Toilet logic

About two years ago, my housemate (who is also my husband) staged a domestic revolution. He no longer lowered the toilet seat.

He clarified for me that hinting, straightforward statements of preference, and sullen looks (the last after butt-first plunges into an open bowl) were not only of no use but were logically unfounded. This is how the conversation went over a few weeks.

Me: Please put the seat down.
Him: Think about it. Why?
Me: If I go in at night, I fall in.
Him: Learn to look first.

Me: Then let's both put the cover down, for hygiene.

Him: See Mythbusters.

Me: It's gross.
Him: It's ceramic. I have to touch it, why shouldn't you?
Me: Well, from courtesy, then, or just to make me happy.
Him: Why do you deserve more courtesy than me?

That last question stopped me cold. Why, indeed? Why should I not have to touch a toilet seat, but he has to? Why would I assume it was more icky or troublesome for me to lower a seat than it was for him to lift it? Why should he have to look first but I shouldn't be expected to? On what basis did I deserve being spared this tiny bit of annoyance -- one that I insisted be a part of his everyday existence?

The only answer, and it was a cold spot of rot to find in myself, was this: Because I'm a girl.

I was horrified, and the matter was closed from that moment. We put the seats down when guests are coming. Otherwise, my fingers are no daintier than his, my ablutions no more preciously pampered, and whoever needs the toilet puts the lid where they want it. I don't like touching the toilet seat -- long conditioning there -- but you know, I don't assume anymore that he shouldn't mind it. And I learned to look first.

Tell me everything...

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Anything can happen birthday edition

So, as I do on every birthday, I call my parents. "Hello," says my mom.

"Thank you," I say.

And, like every other year, she says, "For what?" Long pause. "Oh! You're welcome!"

Then I have the exact same conversation with my dad.

I also talked to my father-in-law, who informed me with great mock gravity that my birthstone is agate, my flower is the rose, my colors are sky blue and black (black and blue! Excellent!), and that my numbers are 3 and 4. I love hearing him laugh over the phone.

These are some day-brighteners from my friends:



The Magic 8 Ball is going with me to work tomorrow. And the orange daisies -- well. Orange is the color of happy for me and not having dishes to do is one state of happy, so I have been a happy woman every time I walk in the kitchen today.

The best gifts, however, have been the hours that my friends have spent with me over the past couple of days. Partly it just worked out that way, as schedules so often don't. But these gifts of time with strong, smart, upright, and funny women are unspeakably precious.

When we think of being there for our friends, we tend to talk about being there in the hard times. But their gift to me this year is to show me how much happiness can be created by making the time to celebrate with another person. My friends make me want to be a better friend.

So let's put a bow around that.

Magic 8 Ball, will I always remember that it's possible to feel as relaxed, happy, and embraced as I do today? The 8 Ball says: It is decidedly so. Magic 8 Ball, will I make others feel this happy on their special days? Better not tell you now.

I bow to the wisdom of the 8 Ball. (But I know what I think.)

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.

Anything can happen on Hospital Hill

So N. took up running this week. It'll be easier for him to work out when he's on the road, running shoes being so much the lighter to pack than a road bicycle.

I admit to an uncharitable spasm of jealousy at the fact that he is faster and stronger than I am. It's passed because it was stupid, really. Not only is he lighter and a 100-miler on a bicycle -- but I never cared about being the fastest or the strongest before I suddenly started comparing myself to him. Which is to say I suddenly cared about being the slowest and weakest.

Friends, those are the claw marks of deep and insane fears. Fear so powerful that when I was younger I wanted to obliterate myself to be free of it.

I don't know that I'm stronger than that fear even now, and that's scary, too. Look how easily it gripped me, and all it took was my partner in a new pair of shoes. But I know some fear jujitsu, and here it is: from one perspective, the field is so much bigger than me and my nearest point of comparison. Both of us have a place somewhere in that field. From another perspective, no matter who else is out there and what they set out to do, I am running in a field of one.

And if I choose to free myself of the fear of being the slowest and weakest, maybe I can finally find out just how fast and strong I might become.

So. For today, back to what I cared about before: building my endurance and leg strength, running regularly, and for once in my life -- hopefully for the rest of my life, at last -- enjoying exercise and feeling strong and capable and happier than I ever have in my moving body.

And finishing the Hospital Hill Run in a few weeks. We walked and jogged the course last Saturday morning with Annabelle the dog and I took pictures so I can visualize these hills while I train. Ready? Here we go.

This is the first hill, at the start of the run. We run north up Grand for about three-quarters of a mile. It's a steady, gentle uphill grade. (Conserve, conserve. Do not pace with anybody else.)


From Grand we hang a right on Truman. We have this for about a block (Conserve; it will not go unused; conserve.) :

Then we hang a right on McGee and skate downhill for more than half a mile. (Okay! Have some fun! Longer stride now! Pick it up!) Then we come to this (shorten stride, don't slow down!):

And at the top of that bridge we see this (slow and steady! 150 seconds and you're there!):

And at the top of that hill we turn left and see this, which actually is much gentler than the hill we just finished (catch your breath, round the curve, keep it easy, suck it up):
But after we turn that curve, there's this, the last significant hill for the 5K crowd (ok! let go! Strong legs! steady up! quick step!):

At the top of this hill on the right there's a big church, and as soon as I see that church my heart is going to SING, buddy. Because after that it's downhill to flat for the last mile. (Ride it out, let it burn, you did it, you did it, you did it.)

And you know who will be at the bottom of the hill? That's right, the man who can run it faster and stronger than me and who knows all about my rotten spasm of jealousy. Because somehow, none of those things has meant he has stopped cheering me on.

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.

Anything can happen to Lucy Ricardo

And because I am channelling Lucy Ricardo this week, everything I have touched has gone bananas and my attempts at fix or cover-up have only made things worse. (Remind me to tell you the one about the curtain rod, the garbage disposal, and the superglue.)

The carnival of errors did not spare my newly inherited, much faster laptop, which I promptly mucked up while copying settings from my old laptop. I've spent most of my time this week on the distraction of repair. Of course, because of being Lucy Ricardo, this chaos struck the day after I invited everyone on my Kansas City local email list to come see my blog.

I should be back in business now, and since I'm actively telling folks about the blog, I'll be posting more regularly. For those handful of you who have stuck it out this week with me, thank you!

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.

Anything Can Happen Near Santa Barbara

This past weekend I joined N. for three days in the Santa Barbara, California area. (I'll post the pics as soon as I can get them off the camera -- stop back to see them.) Our adventures:

1) We walked around Solvang and Los Olivos. Solvang: Many Danish bakeries and shops of pretty doo-dads. And wine tastings, though we held out instead for an olive oil tasting at Global Gardens in Los Olivos. We dipped torn pieces of fresh wheat roll in quarter-teaspoons of oil -- peppery or fennelly or fruity -- poured in a round plastic painter's palette.

2) I ran with our friends' yellow lab, Nyra. Nyra's female human is a marathon runner, so our jaunts in the cool morning air were no sweat for her. We ran past shoals of lavender and Mexican heather, past small trees thick with oranges.

3) At the Karpeles Manuscript Museum's Santa Barbara location, we saw these among other original handwritten manuscripts:

• The Emancipation Proclamation, a huge broadsheet signed by Abraham Lincoln
• Martin Luther King's scribbly and zestful, fat-stroked "We Shall Overcome" speech
• A plain-calligraphy list with no strike-throughs and all the semi-colons where you'd expect them from Noah Webster's dictionary (brag; braggadocio)
• Puccini's big cartoon Madama Butterfly scrawl
• A right-slanting, ovalesque poem by Emily Dickinson on the kind of paper my great-grandmother used to take phone messages on - a little apricot colored rectangle
• A page from Little Women, with Jo's name in Louisa May Alcott's tidy loop
• A page of tiny, precise German from Einstein's theory of relativity

4) We walked on the beach every day. We saw a young, dead dolphin that had washed ashore. A woman came and measured it. And we saw pelicans and plovers and curlews and godwits and terns and bald eagles. And the ocean curled and rolled and sighed.

Doesn't this all sound dreamy? A year from now it will probably be like a dream. What happened in Santa Barbara last week: I suddenly remembered places that I had forgotten visiting. I couldn't connect the memories with dates or names. They floated and flashed, images inside my brain, with no information about how they had gotten there.

This discovery is not without its frightening aspects. But for now we'll leave it here: when I dream, it's like I'm traveling and when I travel, it's like I'm dreaming. Who could be anything but grateful to dream them? Oceans and orange trees, pelicans and plovers, husband holding my hand.

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.

Anything can happen at twilight

Sometimes, toward the end of a dark day, the sun will peel down like a long blue piece of weatherstripping. Things that are still and quiet stand oddly bright and dignified.

The things that are noisy dissolve and the things that are still and quiet rule in that fading gray rafter of sunlight.

And you want some way to express this and fold it up in your pocket at the same time, how much you were not required to notice.


And this is Lee Hazlewood.

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.

Anything can happen in Alexandria

I dream sometimes of living near the library at Alexandria. In my dreams, the rooms are filled with natural light which never ages the books. At night, I can see the stars through high windows.

Every book on every shelf is one that will make me glad to have read it. When I pull down a book, I know that reading it will make me feel wonderful -- challenged, stretched, encouraged, comforted, delighted, overexcited, entertained, awed.

At ten o'clock every morning, exactly the volume I would have chosen for myself is lain by a smiling librarian on the marble side table beside the most comfortable chair. And I never feel as though I should be doing something else. Reading is like running, like kissing, like laughing. And all those things are mine to do as well, any time I want, without losing any time reading.

Outside the library there are cypress gardens with orchids and lotus pools, and outside the garden gates a city with people building houses and glass office buildings and yelling things to each other across the streets and selling soft fabrics and silver chains and hoisting their briefcases and jangling their pots and pans. And outside the city are wide fields, and beyond that a river, and beyond the river and winding away over the curve of the earth, a vast wiggling net of roads and rivers, teeming with people in whose hands and heads are libraries of memories and hungers and plans.

Did you once sleep twenty minutes and feel as though your dream had lasted hours? I have an idea that in the moment before death, the mind goes into the timeless state of dreams. That instead of reliving our lives, we go into what seems an eternal dream, a place of our imagination.

Death: a moment's pained surprise, a moment's dream -- but until then the reading and running and kissing and laughing, the field and the river, the clanging, peopled cities, the faces I see every day filled with their libraries of memories and hungers and plans.

Someday, for a moment that will seem to me forever, I will be in Alexandria. Until then? I suppose I am building my library.

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.

Anything Can Happen in the Pacific Northwest

So, this is our third time to visit the Pacific Northwest urban universe. We stayed a week each time. Each time I hoped it would be rainy and gray so we could get a reasonable idea if we could live with that kind of weather six months out of the year. For the third time, the sunshine has followed us. It's gorgeous in Portland this week. Again.

(I'll attach a pic or two when I can.)

As Promised (11/25):

So we took zero pictures of Portland-at-large on this trip.

N. did take this picture of the garden gnome in our friend Vicki's back yard. (Shout out to the St. John's neighborhood! Woo!)

I am told it was a good year for pole beans. Was also a good year for tomatoes by the looks of things as Vicki had a huge overflowing bowl of the green tomatoes she picked at the last freeze.





This is Enzo.

Enzo is about a year old and already he knows his heart's deepest need: It is to taste the light.

Enzo chases reflections, flashes, glints. After they have disappeared he runs looking for them, up to the heavens, in the dark corners, under the furniture.

Good boy, Enzo.


This is tofurky.

Do not make this mistake for yourselves. Do not let your vegetarian friends talk you into it. If you are serving vegetarians, have lots of unbelievable mouthwatering sides and let them rave at the bounty. (V. and R., that was the best Thanksgiving meal I've had in ten years, easily.)

The furky was no one's fault.




Things I am thankful for:

1) All the people I know. Yes, all of them.

2) My hands and feet.

3) Ani-pals for taking good care of Annabelle while we were away. I hope they find good homes for those kittens.

Tell me everything...

OK, that's enough.