then, yesterday, the unbelievable videos and photographs from the Occupy Oakland demonstration that was dispersed by police with tear gas and possibly other projectiles. (There are disputes about whether police used rubber bullets or bean bag launchers. And here is what non-lethal force looks like – a U.S. veteran hospitalized with a skull fracture sustained during the police action.)

Watching those images, I couldn’t help but think of photos of civil rights protesters being attacked by police dogs. I thought of Kent State.

Look beyond the videos though at the fact that there are so many videos. Rodney King was an exceptional case because a person with a camera just happened to capture something that was a daily occurrence. Watch this video that depicts the beginning of the police action in Oakland. Look at all the people recording the event. For all practical purposes, this is a video of police attacking a large gathering of journalists. That alone gives me hope.

A lot of the Occupy groups have adopted a logo of a powerful raised fist. It would be more accurate if that hand were holding a cellphone shooting photos and videos, texting, Tweeting and Facebooking field reports.When you document bullying and oppression, you take away a significant source of its power.

To me, that’s what all the people involved in Occupy all over the country and the world are doing. They’re documenting and sharing their experiences with the forces that are getting rich and powerful through bullying and oppression. Sometimes that oppression looks like police forces lobbing flash grenades. Sometimes it looks like a young woman bankrupted by breast cancer. Sometimes the oppressive cage seems quite gilded, as in the case of the Facebook ad that keeps showing up on my page that reads: I Am What I Buy.

Document it.