Murphy's Teeth and the Insurance (Part Two)

By nine in the morning, Pat is back in bed having whisked Spencer to his bus stop and Murphy is sleeping on the couch. He glows with fever, his curls sticking to his reddened face, looking like a Victorian porcelain doll. I consider forcing him awake and walking him around in circles like people do in movies when they have to sober up a drunk.

I’ve laid a my cool hand on his forehead a couple of times in the last few minutes and said, “Remember we have to wake up soon to go to the dentist.” But the only response has been a flutter of eyelashes.

It’s hopeless.

I can’t do this to Murphy. If the whole point of cramming all of these appointments in at the last minute was to take care of my children in the best way I could under the circumstances, then forcing Murphy to go to the dentist in this condition is the opposite of that. I have to think of him first and not the money. I’ll have to pay for the cavities out of pocket. That’s all there is to it.  We can save up for a few months. Or we can sell the coronet. We can even turn it into a family joke, “Remember, now. Those are the fillings your grandfather’s coronet paid for.”

Lately, it all comes down to the coronet. When we don’t have the rent, Pat looks at me sideways and says, “Maybe it’s time to sell the old girl.” Meaning the instrument, not me. Although, given the strains in our marriage lately, the ambiguity is downright poetic.

Pat’s half-brother gave the coronet to him after their dad died, extracting a promise that Pat would never sell it. We’re the kind of people who traditionally honor promises like that. But that fraternal contract was made when Pat and I were making four times what we make now – when we had health insurance and every reason to believe that our fiscal future was bright. Pat was an at-home dad, acting in a couple of national commercials a year. And I was writing for television.

I pick up the phone and call the dentist.

“Oh, yes. We completely understand,” says the receptionist. “And we wouldn’t want to make the Dr. Olsen sick.”

There is that too, I think. Dr. Olsen is a sweet man who is so cheerful you can almost believe that filling and extracting teeth is his life’s singular passion.

“I don’t suppose we can reschedule the Murphy’s appointment for the end of the week?” I say, trying not to sound desperate.

“Oh, no,” she says brightly. “There won’t be anything open until next month.”

I pause, listening to the clicking of her computer keys while she searches for an opening next month. I feel shaky and about to cry. But I take the chance, “You see. We run out of health insurance at the end of the month and I’m not sure when we will be able to afford to bring Murphy in again.”

The keys stop clicking. Tears spill down my cheeks and I adjust the phone so she won’t hear any sounds that I might make.

“Oh,” she says, not giving anything away. I sniff as lightly as possible to stop the snot from pouring out of my nose. “Well, what we could do is make the appointment for next month, but I will change the date on the insurance forms. That way it will be covered. We don’t do that often. But we can do it for you. Will that help?”

Will that help? Relief suffuses my body like a fast-acting drug. Snot flows out of my nose and I sputter, “Yes. Yes. That would help us very much.”

I wipe my nose with my sleeve. The computer keys click again and I say, “You know we will pay you everything we owe you. I promise.”

“I know,” she says. “Times are hard. And you can pay us a little bit each  month like you have been. We know you will.”

“Thank you. Thank you,” I say, like I’m kissing the hem of her skirt.

I put down the phone and walk into the bathroom to grab tissues and honk into them. Looking up, I catch my reflection.

I look like Mickey Rourke.

But I’m so spent, so drained of feeling, that I don’t care. In fact, it crosses my mind that this is exactly what I should look like – a has-been fighter who is desperate for a comeback.

In the bedroom, I lie down next to Pat who flops a semi-conscious arm over my belly. I think about the receptionist’s kindness and how she rescued me from complete despair within seconds. The last two years have been the hardest of my life. But there have been glorious moments throughout. Little rescues like this one. Flashes of clarity about what really matters. Even times of uncontrollable laughter that completely gutted me over some adjustment we had to make because we were broke. I have been more angry at Pat than I have ever been. And I don’t know when I will be able to let go of it. But I have loved him too. Fiercely, protectively, resentfully.

And I have discovered a seemingly endless well of compassion inside me for anyone who is broken or helpless or lost.

Which is all of us at some point or another.

            I roll over and look at Pat. His chest rises and falls. The cat jumps onto the foot of the bed. My thoughts settle. “You are here, right now,” I tell myself. “You are here right now with your husband and your cat and a boy in the living room who you have just taken care of. “

            Naming what is around me is one of the ways that I have saved myself from feeling completely helpless. And in the last few months I have learned that we have to save our own lives over and over and over again. By staying conscious. By naming. By actively choosing, rather than waiting for life or an intemperate god to put up a roadblock or toss us a bone. The dental receptionist was kind but I had to choose to ask her for help. I did it with snot spurting out of my nose. I shook with the effort of it. I looked like hell. But I had fixed the problem.

            If this cosmically tiny domestic challenge had stood in front of me two years ago, I would not have been able to scale it.

            I put my hand on Pat’s stubbled cheek.

            This is my husband.

The cat is at my feet.

It is sunny outside.

Spencer is at school and Murphy is on the couch.

There is food in cupboard.

There is work to be done.

Murphy's Teeth and the Insurance (Part One)

              I wake as I do all school days, two minutes before the five-thirty alarm. I am wound tight, like a night watchman who accidentally dozed off.  My hand slaps the alarm that never gets a chance to buzz and my feet hit the carpet as I prioritize. No day is the same and there is little room for error. If I forget to pack a lunch, write an excuse note, or buy toilet paper on the way home from the bus stop, everything will be thrown off. The boys are on two different school schedules and keeping track requires a mind capable of last minute recalibrations. Pat for example, who sleeps on the other side of the bed, has probably neglected to tell me about an appointment that can scatter the best-laid plans like an ill wind on a neatly raked pile of leaves.

Which isn’t to say I don’t love him. But I don’t have time for that now.

I pad out to the dark living room and turn on the lamp. This is routine. I flip on the light switch in the kitchen, feed the cat, and walk back into the living room to turn on the computer and check the weather. I look out our bay window, seven stories above a street in West Hollywood. The odd car drives by. A woman walks her dog.

I breathe in.

The top priority today is getting Murphy to the dentist. We lose our health insurance at the end of the month because our union only gives insurance based on income. We didn’t make enough last year to get more coverage. Three months ago, I assigned Pat the task of booking our physicals and dental appointments so we could get everything done before we move to a plan that only kicks in after we have paid an $8500.00 deductible per person.

A gate across the road swings open and a man in a business suit shuts it behind him.

$8500.00 out of pocket per person. I feel my lips curl. I told a friend that all I would be getting for $450.00 a month was assurance that if one of us got cancer it wouldn’t cost us more than twenty percent after we’d paid off $8500.00.

She said, “Forget cancer. What if one of you breaks a leg in three places? That adds up fast.”

Now I have to worry about our legs being broken in three places.

I breathe in again to soften my belly, which is tightening.

The lady with the dog across the street unlocks the gate that the businessman just passed through.

Of course, Pat didn’t schedule the physicals and dental appointments. It’s not his usual job. He does the bills and the car. I do the appointments and dusting. I allowed six weeks to tick by, waiting and reminding him to make the appointments until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I picked up the phone to do it myself. It took me all of fifteen minutes to nail everything down in a tight, almost triumphant voice that must have confused the office assistants. Then I wrote the appointments on a clean sheet of paper, in jagged handwriting, and smacked the list down in front of Pat at the computer. Proof, you see. Proof that I have to do everything around here.

Except the bills and the car.

And the bathrooms.

I haven’t done a bathroom in twenty-one years. My girlfriends want to know if Pat has a brother.

A truck drives by.

In the last month, all four of us have had our physicals and teeth cleanings. Spencer and Murphy are scheduled to see an orthodontist later this week. I just had a pap smear and my mammogram. And Pat and I both had colonoscopies. It’s like we are on a reality show that involves a wacky family health challenge. We would have an excellent chance of winning it too. Except that Murphy ended up having seven cavities.

“Can you squeeze his appointments in before the end of the month?” I implored the receptionist, who has known our family for several years. “I’m leaving town in April.” I wasn’t about to tell her that our insurance was running out for fear that she would drop us entirely. “Or what about doing all seven cavities in one sitting? Has anyone ever done that?”

The receptionist smiled vaguely and consulted the schedule, “I don’t think an eight-year-old can sit in the chair that long.”

I had to stop myself from yelling, “Don’t you have a fucking drug that can knock him out?” Instead, I waited anxiously while she squeezed three appointments into my inexplicably rigid time frame, all of which involved pulling Murphy out of school.

I turn away from the window, breathe again, and walk to the door of the kids’ bedroom. I twist the knob as noiselessly as possible so as not to wake Murphy who can sleep until it’s time to go to the dentist. I reach up to the top bunk and grope around for Spencer’s shoulder.

“Spence,” I whisper, “time for school.”

“OK,” he croaks. “Is Murphy all right?”

“What do you mean?”

“He threw up last night.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” I hear Murphy say from the dark on his side of the room.

I wheel around, “You threw up? When?”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” says Murphy. I can just make out his blonde curls glowing faintly in the streetlight sliding in through the window. Spencer inches down the ladder behind me.

“Spence, why don’t you go into the living room and start getting ready,” I say, without turning to him.

“Ummmmph”, he says, which is a preteen affirmative.

I lean down and touch Murphy’s forehead. It is hot. Very hot. Unmistakably hot. He coughs. It is a phlegmy, chesty alarm that trumpets in my brain, “NO DENTIST TODAY!!! Now you are going to have to pay thousands of dollars for dental work because you wanted to test Pat to see if he really was going to be more responsible after the last time he disappointed you!!!”

“Honey, can you move to the couch?” I ask Murphy as gently as I can. “You will need to have some medicine.”

What am I doing? Why don’t I let him fall back asleep? Because I am still hoping that I can bring down his fever and mask his cough in time for him to see the damn dentist so that I can prove to myself that I am not the most selfish bitch-mother on the planet for making my kids’ health a wedge issue in my marriage.

Murphy sits up, pulls his blanket around him, and swings his legs off the bed. I trail him out the door, his blanket dragging like the cloak of a boy king. A sick boy king.

Spencer has already gotten himself some cereal. My throat tightens. I usually do that for him. I quickly remind myself that I need to start letting him do things for himself anyway. He’s a remarkably responsible kid who could probably run a country more efficiently than I manage my writing career.

Murphy crawls onto the couch, adjusting his blanket as I grab medicine from the bathroom cabinet and sit on the coffee table. He watches me pour the gelatinous, cherry flavored elixir up to the right line on the measuring cup.

“Hold on, I’ll get you some juice,” I say. He always needs a juice chaser to erase the taste of the medicine as fast as possible.

I jump up and head to the kitchen, hoping that my dark purpose is isn’t showing itself in the quickness of my gait or the sharpness of my speech. My sole mission is to get Murphy well enough to see the dentist today.
Part 2 will be posted next week.

Murphy, when he isn't sick

On Finding Relief at Ragdale

             Last week I lost my unemployment insurance. Last week, I lost health insurance for my whole family. And, last week, Pat and I declared bankruptcy. Believe me when I tell you that I know that many people have had far worse weeks.

            The day of my bankruptcy hearing, I finally allowed my feet to hit the floor at four in the morning. I had been flinging the covers on and off, forcing Pat to roll over, readjusting my pillow, and picking up my glasses to look at the clock for what seemed like hours. The clicking of the analog clock’s seconds evoked images from science fiction movies – the painful slowing down of time before the dreadful, predetermined hour when life as we knew it would be completely destroyed.

It might be worth noting, here, that Pat was clearly going to sleep trough my apocalypse. In fairness, this might be because he’d already been through nights like this with me before. And we had – so far – arisen those following mornings with hearts still beating and no sign that our bodies had been claimed as hosts for a galactic showdown that was not of our making.

            Four in the morning is the hour for reckonings. Three o’clock still belongs to the night before. It is a post-party hour or the hour that one wakes up on the couch with the TV still on. But by four you have been to bed. You’ve attempted sleep and failed. You are up alone with no one to lie to. It is pre-dawn and the day is coming whether you like it or not. Four o’clock in the morning most assuredly belongs to tomorrow. Unless there is no tomorrow. In which case, you’ve got a whole host of new problems you haven’t even gotten to yet.

            I walked over to the clothes that I had set aside for the bankruptcy hearing. I was hoping to look respectful but not too upscale. The second part of that description would excuse the run-down pumps that I had picked up at a garage sale. Would the judge be looking at my pumps? Or at my sad, worried eyes?

            To be accurate, bankruptcy proceedings aren’t “hearings” or “trials”. By the time you sit in front of a Trustee, you’ve pretty much proved that you haven’t got a thing left but your second hand pumps and a prayer. The trustee takes control of your non-existent assets and BOOM… you’re discharged. With a credit score that looks like the circumference of a single cell organism and, if you’re me, a lot of self-reckoning.

            I am a woman who expects to pay her debts. I am a woman who likes to work hard. You can call me in the middle of the night and I will spend an hour listening. I will lend you money if I have it. I will watch your kids at the last minute. I am good for a favor, a pep talk, and a lengthy analysis of which pair of earrings you should buy even if the conversation bores me to distraction.

            I have my failings, for sure. But I am not a shirker, a flake, or a no-show.

            And I am bankrupt.

            Self-reckonings. Do I deserve a tomorrow?

            A suitcase was next to my worn pumps and the business slacks that I had only worn once before to a funeral. Yes. That afternoon, after my bankruptcy proceedings, I would grab that suitcase and hop on a flight to Chicago, Illinois. I was going to be spending an entire month at a writers’ residency called Ragdale in Lake Forest, Illinois.

            Was I running away? From my family? From the bankruptcy and my responsibility for it? That’s what it had felt like days before when I talked to one of my closest friends.

            “Everybody needs relief,” Stephanie said on Skype. I could see an unusually sunny afternoon in London outside the window behind her.

            “But it’s crazy,” I said. “I should stay here and get a job in a furniture store.”

            Lately, whenever I fantasize about getting a ‘real’ job, it’s always in a furniture store. Part of the reason is because the furniture in our apartment is falling apart and I believe I’ll get some good deals. But it goes deeper than that. I like furniture. It’s solid. It’s uncomplicated. It’s utilitarian. Furniture is the opposite of a poem. And, because being a writer is a small part of what landed me in bankruptcy, working in a furniture store feels solid. Like a cure. 

            “But you said, yourself, you’re depleted,” Stephanie said.

            “True. But any sane person would tell me to get a job, not run to an artists’ colony to write something that may or may not sell.”

            Stephanie smoothed her hair back from her forehead, “You’ve always said that you sell the things that you’re passionate about.”

            “I could be passionate about furniture. I could be super-passionate about a red leather club chair and hand-crafted knotty pine bookshelves.”

            “Listen. You’re not going to make that much money at that furniture store but you could make a lot of money selling a book. I could make the argument that taking the residency is the most fiscally responsible choice you have made in the past ten years.”

            I loved where this was going. Not only was I being fiscally responsible but I was also getting to spend a month living in a pretty room that looked out onto a prairie, reading novels, and eating gorgeous food that was prepared for me every day.

            Stephanie looked skype-straight into my pixeled eyes, “Trust yourself. You know that you need this. You’ll be better in every way. It’s healthy to look for relief.”

            I have thought a lot about that conversation since I arrived at Ragdale two days ago, relief suffusing my bloodstream like oxygen as soon as I stepped over the threshold of my room. I set up a picture of my two sons on my desk. I look at it whenever I doubt myself.

            There are different kinds of relief.

            I came here for artistic mooring. Time and space to listen to my inner voice. Room to distance myself from the expectations of others. I came here to be gentle with myself. To nourish my body and breathe crisp country air. But the main reason I came here, in spite of every practical reason to stay at home, was to save my own life.

            That sounds dramatic, I know. But I believe that our lives need saving over and over and over again. We all get lost. We all fuck up. We fuck up really, really badly. And when I look at that picture of my sons on my desk, I know that I owe it to them to find my way again. And, sadly, I wouldn’t have found it in a furniture store. Although I’d be happy to work there, once I’ve reclaimed what I lost. Or more accurately --- claim who I am now.

            Stephanie was right. We all need relief every now and then. And it is our duty to admit when we need it and to accept it when it’s offered. My relief is singularly luxurious and that is why I know – I REALLY KNOW – that people have had far worse weeks than the one I just had. I only hope that their relief comes quickly.

            Take it. Use it. And then give it to someone else.

Where I sleep

Where I write

Where I sit and think

Out of Helplessness

I have always been drawn to philosophies and spiritual teachings that emphasize the importance of balance in our lives. Striving for personal equanimity makes perfect sense to me. We should be industrious, but also know when to relax. We should exercise our bodies as well as our minds. We should seek balance between art and science, giving and taking, our heads and our hearts. The Aristotelian ideal of finding the golden mean – the desirable middle between two extremes – is enormously compelling to me.

            Because I’m lousy at it.

            I can swing between moments of euphoria and total despondency within seconds. Just like my eight-year-old, Murphy. One minute he’s declaring that his new light-up YoYo is “the best invention ever” and the next he’s crumpled on the floor, the broken toy in his hand, howling, “Why? Why? Why?”

            Yes, apparently I have the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old. A couple of Christmases ago, my father asked the whole family to close our eyes and hold hands around the table while we listened to a gorgeous aria that he loved. After a minute or two of reverent, head bowing around the pot roast, I got antsy and felt trapped. I started to giggle and then to sputter and cough when I tried to rein it in. Afterwards, in the kitchen, my mother said through a clenched jaw that she wasn’t surprised at my behavior: “We all know what you’re like Brett.” And she was right. Everyone who knows me knows how hopeless I am at marshalling my emotions.

So how is it that someone like me has made it through the last couple of years? 

After the economic crash, my husband’s and my income has dwindled down to a quarter of what it was. Which meant that we had to drain all of our accounts. We are in the process of declaring bankruptcy, losing our health insurance, and struggling daily to create a sense of normalcy for our two sons. Last summer when the IRS put a lien on our checking account, freezing any remaining money we had, I screamed at my husband that I hated him and I wanted a divorce.

Our economic woes, by the way, are not solely his fault. We both have under-earned and mismanaged our money. But I don’t want to talk about economic foolishness right now. Even though I can. I’m an expert. What I want to talk about is helplessness – that feeling that we cannot control anything, not even the basics, and that we cannot prevent a catastrophe from slamming us into oblivion. How do you prevail over the debilitating feeling of helplessness? And if you’re someone like me, who gets knocked around by their own emotions on a regular day, how do you uncurl yourself from the metaphoric ball you have pulled yourself into under the covers?

First, you start at the bottom. Since you are there anyway. You remind yourself of what actually DOES work in your life. You’re not going to divorce your husband because despite the stress of the past few years, he still makes you laugh, is a good kisser, and loves you even though he, like your mother, “knows what you’re like.” Your kids are healthy and happy. You enjoy your work (in this case, you’re a writer) and your friends still like you even though they, too, know what you’re like.

Once you’ve remembered that some of your life has worked out pretty damned nicely, you start to make choices. Because I have come to believe that the road from feeling helpless to resourceful, even happy, is made one choice at a time.

When I found myself at my lowest point, I first had to choose to choose. You see, feeling helpless can be very comforting, even luxurious. After all, no one requires anything from someone who is truly helpless. No one asks a newborn to make dinner. There is an abdication of responsibility in adult helplessness that I found deeply attractive and kind of sexy. At times, I had felt like the French Lieutenant’s woman, staring out to sea – the wind flapping my long cape around -- waiting patiently, sexily, for someone to save me.  Most of the time, however, feeling helpless was simply boring.

So, for me, there was a point when it became untenable. Unsustainable. And I didn’t have a long cape. What I did have were children who needed me and a marriage that required tending. So the first choice I made was to actually start making choices – which lead to choosing to eat better, exercise, and get more sleep. That made me feel a little more capable, but not that much more. Because nothing had fundamentally shifted. My financial situation certainly hadn’t. The only difference I could point to was being able to fit back into my skinny jeans.

It was clear that what needed to change was my mindset. Surely, if I were a happier, I would be more adept at handling life’s challenges. So I started small and simply. I decided to consciously fill my life with things that I enjoyed and I endeavored to let go of things that made me miserable. Knowing that on a pragmatic level, I couldn’t just let go of paying bills, for example. Which definitely made me miserable. But you get the point.

When I thought about what made me happy, the list was quite long and very doable. “Breathing” was at the top. I really like to breathe and so I decided to do a lot of breathing in pretty places. In fact, I decided to slow down in a number of ways. Which may sound like helplessness, but is quite the opposite. This was not inertia, but focus. It was attention.

What, I wonder, are the little joys that you could double up on? Or triple up on?

As long as it’s not vodka. It might be worth considering.

During this period of time, I also thought about joyful activities that had somehow dropped away when I was pulled into the tide of helplessness. One of those had been reading novels. Somewhere along the line, I had forgotten to read.

I also reclaimed the joy of crying. In my darkest days, I started to believe that if I cried, I might never stop. But you do stop. In fact, in my experience, you stop much faster if you fully invest. Once I started crying again, I felt better. More connected and, strangely enough, more able to feel joy. Sounds a lot like balance. (If you need more crying in your life, I highly recommend seeing bad romantic comedies in the middle of the day. Almost no one is in the theater and you can bawl your eyes out. Anything starring Drew Barrymore or Sarah Jessica Parker will do the trick.)

And while you’re in the business of choosing to fill up on activities that make you happy, you might choose to let go of some stuff too. I let go of a couple of unsupportive friendships, which was painful but necessary. But I also tried to let go of complaining and blaming. That was even harder. Because complaining can be fun and it’s a group sport.

And blaming had to go because blaming is the battle song of helplessness.

Let me pause here to say that there were days when I was more successful at making these choices than others. But on the days when I slipped up, choosing to forgive myself was awfully powerful.

And here is an almost counterintuitive choice that I made in the midst of making all kinds of choices: When I felt at my worst. When I was spent and felt that I had nothing left to give. I decided to give more.

A friend of mine is a runner and he once told me that when he feels tired and is convinced that he can’t go on, he runs harder. He runs faster. And it gives him more energy to finish his run.

I believe that it’s the same with giving. When you’ve got nothing, give more. It feels good. It connects you to the world. And you find that you have more than you thought you did. Call a friend who is having a hard time. Volunteer. Help someone carry their groceries up the steps. Giving made me feel resourceful. Which is the opposite of helpless.

Your choices might be very different than mine. I know that mine don’t tend to be pragmatic in a worldly sense. And, to that end, my outward circumstances haven’t shifted that dramatically. But I don’t feel helpless anymore. In fact, I feel quite capable. And I certainly feel more balanced than I have in the past – either in good times or in bad. Because making active choices means consciousness. It means refusing to wait passively for fate or an intemperate god to put up a roadblock or toss you a bone.

And what I have discovered is that all of my choices fall under the umbrella of the big question I ask myself every morning when I wake up.

Which is, “Am I going to keep lying here or am I going to get up and participate?”

Mary Oliver ends one of her famous poems like this:

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder

If I have made of my life something particular, and real

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened

Or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

So for me, the choice – the big choice – is always whether to continue lying on that bed or to get up and walk out the door. To be a part of the world and not just a visitor.

So far, the decision has been easy. Easier than I would have thought.

Grace in the ICU

             I spent last week looking for grace in the ICU. I flew out to Denver to sit with my friend, Sarah, while her husband was in critical care following an aortic aneurism. A lot of praying happens in ICU but many of those prayers go unanswered or aren’t answered the way that was hoped. As I sat next to my terrified friend – terrified myself – I listened to a woman beg her father to let her mother go from life support. Across the hall, a woman wailed with anguish when given bad news about her mother. When Sarah was told that her husband’s heart had stopped, I held her shaking body, heaving with grief. Later, when her husband rallied, I felt relief, not grace.

My own definition of grace has changed throughout the years. When I was in my twenties, I thought that I had confirmed the existence of God in a New York City parking lot. Staring out over the rows of cars I allowed myself to imagine a godless world and I felt immediately bereft. The thought was so unbearable that I re-embraced my former God within seconds, and that was that.  It was the spiritual equivalent to finding lost keys – “Oh there He is. Right where I left Him. Good. Life can go on like normal now.” At the time, I thought my parking lot reclamation of God was a moment of revelation and grace. Today I consider it simply a return to habit. A return to what was comfortable. I don’t think that grace is chicken soup for the soul.

            Now that I’m older, I believe that grace reveals more often to those who are open to it and to those who actively seek it. I have been inspired by friends who look for it through mindfulness and practice. They experience it all the time. The past two years have been very difficult ones for my family and me. As a result, I have had to train myself to wake up every morning and choose hope over despair and grace over cynicism. Sometimes I don’t succeed and I find myself sniping at Pat that we’re huge failures who will never dig ourselves out of our financial mess. Last summer, the IRS put a lien on our bank accounts and I screamed at him, “I hate you. I want a divorce.” Clearly, it wasn’t going to be a good day for grace and me.

            But on the days that I manage to actively choose it, I find grace everywhere. Most notably at my dinner table when Pat and I listen to our sons tell stories about their day and the sky outside our living room window turns orange as the sun sinks behind the mountains. This is grace for me, pure and simple. Food and laughter and beauty and love. And Stevie Wonder playing in the background. It is those moments when I am not looking back or looking forward. When I am consciously in the room, connected to everyone there and to the world outside.

            I have also, by the way, experienced moments of grace and connection when I am completely alone. I recently decided that I was going to learn how to poach an egg and I failed for several days in a row. Then one unremarkable morning, I succeeded and felt completely in tune with the universe. Practice and consciousness had brought me there. That and a capful of white vinegar.

            I did finally find grace in the ICU last week -- it wasn’t when Sarah’s husband got his mortal reprieve, although that kind of soaring hope is oxygen for the soul --and I had to look for it. I was sitting in a chair watching my Sarah stroke Rob’s hair. “I love you so, so much,” she said to him. I breathed deep and loosened my fingers that had curled into fists. I felt the back of the chair supporting me. I listened to Sarah say over and over again, “I love you so, so much.” I breathed again and then there was grace. For a moment I felt no separation from Sarah and Rob. In fact, there was no separation between me and the chair and the sun streaming through the window. There was no future and no past.

Just this. 

** Much love and many prayers to Sarah and Rob. 

Free Lunch (Part 2)

After having lunch with my old high school chum and finding out that I was wrong about every prediction I made about her, I came home to process it all with Pat:

            “She cured AIDS and now she’s going to cure cancer,” I tell Pat, after putting Spence to bed.

            “I thought she was a softball player,” he says.

            “No.  That was what I predicted.  I predicted that she played softball on the weekends.  But she doesn’t.  On weekends, she flies to D.C. to fuck a judge.” 

            “Are you leaving something out?” Pat says. 

            Pat accuses me of leaving out huge gaps of information when I tell a story.  I disagree.  My brain just works differently than his.  He has a brain that can’t leap over things.  My brain jumps around, but in a logical fashion.  The things I leave out are the connectors – vital to Pat’s understanding of any narrative.  Connectors are boring.  They slow me down.  Connectors prevent me from leaping over the left lobe, grabbing a thought, and winding up with an epiphany. 

            “She’s a lobbyist who works in DC sometimes and her boyfriend is a judge,” I say.  The edge in my voice is a sure sign of my annoyance at having to slow down.  Now I have to stop and give information.  This isn’t what I want to talk about.

            “Ah,” says Pat, “I thought she was gay.”

            “Obviously not.  Since she has a boyfriend.”

            Pat gives me a look I know well.  He’s deciding how much further he wants to go with this.  He can tell I’m annoyed about something and he’s hoping it has nothing to do with him. 

            I flop on the couch, look out our smudged window, and sigh, “I have done absolutely nothing with my life.”

            Pat responds with a non-committal, “Ah.”

            The window needs to be cleaned.  I only notice it at this time of day, when the setting sun hits it at the right angle. 

“I can’t even clean my windows,” I say.  “I’ve lived here two years and I’ve cleaned them only once.”

“I see,” says Pat dubiously.  I know he doesn’t see.  I know he wants to ask what dirty windows have to do with having achieved nothing in my life. 

“Do you think I’m completely self-centered?” I ask.

Pat doesn’t answer. Time passes.  I hear the traffic outside and the drip of our leaky faucet in the bathroom.  I listen to the drip, drip, drip – as if it’s marking time.  All the time I’ve wasted.  Drip, drip, drip.  Time leaking through the loose seal of my best intentions.  Drip, drip, drip.

Pat’s chair squeaks.  I had forgotten, in the vortex of time wasted, that he was here. 

“I don’t think you’re any more self-involved than anyone else,” he says carefully.

“Oh God,” I say, “That means ‘yes’.  You think I’m completely self-involved.” 

Pat pushes his chair away from the desk, “I didn’t say that.  This is what you do.  You twist what I say.  I send the words out…” He mimes words floating out of his mouth, “and then you twist them.”  He grabs the invisible words with his fists and twists them, like he’s unscrewing something. 

“OK.  OK,” I say. “Everyone’s self-involved.  But shouldn’t I want to be a better person than that?”

“So far, I’ve got that better people cure cancer and have clean windows,” he says.

“I should be doing something,” I say, jumping off the couch.  “I should be making something, giving time to a shelter.  I should adopt someone”

“Great,” says Pat, “Go do it. If it’s adopting we may need more of a conference.”

I pace, “I should call a soup kitchen.”

“If this means so much to you, why haven’t you done it before?”

“You remember.  I’d make a phone call or go to a meeting and then, something would get in the way. I’d get a job.  Or, hell, I’d leave the country.  I could never stay focused.”  I drop to the couch again.  “Most of the time, I just forgot.  I’d get all geared up and then I’d forget.”

“You’d forget to save the world?”

“Right,” I say, feeling the familiar creep of defeat seeping into my bones.

Pat scoots his desk chair back up the computer and turns on the monitor again, “Sounds like you’ve got a ton of stuff to get through before you save the world.”

I hate Pat. 

                       

           

           

           

           

Free Lunch

      The following is a piece I wrote for More magazine a few years ago about meeting a high school friend for lunch and comparing our post-high school lives...       

            I watch people walk through the swinging doors of the restaurant, wondering if I’ll recognize her.  I haven’t seen Tracy in twenty-five years so it’s mostly guesswork.  What I do remember is her unusually deep voice.  I also remember how she peered over the rim of her glasses with a withering stare.  And I remember that Tracy seemed comfortable in her own skin which is rare for any high school senior, let alone a man-ish African American lesbian with a ‘fro that added a foot to her height.

            As each person enters, I strain to catch a telling detail in the dark human form that blocks the noon sun.  I’ve mistakenly raised my hand twice.  Once at a man who turned out to be white.  And then at a bearded man who was black, but not Tracy. 

            Pat is at home watching our baby, while I sit here in a booth tearing apart a damp beverage napkin.  Tracy and I have not spoken or written to each other in two and a half decades, excluding the short e-mail exchange that set our lunch date.  A high school friend of mine ran into her at an AIDS benefit and gave me her info.  I’m looking forward to seeing Tracy because I love seeing people from my past.  I’m infinitely curious about all people.  At parties I can sit in a corner with a wallflower for two hours, drawing her out.  Occasionally, I’ll get a gem of a story – the wallflower was a homeless junkie, for example, in the 70s. And her face was slashed in a street fight over a quart of orange juice.  Her entire face, she’ll say, was reconstructed by a famous surgeon who did pro-bono work on indigents.  That was before she met Jerry, she’ll say, pointing to a doughy accountant type.  And, she’ll add, her hair is actually a wig because she has that disease that compels her to pull out her hair obsessively strand by strand. 

            Even more fascinating than the stories of strangers, are the stories of people I once knew.  I love to predict how old friends will have changed (or not) before I see them again.  I go through my predictions with Pat before the meeting.  After the meeting, I run home to Pat to compare my predictions with the real thing.  I have lots of time to do this, since I’m largely an at-home mom who’s recently started writing stories in her spare time. 

            This morning, I told Pat my predictions about Tracy.  I decided that she is probably a science teacher (or doing something sciency, she was a whiz at Chemistry).  She probably plays softball on the weekends with twelve women she’s known for twenty years.  I predicted that the highlight of her week is the Saturday BBQ/kegger she and her girlfriends attend at a bar with a name that’s something like “Suzie Q”.  I predicted that she’s still smart and a little bit eccentric.  And I bet Pat that she’ll order the chicken burger.

More often than not, my predictions are pretty accurate.  Though I defy anyone to have known that Dana Havelstrom would become a Mormon.  She was a total pothead at school.

So I am driven by curiosity and my love for prognostication.  But when I meet people from my past, I also tend to find absolution.  Everyone’s bumbling along.  It’s possible the old friend has figured out one area of their life, but another quadrant is in shambles.  Cherry Simonsen looked like she had the whole package:  The successful genius husband, two gifted kids with straight teeth, a side-line repping a graphic artist – and her hair was still glossy and bouncy. After an hour and two martinis, however, she told me that her husband’s addicted to porn and one of her legs is shorter than the other.  A fact I never knew about in college. 

Tracy’s late.  I look through dancing dust particles at the shapes of people walking past.  I’m pretty sure I’m not looking for a foot-high Afro anymore.  But I am looking for a guy-type girl with a bulky plaid shirt and ill-fitting jeans.  Which is why I’m confused when a sleek African American woman in a pencil skirt and pumps appears in front of me. 

            “Brett,” she says, in a low drawn-out voice like Tibetan chant.

            “Tracy,” I say and start to rise before the table slices into my thighs, knocking me back into the banquet. 

            “Don’t’ get up,” she intones, slipping into the other side.

            As she settles, I get a better look at her.  It’s Tracy all right.  Her hair pressed into a neat bob, no glasses, starched white shirt brilliant against her dark skin.  She is now a stunning lipstick lesbian.  I wonder if she came directly from a makeover show.  Which is somewhat possible since we’re in Hollywood, a stone’s throw from where all the talk shows are shot.  As she puts her sunglasses into a stylish case, I glance around for cameras.  Maybe we’re being taped for a show called, “High School Buddies, I’m Hot and You’re Not.”

            I reach up to smooth my hair.  

            “I’m sorry I’m late,” says Tracy.  “I’m not used to things on this side of town.”

            “Of course,” I say, wondering what side of town she is used to.

            We pick up the menus, exchanging idle chat while we scan.   She tells me that she just came from a Saturday morning meeting.  I tell her that my son and husband are at home.  I wonder what her meeting was for but am afraid that it might be some twelve-steppy thing, so I don’t ask.  Recently I asked a new friend what meeting she was coming from and she said, “Narcotics Anonymous.”  Feeling the need to be polite about such an admission, I asked a series of invasive questions that ended with, “I heard that crystal meth eats away at the cartilage in your face.  How did you manage to keep yours?”

“What are you working on now?” I ask Tracy.  I figure that this phrasing of the question lends itself to answers that range from “A report for my boss” to “sobriety.”

            “I’m a lobbyist,” she says.

            “A lobbyist.  Wow.”

            I wonder what she lobbies for?  I look at the suit. She’s awfully put-together.  Maybe she’s in some really conservative field.  It’s not a twelve-steppy meeting she’s coming from; it’s a religious one.  She’s repressed her lesbianism and has become a  religious-righter or a scientologist or a pro-life zealot who meets on Saturdays to plan abortion clinic bombings.  She could be anything.  I haven’t seen the woman in a quarter of a century. 

            “I lobby for women’s health issues, especially for more government funding for breast cancer research,” Tracy says.

            “Wow,” I say. “That’s very…important.”

            Good Lord, I think, here’s someone who’s doing something significant with her life.  What’s she going to think when I tell her that I don’t do much of anything?  I quickly review all the small donations I’ve made to charity in the last year.  Maybe I should bring up the five dinners I buy for the Homeless Shelter downtown every Thanksgiving. 

            “I moved over to Breast Cancer after raising two billion dollars for AIDS research seven years ago.  Since that funding significantly led to the creation of several drug cocktails that are proving effective, I thought it would be time to do for breast cancer what I did for AIDS.”

            “Why not?” I say.  “When you have a talent…”

            I trail off.  I stare at my watery Diet Coke.  What have a done with my life? I flash on yesterday afternoon when I helped an older woman get up after taking a nasty spill on the sidewalk.  I could bring up being a Rape Victim Advocate, but that was ten years ago.  I wish I had cured something or gone to Africa to feed a village. 

            “What have you been doing the last twenty years?” Tracy asks, seeming to be genuinely interested. 

            “Well,” I say, pulling out a standard response that most often connects with your average asker, “I got married and traveled around with a show called ‘The Real Live Brady Bunch’ for a few years.”

            “’The Brady Bunch?’”

            “We re-enacted episodes of the show.”

            “I remember that show.”

            “Right.  Well, I played Carol the mom.  So, my husband and I did that for a few years,” I say, thinking of something redeeming I can throw in.  “I also became a member of the ACLU.”

            “Do you work on any committees?” She asks.

            They have committees?  I thought they just had a newsletter, which is pretty damn dry. 

            The server appears at our table, “Brett, what a treat to see you during the daytime.”

            I look up at Claudine who’s been working at this restaurant as long as I’ve been coming.  Claudine likes to regale anyone who will listen with her dating disasters.

            “You know that guy who was waiting for me at the bar last night?” she asks.

            I smile weakly at Tracy who smiles back enigmatically.  Either she truly finds slumming it with out-of-work actors charming, or she’s biding her time before she can return home to her life partner (who’s probably an attorney for poverty law) to complain about the shallow, purposeless lives most folks lead.              

            “Um, I’m not sure I saw that guy,” I say to Claudine.

            “Sure you did.  He was the one who was asking all the True or False questions about American Idol.”

            “Oh, him,” I say.  “I didn’t notice because I don’t watch reality TV,” 

            This is true.  I don’t watch that kind of TV.  I look to Tracy to see if I’ve scored a point here.

            “Bo got robbed,” says Tracy.

            “No shit,” Claudine says to her. 

            I watch them dive into an exchange about American Idol.  The conversation is animated, and as they prattle on I take this last bit of information about Tracy and try to slide it in with all the rest.  Tracy is a high-powered, pump wearing lesbian lobbyist who watches American Idol.

            I could still be right about the softball on the weekends. 

            After placing orders with Claudine (Tracy orders the Tai wrap instead of the Chicken Burger), we return to our conversation.

            “So you did that Brady Bunch show and then you did what?” asks Tracy.

            See here’s the problem with meeting old friends – they invariably ask about you. 

And while I’ve been a loving friend, a devoted wife, and good conversationalist, I can’t claim to have accomplished much in my life.  The only tangible things I seem to have produced are a child and debt.  When I graduated from high school, I intended to change the world.  I remember ordering the application for the Peace Corps, but I never got around to filling it out.  I started a feminist theatre collective in New York, but after two plays we lost steam.  I never had too much interest in making money, so I grabbed enough work to pay the bills and usually quit to travel around Europe for a bit.  And I married someone exactly like me.  Pat and I haven’t contributed much to the world, but lately I’ve consoled myself with the idea that all that lack of industry means our carbon emissions are low. 

            I tell Tracy the only thing that I can tell her.  I got married, worked around Hollywood for a bit, and had a baby.  I resist the urge to flip out one of the twelve pictures of him I carry around.  I know that baby pictures bore most sane adults senseless. Also, I have found that showing pictures of your children to childless people invariably leads to them showing you pictures of their dog.  Whenever anyone does this to me, I can’t think of anything more interesting to say than, “That’s quite a dog.”  To which they almost always say something like, “Doesn’t it look like he’s smiling?”  And I never see it.  I never see the dog’s smile, or the air of contempt, or wisdom, or sweetness the owner claims to see.  I only see a dog.  Just a dog.  Which is why I know that people who look at my kid pictures see just a kid. 

            “Children sound like a lot of fun,” says Tracy without a trace of irony.  “Being a parent gets such a bad rap among my college friends, who are still the women I spend my time with.”

            “A bad rap?”

            “I don’t think it’s fair really. If you want children I think you should have them.”           

            “Thanks,” I say.  Although I’m not sure what I’m thanking her for.  I’m surprised to find that I’m not remotely offended by any of this.  I’m fascinated.  Tracy lives in such a different world – one so far removed from nap schedules and play dates -- that I feel like I’ve been given a backstage pass to The People Who Run the Country Show. 

            “Most of my women friends see marriage and parenthood as compromising our promise,” she says.

            “You made a promise?” 

            Does she belong to some black lesbianic sorority that extracts the promise from its members that they won’t procreate?  That’s so hardcore.  I think about all the groups I’ve turned down because of the most benign of rules.  Recently, I couldn’t attend the second meeting of a mom group that required bringing snack for the snack table. I was too afraid I’d forget one day and get snubbed. 

            “Our ‘intellectual’ promise.  Our ‘creative’ promise,” says Tracy.  “We didn’t make and actual promise.”

            “Right,” I say, relieved.  “Because that might be illegal.”

            “What?”

            “Requiring someone to promise that they won’t have kids.  It’s a little…” I want to say that it’s a “little Nazi-ish” but I stop myself in the nick of time.  Because I do realize that I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about here.  I’m sounding like an idiot.  I search for an end to my thought, “…to promise that you won’t have kids is a little…a little…”

            Tracy jumps in with, “No one’s promised anything, Brett. It’s simply that we were a group of black women at Yale University who were determined to make our mark.  Politically and Socially.  Most of us have high powered careers now that give us an opportunity to shape the future.”

            “That’s great,” I say. 

            “And children,” she says, “family – gets in the way of all that.”

            “Yeah.  Kids get in the way of shaping the future.  That’s true.”

            I register the contradiction, but don’t press.  She’s talking about something different.  I might be shaping the future through my child – by proxy – but what am I doing now?  I re-promise myself to sign more e-petitions. 
            We pause to poke at our food and I mentally scramble for a subject that would change the course of this conversation. 

            “I think I might be writing a book,” I say.

            “That’s great, “ says Tracy, putting down her Tai wrap.  “I wrote a book a couple of years ago.  And I’m thinking of writing another one.”

            “Wow.  You wrote a book?  Was it published?”

            “Oh, yes,” says Tracy. “And my publisher keeps hounding me for a second.”

            I’m afraid to ask the title of the book.  It’s probably something like Tracy Majors’ Master Work on Curing Cancer, Poverty, the Ozone, and the Common Cold.  I hope Tracy doesn’t ask me what my book is about.

            “What’s your book about?” she asks.

            “Oh it’s a nothing little thing,” I say.  “It’s just a bitty little project that’s been cooking in my little head about moms and kids.  It’s really nothing.  I can’t believe I brought it up.”

            “Sounds fun,” She says.

            “Not really,” I say, reflexively, trying to make my work smaller, more minuscule, than the most insignificant thing.  Thereby, of course, making myself smaller, more insignificant.  It strikes me that Tracy has not pronounced judgment on anything I’ve offered.  It’s only been me -- damning myself with every comparison. 

            Tracy smiles, “In case you want to look up my book, it’s called Lord Hammersmith and the Stranger.”

            “I’m sorry.  ‘Lord Hammersmith’?  Did he discover or cure something?”

            Tracy laughs, “I don’t think so.  I made him up.  The book’s a bodice-ripper.”

            “A bodice-ripper?”

            “A historical romance.”

            “Right.  Right.  A bodice-ripper.  I know what that is.”

            Relief floods me.  Tracy wrote a bodice-ripper.  She may be curing breast cancer but she wrote a bodice-ripper and she watches American Idol.  Tracy is all things.  She is a cancer curer, but she also watches bad TV and writes bad books.  This is the chink I’ve been looking for, like Cherry’s porn addicted husband. Finding that chink restores my faith in the inherent imperfection of each individual.  Thereby making it OK to be me.  The wildly imperfect me.  I feel equilibrium descend like a benediction. 

Later, much later, I will see this scene entirely differently.  I will recognize my search for the chink -- my search for absolution -- to be a sedative.   A sedative that dulls the desire to carve out a place for myself in the continuum.  I will start to understand that finding the chink in someone else’s life, in no way mends my own.  I’ll also note that watching bad TV and writing bad books isn’t much of a chink.  But self-awareness is a gift time gives us.  And right now I’m mourning the loss of time, rather than embracing its benefits.

The sun has moved and no longer pours through the doors as they swing open.  In the fading light of the restaurant, in the glow of mutual imperfection, I am grateful hit an easy conversational rhythm with my old friend.

            I tell her that Spencer’s fourth tooth just came in.  She tells me that she’s meeting with Hilary Clinton about thermal imaging.  I tell her that I’ve started taking yoga.  She tells me about a new job offer that would require her overseeing fourteen AIDS vaccine-testing sites in Africa.  I tell her that we still go to the Midwest at Christmas. She says that molecular science supports the possibility that we will eventually beam ourselves to another location like Captain Kirk. 

            She glances at her watch and I think that we’ve been here a long time and she probably has to get back to her girlfriend.  Maybe they have a softball game this afternoon. 

            Tracy glances up from her watch, “I’ve got a flight to DC at four.”

            I roll my eyes like I know, “Yeah.  All that traveling in the lobbying biz.”

            “Not this time,” she says.  “This is pleasure.  My man and I are going to the Adirondacks for three days.”

            “You’ve got a man?”

            “The same one for thirteen years.  He’s a judge.”

            “Wow.  A judge,” I say, as I watch Tracy give a gold credit card to Claudine. 

            “I’ll get it,” she says. 

            I don’t fight her for the check.  Usually I would, but things have been tight.  And Pat will be happy it’s a free lunch.  

Next week -- I process the lunch with Pat.