Three Events

Jim's service is this weekend. He has been on my mind for weeks now. Heavy. Tiring. A deep sadness that hangs around the moments of my busy life.

Then yesterday. A man walks into a local restaurant and kills one person seriously wounds another. We've had a lot of shootings in the neighborhood lately. So many that, at school, we're in perpetual yellow alert -- parents must come into the school to pick up their kids and we can no longer go to the park for recess. The kids are crazed. So are we.

And then long talks about what the shootings mean to our community. Some are gang related, but yesterday's shooting was not, though the news would tell us otherwise. It was a young man, angry at the man who was dating his girlfriend. Domestic violence, they're saying, but it's so much deeper than that.

A student in my classroom lived with this man when he was a boy. He was a foster child in their home and she watched him like she'd watch an older brother. And then he went to prison. At 16 where he's been for the past 7 years. Not just prison, but solitary confinement.

"He has anger issues," said the mother of the girl in my classroom, the mother who knew this young man. She wept as she told me how sad she was that this is how his life ended up. "What was he supposed to do? I'm not condoning what he did, but he was a kid who couldn't get a job, couldn't find a place to live, and was very, very angry."

I listened. I cried, too. It's so much more complicated than a young man killing another young man over a girl.

In the morning, another parent told of us her oldest daughter's current condition. The youngest daughter is in our class so the mother wanted us to know that "G had turned for the worst." G had suffered a brain injury in a horse riding accident. For over a year she's been in a coma and now today, she was diagnosed with an abscess on her brain. G was coming home with a hospice nurse. W, the girl/sister in our class, has never once talked about her sister. She's never once let on how horrible it must be to have a sister in a coma, a sister she's watched diminish and slowly die for over a year.

And then this afternoon. W's father came and asked to check W out of school. "A medical emergency." W raced out of the room.

Three events. So unique, so different, and yet so much the same.

I walked home today in the rain. It was cold and windy and wet. When I got home I leashed up Rubin and we went out in the weather again. I was hoping it would wash me somehow, make me feel as if the world in which I lived was good and clean.

It is, of course, both good and clean. But it is also evil and dirty. It's also unjust and unfair.

I am thankful for the rain. I am thankful for the cold. I am thankful for the wind.

And, despite the pain, I am thankful I knew Jim, that I know the foster mother of a troubled young man, and that I know a young girl who is facing the world the only way she knows how -- one moment at a time.

In Times Like These

I am addicted to the sound of the keyboard. The clickclickclick feels cathartic. I want to hear it. I need to hear it. I find myself typing and typing faster and faster pushing the limits of my skill just to hear the pattern of sound my thoughts make as they are transferred through the keyboard.

And I have nothing to write, really, just random thoughts about random things.

We just returned from dinner at our neighbors. Lamb soup. I did not eat it. I tried, but pictures of the lambs I once raised kept leaping into my mind. I ate salad and hummus and bread and goat cheese.

We laughed as we shared the meal with our neighbor's housemate, Abdullah who is learning English, but as our neighbor says, "Has yet to put a whole sentence together."

Still, we understood each other. He was cold. It is not this cold in Saudi Arabia. There is no ice. He waited 30 minutes at the bus stop. He was cold.

He ate the radishes on the plate with a fork. They rolled around while he politely tried to stab them. I laughed and pantomimed the radish ricocheting around the room. He laughed.

I had today off. No school because of the ice and snow though there was more ice than snow. I was thankful for the day and I'm trying hard not to long for another tomorrow. At noon I took a nap and slept deeply. Now I feel rested, but still one more day would feel healing.

I have made a resolution. I will no longer complain. Well, I will try to stop complaining so much. I am alive and I must live this life. Each day. Each day until I am no longer a teacher. And then, each day again without complaint.

I read Bookworm's blog and I cried. Ann wanted to read it so I read it again over her shoulder and I cried again. Bookworm, there is such beauty in your pain. I feel wrong to say it, but your voice is so strong, your words are so exactly what they should be. I wish to have such wisdom at such a time.

Instead, I just want to hear the sound of the keys under my fingers tapping out something. Even if it isn't beautiful, I want the sound to soothe me.

I am saddest when I think of what is left behind. Yes, Fossil Guy is gone and there is a hole in the universe, but it is the ripples that make me cry. My parents. Bookworm. The children. The grandchildren. All the friends, the mountains of friends. All ripples and I know not how to offer comfort or sympathy and I feel arrogant in thinking that my offer is of any use.

Rubin has come into the study and laid his head on the carpet with a big sigh. He liked today. Snow. Staying home. Playing with his dog friends from up the street. The long walks.

Tonight, while we went to our neighbor's house for dinner, we left his kennel door open as a test. Will he feel comfortable moving about the house when we aren't here? Eventually we want to be able to just leave him in the house, no longer using the kennel. When we came home 2 hours later and he was still in his kennel, the door open, and he waited for our "okay" before he came out.

His kennel is a comfort. The sound of the keyboard appears to be mine.

I guess we each find what we need in times like these.

6:40

It's not raining yet, today, but the Ethiopian women are bundled for the wet and the cold. They scurry by our house dressed in white scarves and wool coats. There isn't a single place to park on the block, but the churchgoers try again and again to squeeze their SUV's into tiny spots next to fire hydrants and driveways. They park too far away from the curb, their cars angled out into the middle of the street. The neighbors across the street call the police. Every Sunday, they wake up, place orange cones in front of their house and driveway and then, call the police.

This happens every Sunday. We don't go anywhere on Sundays unless we are away until after noon when all of the churchgoers have unwedged their cars and gone home.

But this is not every Sunday. Today I feel like donning a white scarf and chanting in the orange Coptic Christian church where all the Ethiopians are headed. Today I feel like saying the name of god over and over again in a foreign tongue until my throat grows raw, until my knees bleed rocking back and forth on the cement floor.

I woke at 6:40 this morning. I looked at the clock and thought, "Is Jim (Fossil Guy) still alive?" Then I took the dog out and watched the Ethiopians drive down the street looking for their parking places. I crawled back into bed, summoning the dog up with us. He rested on a pillow in between us, his head draped over my hip.

"Is Jim still alive?" I thought it again and kissed Ann on the forehead.

"You okay?" she asked.

"Just thinking about Jim."

I came downstairs and got the paper, made coffee, and listened to the radio. A slow morning. Ann read the paper and I searched for new music on iTunes.

Then an email from mom and dad. Jim died this morning. 6:40.

Death is a squeeze to the heart. Not a gentle squeeze but a firm one. It hurts. It reminds you you are still alive. I want to do something to relieve the squeeze, but there is nothing to do.

I shall take the dog for a walk. I shall grade papers for the upcoming week. I shall clean the house, fold the laundry, and call my parents.

But those aren't things one can do to loosen the heart. It's tight and it will stay that way for days, weeks, and Sundays to come.

Goodbye, Fossil Guy. Know that you are loved.

Still.

And that the women in white chant their prayers not knowing they are chanting for you.

I know.

I will miss you.

42.2 Days

I've been thinking a lot about time. Every day it walks around with me on my wrist, in my head, and now even on my computer. We bought a new computer recently and because of the ridiculously short life of computers, I had to reload all of my music. It took over a week. CD in, hit IMPORT, CD out and do it all again. At the bottom of the iTunes window I watched the minutes, the hours, and the days count up. Now, if I played my library from beginning to end it would run for 42.2 days.

A lot can happen in 42.2 days.

Today, for instance. My allergies returned. Full throttle. I could scratch my eyes out and perhaps feel better. I could rub my knuckle deep into my skin and perhaps relieve the pain from the unending itch. Instead, I'm taking too much Benadryl and trying to stay calm.

Today, part two. Rubin went in to have a tooth removed. It came in crooked. So crooked, in fact, it dug a hole in the roof of his mouth. So crooked, all the other teeth shifted and now his once minor underbite is a major underbite. Tonight he is groggy and wobbly and disoriented. He wants to sleep, but he finds himself staring out the back door window, slightly leaning, with an occasional "woof" escaping from his drooling mouth.

42.2 days. That's a long time to listen to music.

In 6 months I will no longer be a teacher. I've submitted my intent to resign at the end of the school year. Then I jump my ship of certainty for something wobbly and groggy. I'll stand at the back door of my life and drool. 6 months seems like an eternity though where every day I must face students who make demands, ask questions, feel insecure, want my attention, create crises, walk around self-absorbed.

They don't know I'm leaving, yet, and frankly, I don't want them to know until the day after school gets out.

I don't like goodbyes. But that's still 6 very long months away.

Then I remember FossilGuy, my surrogate uncle. A man I've known since I was 8 or 9 or maybe 10. No one seems to quite remember. FossilGuy is dying. He's been given 6 months at the most.

Ironic. We have the same time though my time marks a shift and his, well, his marks a more permanent one I suppose.

6 months is too short. When I think of FossilGuy breathing through his oxygen tank 6 months feels too long, too.

Rubin has finally fallen asleep in his bed behind my chair. His head is still up, but now resting against the side of the bed. His breathing is heavy.

My eyes are itching and I just popped in two more Benadryl and an Allegra for good measure. Soon I'll be floating. I floated this afternoon almost down the stairs when I came home from work early to rest and attempt to get through this allergy attack. I was wobbly and groggy from the medications and only wanted to put on my pajamas and take a nap with a cold, damp cloth over my eyes. I felt as if my feet weren't touching the ground. The stairs moved and I caught myself on the railing.

I slept. I slept like the dead. I didn't move and when I woke, Rubin was there, wagging his tail and falling over. Ann picked him up from the vet hospital and she came in stroke my forehead and tell me about Rubin's tooth removal.

I have yet to listen to any of the music on the computer. I feel almost compelled to play it straight through -- 42.2 days straight through.

But I can't start. I don't want to measure time in songs. I don't want to measure time in transitions. I don't want to measure time in medication. I don't want to measure time in death.

I can feel the Benadryl coursing through me. My eyes are a tad less itchy. Still swollen and red, but not as unbearable as they were before.

I should stop complaining.

My heart is sad tonight. Not because of Rubin's tooth or my puffy eyes, but because I don't know what to say, what to do about FossilGuy. There's nothing to do. I can just send love his way. I can't fix it. I can't slow down time. I can't speed it up either.

It took me a week to download 42.2 days of music. There must be some kind of meaning in all of this, isn't there?

No. No meaning. Just time.

Eyebrows

I've been thinking about eyebrows lately.  My own in particular.  They are rough, but I've never really seen them as so...not until I looked at my friend Jeanne's eyebrows that she'd just had waxed.  First, it's important to know that both Jeanne and I are on the hairy side.  Not abnormally so (whatever that means), but fuzzy -- more hair than a lot of women. 

 

And it's black hair.  That makes a difference.  

Blond hair or lighter hair seems to go unnoticed say on unshaved legs or armpits, but black hair shows up.

Even in the dark.

So I was intrigued when Jeanne told me she'd waxed her eyebrows. 

I took a close look.  Yes, they were thinner and not nearly as thick or full as they'd been before. Certainly leaner and lighter than my own.  I was surprised Jeanne undertook such a procedure for she, like me, is not a girly-girl, not a lipstick lesbian or a femme -- all those labels people still pass around despite the changing times.

Once I'd seen her eyebrows it got me looking closer at the eyebrows on other women -- friends and passersby alike.

Eyebrows, in and of themselves, are simply swaths of hair placed in unique positions above people's eyes. They move.  They arch and furrow.  They lift.  Sometimes they lift awkwardly, haphazardly.  Sometimes they lift without each other.  They convey emotions.  Anger and fear, patience and sadness, love and frustration.  

Men's eyebrows are more varied. They are allowed to be.  Old men are prone to bushy brows like the man I saw standing in line ahead of me at Starbucks. Wisps bent in all directions, varying lengths of coarse hair curling into his forehead and temples and even into his eyes.  Some men, and women too, have uni-brows -- that line of hair that extends across the forehead, no distinct break for the natural line of the nose.

But women, I've noticed, sculpt their eyebrows.  Some, it seems, pluck the unwanted hair creating an arch and puffy red skin where the hairs used to be.  

Others do what Jeanne did -- waxed their eyebrows into a shape with a bit more curve.  No pointed apex, no tips sharply slanted toward the ears. 

Beauty or some perceived notion of beauty drives such artistry.

Or maybe it doesn't.  

Did Jeanne wax her eyebrows because she was worried about the shape and thickness and volume of hair?  Did she want to look more beautiful?  Did she look in the mirror and scare herself into making an appointment for an eyebrow wax?

I can't picture it.  Jeanne is beautiful no matter what her eyebrows look like but somehow she felt moved to rid her forehead of unwanted thickness.

Looking at eyebrows has made me look at my own.  Years ago I thought I'd never be a woman who plucked anything, but then weird, wiry hairs started to appear on my chin.  I took a pair of tweezers to them and yanked whenever the black whiskers showed themselves.  

One day, a few years back, Ann and I spotted an older man who had huge strands of hair emanating from the moles on his face.  Lengthy.  Five or six inches lengthy.  I have moles, too, and hair pops out all the time.  In fact, one particular mole gets so hairy old women and young children often try to slap the spider from my neck.  

I clip those hairs often.

When we saw the man with the long wisps of hair on his face, I turned to Ann and said, "You'd tell me if I had hair protruding from my face like that wouldn't you?"

She just laughed, but when I looked in the mirror, my god, there were three hairs curling out of my cheek mole.  They  must have grown for weeks. I trimmed them instantly and then watched the mirror every morning for signs of unwanted growth.

So what's the difference? Why am I okay with trimming mole hairs, but not pruning my eyebrows?  

I looked at them closely this morning.  They aren't too bad.  They certainly aren't trim.  And when I use the word "trim" I mean like the trimmer or edger Ann uses to give the front parking strip that well-maintained, golf course look -- no raggedy edges spilling onto the sidewalk.

If my eyebrows are the grass and my skin the sidewalk, well I have to admit there are some wisps of grass growing out of the pavement.  

Should I pluck them?  Should I schedule a wax?  

Isn't okay that hair doesn't grow in neat little rows?  Isn't it okay that sprigs of black pop out at random locations?  Are people walking around looking at my eyebrows and saying, "Jesus, even cavewomen had less fur!"

I remember as a teenager deciding to no longer shave my legs.  This was a big deal because I was already an outcast and the hair on my legs is just like the hair on my head -- thick and dark.  

My nickname in high school was Magilla Gorilla.  

In college, when I walked into the women's bathroom with shorts on (and short hair on my head) women would gasp or even worse, tell me, "This is the women's bathroom!"

Once my mother said, "Oh honey, you should shave your legs, it looks so dirty!" (She'll deny that she said this, but believe me, it took years of therapy to get over that one.)

Of course, she sleeps with a man who has just as much hair on his legs as I do and more on his chest and back than I ever expect to see on my body.  Is he dirty?  

Our friend Trina came by today.  She has sculpted eyebrows.  They're almost perfect.  She's very young, of course, so it's hard to know if she makes them look like that or if they just come so well groomed.  

What did my eyebrows look like 20 years ago?

I haven't a clue.  I never looked.  I never even thought to look.

Now I can't seem to stop.