Lightening and early morning goldfish

I wake up at 5 am to hear my goldfish smacking it's tail on the kitchen counter.
I flip on the light, and there he is, all orange and white and waiting to die.
I scoop him up and put him back into his bowl.
Immediately he starts swimming fast like a miniature dolphin.
I stare, amazed that he is still going, waiting for something to malfunction.
But he doesn't.  He returns to homeostasis plunging his giant mouth in and out, splaying his thin tail through the first morning light.  
I siphon a few cups of water off the top, just so he doesn't jump out again.
He's lucky Kit the cat spent last night outside on the porch.

A few months ago Beckam decided it was time to clean the fishbowl.
Sophie was babysitting.  I checked my phone to find 8 missed calls from her.
I call her back.

"Mom!  Beckam dumped the fish down the garbage disposal!  Don't worry I got him out.  He's okay."

I am impressed to hear she reached her hand into the sink's abyss to pull him out.  I tell her she's a good babysitter.
Now the fish has a few chinks in his armor from his adventure down the drain. 
There was also the time we came back from vacation to find him barely breathing in a 2 inch puddle after the cats knocked his bowl down.  Once again I scooped him up, gave him water and he came to life.  This fish just will not die.

My next thought was:  why did I wake up at 4:51 am?  Was it to save the fish?  

But I know the truth.  It is because I haven't eaten for about 15 hours.  I also went to the gym last night.  Tiny and I climbed the rope to the ceiling 4 times.  Sweaty and beaming, we slap a high five.  My arms are tight with blood.  When I exercise and don't eat, my body won't turn off.  It can't settle into rest.  It's waiting for dinner.  I don't intend to wait make it wait forever...I just don't want to give this up...not yet.  There is a vibration, a rush through me.  I want to ride the crest until it smooths back into the ground.

Last night Andrew and I sat on the porch swing and watched the lightening storm.
No wind, no rain, just blue electricity against a grey sky.  My bare feet rest idle across his legs and I feel the leftover summer heat.  I laid my head on his shoulder and remembered a time when it was only this.  Only he and I and the summer.  Before the kids.  Before the two car garage and the budget.  Before we turned 30.  There was so much energy in the sky.  I wondered if any of it was entering our bodies as we sat there.  How can we witness it so intimately and not be affected?  Maybe that's why I couldn't sleep.  
Or maybe it's because I didn't want to sleep.  I wanted to stay with him, with the storm, and with my freshly laid skin still electrified.

When I was first in recovery, I was so afraid to loose my identity.  
There is a line in the 12 X 12 that says:

 "If I keep on turning my will and life over to the care of Something or Somebody else, what will become of me? I'll look like the hole in the doughnut."

I felt panicked with so many questions.  
Is it selfish then, to be in love?  
Am I not allowed to desire anything?
Is ambition really just self-centered fear manifest in the form of fabricated achievement?

Whoa.  Big questions.  I am still learning.  The answers swell and shift as I age.
But this is what I know about those huge, over-arching questions.  They are not helpful.
They will not aid in the walking of my path today.
When I hiked the Appalachian trail, all I needed to know was that my body was strong, the forest was worth walking through, my friend Monica was with me, and I could see the trail.

Rather then swim up river begging her to make me feel alive.  I ride with her.  When she is smooth I am smooth.  When she roars I let her echo fill me.  I understand that she is more powerful than I am.

Riding the wave in Lake Powell 2014

ticket stubs from the symphony

I tried to convince myself to go for one of those miraculous 6 am runs...but my body couldn't be sparked to lace up shoes.  Sore muscles snuggled in to the sheets.  They grumbled their acid in tiny pricks pinning me to the bed like a deceased bug in a collection.
"Here we see the housewife in her dormant state.  Soon she will rise and make coffee, waffles, and begin compulsively washing laundry."
My mind though, she bings awake at 5:30 a.m.
She is ready.  She is curious, still eager for what the day will bring after 35 years.
She doesn't know she is a housewife.  Her imagination radiates in 12 directions before the body rolls from it's pillow.  I sometimes marvel at how my entrepreneur father still dreams in full color at nearly 60 years old.  After so much "normal" life, he believes something amazing is just around the corner.  I guess we are are not so different.
So now I am hear, slugging the brown shit out of the pipes.  Trying to clear the throat of my writing voice.  Sipping coffee in my thin white robe and hair stwisted up in a bun from our trip to the pool.  We are swimming again today, so I get to stay like this.  A kid in yesterday's play clothes.

Tomorrow I will facilitate a writing group unlike anything I have ever done.
As so often happens, I am in awe of this new twist in my path.
How did I get here?
Four women are coming to my house.
The one thing they have in common:  they all lost their partner to a heroin overdose.
One of them is my sister.  She was with Troy from 16 years old until his death at 31.
For half of her life, he lived by her side.  Now he is gone.
Last summer when I cleaned out Mom's garage, I found a small box of notes he had written to her.
Nothing profound, just a post-it note that had been stuck to a candy bar.

"I brought you this candy because it is so sweet and you are so sweet.
 I hope you have a good day.  Love, Troy."

There were ticket stubs from the symphony.
Some of the notes were so small.  Things you might have thrown away.
Now they are all that is left.

Our group came about because each woman came to me independent of the others, and asked for help in writing about their grief.  I am honored by their trust, and I hope I am worthy of it.
I haven't lost a person in this way.
I won't assume to know what their experience has been or what ache still rolls deep.

I just looked up Troy's obituary.  His eyes in the picture looked alive, they were still bright and questioning with a bit of teasing behind them.  I can only imagine how my sister must look at his pictures and wish he would come to life.  How she must cry.
As I read his obituary I thought: this is not Troy.  This is generic.  This could be anyone.
I hope my sister gets to write about the real Troy.  The one who was hers.  The one who will always be hers.  Perhaps I've got it wrong.  Maybe she needs to do something else.  Maybe the story she will tell is different than I expect.  Probably.
So as I enter this new space, I pray that my expectations will wait reverently on the sidelines.

morning paradox.

Anniversaries are funny things.
There is an assumption that everything immediately changes at the 365th day.
I understand we need to measure time in some way.
If only for sanity and navigational purposes.

When I watched the movie Castaway, it hit me that to be alone with no person or measurement to break up my existence would be a mute version of hell.  Like in dreams when I try to scream and make no sound.  Days would run together like a toddler's over-painted rainbow.  No red, orange, yellow...only a brown puddle that was supposed to equal a life.

I want to celebrate the passage of time.  I want to celebrate it with the people who have divided it for me.  This is a strange gratitude.  To be thankful to a person for separating time into moments for distinct pleasure.  It is like saying to the sun,
"Thank you for blue.  Thank you for green.  Thank you for the distinction in 100 increments between the two."

But that's how I feel today.

My tweenager has been here 3 times already to hang from the corner of my desk.

"Go away," I tell her.

She rolls her eyes, and slumps her curls so they touch the computer's mouse.
She only wants my attention when I am busy.
I realize that I would not be any better off if my writing were never interrupted.
If I could go deep into the voice which retells my stories, and stay under for hours, I would not be more satisfied.
In fact, I would be lost.

So I find that my irritations on this morning of my 10 year anniversary of being sober, are in fact what make it worth while at all.

One day in a college bookstore

Water from the faucet is growing warmer.

I leave my hands in it after the dishes are already washed.
My vision is blurry from hot salty tears crowding their only exit
I hold my hands under the water and let the heat of everything build
I look out the window into blue sky and pine trees.
The glass is clean because I windexed it yesterday.
My body tenses and holds in air, ready to dive under and let this wave pass.
Instead I let it slam straight into my chest.  I let it hurt.
I press still wet hands into my cheeks.  The fresh and the salt mix together.

This is the house-wife's pain.  The lonely apex at her kitchen sink in sweat pants.
One white blossom hangs from a geranium.   I planted it in an old orange teapot.  I thought myself so clever, really winning at this whole domestic thing.
Now it holds space with me as I cry.
I miss my friend...

We bought our graduation hats together and marveled at the little tassel:  Class of 2010.
In the college bookstore, on her long grasshopper legs and high heels, she did a stupid jig.
I recorded it on my phone.
I was graduating with an Art Teaching degree, hers Film and Media arts.
It used to be other people who could succeed, and now it was us.
Together we were beating the odds.
Our laughing rippled out across a sea of Philosophy texts and scientific computers.
One hopeful curl which turned out to be too small.
It was not sustainable.  It petered out against the swell of books on Psychology and Mental Illness.

No one else knows this depth of sadness.
I go into it alone while the kids play swords in the other room.
I can hear them shouting "Hi-Ya!" and it makes my tears seem ridiculous.
But I don't care.  I stay with them.
If it I tried to explain why this memory hurts so much, it wouldn't make sense.
Or maybe it would, I don't know.
I guess I believe that other mothers weep for similar reasons at their own kitchen sinks while doing dishes.
It's all I can do to honor my tiny memory.
It didn't seem right to wipe my eyes with my sleeve and take out the trash.

The Bear

Inspired by "My Friend the Bear" by Jim Harrison

"...Where I keep the bear...I found her as an orphan three years ago, bawling against the dead carcass of her mother...We embrace ear to ear, her huge head on my shoulder, her breathing like a God's"

I know this bear with huge head and breathing like a God's.
She has hugged me with her whole body, and it is an otherworldly experience to be so enveloped.

The night I told my best friend Monica my parents were getting divorced we were sitting on the gaudy lavender couch with lemon flowers.  We were surrounded by Jesus, not the actual Jesus, but wooden framed tributes of a man in the clouds, a man who had never done anything for me.
This was Monica's house, dainty porcelain statues of saints and mothers glowed with the moon.  All of it echoed a home holier than mine.
We were in 7th grade.  I had yet to develop hips or breasts or get my period.

The living room was dark and quiet in the way that makes my tummy tickle.
From the hallway shadow cave, Monica's mama bear came softly in.
She wore less than I'd ever seen her wear, just a thin white silky nightgown over her hefty body.
Her hair was a tiny bun, over which she usually she wore wigs of luxurious curls, but not tonight.
She was without her weighty clip-on earrings of diamonds and onyx.
That night her face was immaculate like one who had never lied.

She came to the couch without saying a word.  She sat behind me and wrapped her velvet arms of dough around my 13 year old body.  I let myself cry into her, knowing it would be the last time I was aloud to be held as a child by a mother.
I pressed my eyes into the pillow of her arm and dropped all my tears.  They came up from the depths of a place I could never find my way back to now.  I didn't want to stop.  I knew that when I looked up everything would be different.  The hard shell of my chrysalis was already forming, already inhibiting my vision and blocking out innocence.  I just wanted to stay tucked under her chin like the fold of a napkin.
She never did say a word.

That same year Monica and her Mom moved to Roosevelt Utah.
I started high school without my best friend or my Mom.

I discovered the lightness of feet as I ran from the school doors at full sprint.
I flew from the principal, from boredom, from normal and landed on the slippery seats of Kyle Reese's vintage Ford Galaxy.  We all piled in, a band of lost children.  We went to Denny's and ate hearty breakfast.  We drove to the mountains and talked about poetry, skateboarding, train-hopping and everything which lay before us uncharted.  We fed our souls because no one else would.
 I discovered adults really don't know what they're doing half the time and they don't deserve my trust.  I learned they only have power over me if I believe their authority is real.  I decided it wasn't.

I did carry an old photo of my Mom, though.  It was from when she still had red hair like mine, before she bleached the color out.  Her eyes were soft with no make-up.  Around her neck laid a delicate gold chain with a seagull flying from the end of it.
I couldn't fault that version of her.  In that picture she was me, her eyes still saw tiny prayers to Jesus everywhere.  I knew that no one had given her the answers yet.  Not then, and not now.

My Friend the Bear

Down in the bone myth of the cellar
of this farmhouse, behind the empty fruit jars
the whole wall swings open to the room
where I keep the bear.  There's a tunnel
to the outside of the far wall that emerges
in the lilac grove in the backyard
but she rarely uses it, knowing there's no room
around her for a freewheeling bear.
She's not a dainty eater so once a day
I shovel shit while she lopes in playful circles.
Privately she likes religion—from the bedroom
I hear her incantatory moans and howls
below me—and April 23rd, when I open
the car trunk and whistle at midnight
and she shoots up the tunnel, almost airborne
when she meets the night.  We head north
and her growls are less friendly as she scents
the forest-above-the-road smell.  I release
her where I found her as an orphan three
years ago, bawling against the dead carcass
of her mother.  I let her go at the head
of the gully leading down to the swamp,
jumping free of her snarls and roars.
But each October 9th, one day before bear season
she reappears at the cabin frightening
the bird dogs.  We embrace ear to ear,
her huge head on my shoulder,
her breathing like a god's.

  ~ Jim Harrison

I should...

I should sneak out for a run.

My family is plugged in to miscellaneous electronics, and I pull my laces tight.
I think I ought to feel guilty leaving them this way...but I am actually delighted.
On the nimble feet of my teenage self, I tiptoe out the window.
Using my thin spider legs, I slip into the mischevious night.

The tops of trees make a web across the sky and I skim over it.
Each time I think this may be hard, or I may be old, I relax into my muscles and my breathing.
I become light again.

This practice has been with me for 18 years.
I don't run to be fast or strong, not really.
I run to realize where I am.

As I walk back to the house with the last air digesting, I see Pepper.
I see our morning walk to preschool.
I see her be so small on the crunchy rocks with her feet in sunday shoes.
Her satin princess cape ripples over the gravel.
Wild hair unfurls from the top of her crown.
I see Beckam in the rickety old stroller, his fat calves pudging out from his seat.
I see myself, tired or not tired in my sweats and weak ponytail.
And I know:  it is all good, even this small memory.
Life can grow from here, we have more than enough of what is important.
Green shoots up from every crack along the concrete track back to my house.
It is over now, like a dream this scene fades as quickly as I can recall it.
She is already in kindergarten.
I can only remember preschool Pepper for a moment when I walk this sidewalk.
Like an unexpected angel, I revel in her presence.
Soon this memory will be replaced by an older version of her, and Beckam will tower over both of us.

When I return to my house, it is with open eyes and plenty of space to receive what I find.

Ashes of Glittering Fire.

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones
toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire
where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song."

            ~ Mary Oliver excerpt from the poem Humpbacks

This is the ocean, this place of glittering fire.

Getting ready to receive Gary's ashes
Greeting the water.

Right now I want to cry because it is the place where I splayed my uncle Gary's ashes in wide fans along the current.  I want to cry because I waited 9 years to swim him out to sea. It took that long for Aunt Robbie to be ready to release her partner, to let him diffuse back into the tides.
I thought the task would be heavy, sodden ashes sinking fast and the weight of it on me as I tread water.  I was afraid my legs could not hold us both up, could not pump fast enough.

He said as he lay waiting for cancer to take him, "I want my ashes sent into the ocean and I want Sarah to take them there."
I'm crying because when I actually dove into the water and felt her familiar brush along my lower back, my thighs and streaming from my toes, I came up smiling.  I knew this was not a sad thing.  It took my breath away to know this, and I sat ebbing in the tide with a full chest.  I've never written about it because I've been afraid I could not do justice to the grace I found in the water that day.  Maybe this is why Aunt Robbie waited so long.

She wanted every detail to be perfect.  We spent over $200 on flowers from the markets of downtown Los Angeles.  I think it was Wall Street.  The sidewalks smelled like piss and I saw whole logs of feces in the gutter.  I kept my daughter close as we moved briskly through a paradox of homeless, brown wanderers and brilliant blossoms of every color.  The blossoms billowed out from cardboard cylinders and I couldn't help but find them equally tragic to the street addicts who were their neighbors. Both were so full of life yet doomed to die too soon.  We chose colors of purple and yellow.  We bought orchids and hydrangea and roses to throw into the water.

The flowers and my daughter Sophie

On the boat there was fresh coffee and pastries.  The sun came out with unexpected fervor.  We took off our jackets and lifted our faces to her from the white-washed deck.  Again I was surprised by how bright everything was in spite of the occasion.
The navy came in crisp white and played the trumpet because Gary was a firefighter for 36 years.
I was struck, by how handsome government ceremony can be.

The boat captain also wore white.  He was straight and tall with a good sense of humor.
"Who is the diver?"  He asked.
Once again I felt inadequate.  I am not a diver, only a strong swimmer and lover of the water, but I stepped forward.
There was some confusion about my diving without certification.  He said it was not permissible.  Absolutely not.  Perhaps today would not be so perfect after all.
Then he found out I would wear no scuba gear.  Only fins and my bare skin.
"Oh, well that's just fine," he smiled.  "No problem there."

Aunt Robbie wanted me to wear a wet suit.

Back to shore wearing the necklace of Gary's ashes.

"I really don't think I'll need it," I told her.  But I smiled and let her rent one from Sport Chalet anyway, just in case the water was choppy or too cold.

But when I got out onto that ocean, when I smelled her salt, and heard her roar, I could not dishonor her by pulling a thick layer of rubber between us.  I knew I could trust the water to do her part.  I would do mine.
Uncle Gary would understand this.  He was a diver for 50 years.  He took dive lessons from Mel's dive shop at age 14.  At age 21 he was the youngest trained scuba instructor to come out of LA county's UICC (underwater instructor certification course)  He died September 6, 2005 at 64 years old. His true love was apnea (breath hold) or free diving.  He did not like the encumbrance of tanks, preferring to kick freely and swim, to turn as a dolphin might.
The water was his mother, as she is mine.  I know she will not hurt me.  If I trust her and swim when it is time to swim...float when it is time to float.  She will hold me.

I loved my Uncle Gary.  He took me snorkeling on the So. Cal coast.  I wore a coral one piece swimming suit.  I was 14 years old, my hair wild as a lion in the coastal air.  He let me wear his fins and his snorkel.  He gave me a small knife and taught me how to rip muscles off the rocks.  I'd pry them open and take the meat underwater to feed the fish.  They swarmed around me in a solid current like a dream.  The ocean opened her twinkling jewelry box.  She let me turn over her treasures in my hands, with fingers that glowed white under water.  I floated on my belly, suspended between two worlds and marveled at how I could be in the water and yet there was endless air.
He let me stay... and stay...and stay while he kept watch, my casual sentinel.  He didn't bother me about time or sunblock.  He just held his post on the rocks, a wise old seagull, smiling, assuring me I could take all the time I wanted. He knew what was happening.  He knew I was falling in love.

In the water with Gary's ashes October 2014

As I released his ashes to the water, all I felt was joy through my entire body.  My legs pumping hard in the fins, keeping me upright and worthy of my faith in them.
"Do you see it!  How beautiful it is?  Can you see it!" I shouted up to the people on the boat.
They looked down to me from another world, from a world I had just left.
I wanted to stay here with Gary, and felt I knew him better in that moment than I ever had when he was alive.
As the last trace of grey dispersed to blue, I tipped back into the cradle of waves.  I let them hold me as my chest expanded, a natural buoy.  I can still close my eyes and conjure it, that depth of breath.
My body became a thin flat film over the water, and I don't know how long I laid there.  I felt the captain yelling to me.  I looked up to find he was smiling wide at me from the boat deck,
"You gonna stay out there forever?"

"I would if I could," I told him, and he smiled even wider.