Racing the Sun

I’ve mentioned before that we live near a mountain range, right? And have I mentioned that the sun makes a big difference in temperature? Well, that’s true in the cold as well as the heat. The sun shining on me at 11:15 this morning, for example, made me doff my coat in forty-five degree weather. And I was perfectly comfortable. But the ridge closest to our house hides the sun at about 4:05 pm these days (and getting earlier!). So I find myself racing to get out the door to get my walk in before it gets shady and cold in these here parts.

Now, something I’ve also probably mentioned once or twice is that I have a son, yes? You’ve heard about this? Yes, he’s a rip-roaring three-year-old, and he pretty much wears me out every day. When I put him down for his nap at 2pm every day, I have to take a nap, or I will die. I think that may even be a verifiable medical fact. Not sure. I haven’t had the guts to test it.

Are you getting the idea here? I have to nap at two (to avoid death), and I have to finish my walk by four. I’ll add into the mix the fact that I’ve had insomnia for the last three nights. So today, I lay down at 2:15, tried to read for about thirty seconds, and then fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until after 3:30. When I saw the clock, I sat bolt upright in bed, like I was having a heart attack. I remember waking like that on mornings when I had to catch a flight or get to work on time, but this was getting a little ridiculous.

To make matters more complicated, I decided to go out without a coat, since it had been so warm earlier. Dumb, dumb, dumb. And because I was still disoriented from the nap, it took me nearly twenty minutes just to get my shoes and scarf on. And even though the sun was technically above the ridge when I left the house, I walk in a neighborhood with houses in it. (Shocker, I know.) And they blocked the sunlight. So I was in shade most of the way, shivering and beating myself up for being so lazy, stupid, selfish, and Communist. (May as well throw in everything.)

It occurred to me on this chilly walk, which I admit I shortened to avoid the cold, that what I have been doing with my walks, I also do with my life. I’m racing the sun, trying to fit in everything before I die. Or before bedtime. Or before the first of the month. Or whatever deadline exists, either real or imaginary. I don’t fool myself. Many of my time limits are self-imposed and arbitrary, but death is one I can’t fudge. That’s for real, and whether or not my conscious mind admits it, that deadline – no pun intended – runs me.

I guess it runs a lot of us. There’s even a country song about “rushing, rushing, till life’s no fun.” And that’s a country song, one of the more laid back musical genres in existence. But maybe we – I – are rushing and panicking about all the wrong things, because we don’t want to look at the big thing. We have so little time on this planet. I didn’t even realize it until I turned forty, and now it seems more true every year. Every month. Every day. It doesn’t really matter if I get the cranberries cooked in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Or if I get in a thousand words of writing instead of nine hundred tonight.

What matters is this sense of urgency deep inside me to live my life to the fullest, to stop wasting time, to pay attention. Lately, Brian has been very tired. Not normal tired, or even normal-with-a-kid tired. His energy levels are way too low. He’s seeing a doctor about it; two, in fact. He thinks it may still be the Paxil withdrawal, but his biggest fear is that he will never find out what’s wrong, and he’ll never get better. This is a pretty serious development for someone who wants to climb mountains for a living. And I don’t know what to do. I can’t help him. I don’t have the answer. And I want to fix him.

I want to fix him for my sake, so he can rush around alongside me, doing all of the things that make our household run. I want to fix him for his sake, so he is happy and strong and hopeful again. I want to fix him for Jack’s sake, so he can be tickled and joked with and chased and held. But I can’t fix him at all, and this is causing me more anxiety than I have been willing to admit even to myself.

But maybe what I really, really, really need to do is slow down. Listen to my husband and hold him and cry with him and let him know, over and over, that we are in this together. Because that is the only truth I am sure of, right now.

And maybe, maybe, this slowing down thing will be enough.

Full Circle

Today I visited a place I haven’t seen in eleven years. It’s called Betasso Preserve, west of Boulder. My friend Ginger took me there in November of 2002, when Colorado and its harsh beauty were brand new to me. She was a friend from college, smart and wise and kind. She felt an intuitive tug to take me to this park, and it changed me.

At the time, I was still very close to the grief from my mom’s death, only a year and a half before. I had spent most of my summer terrified into paralysis with the fear that my father would die soon, too. I obsessed over it, fretted, lost sleep. I didn’t want to lose anyone else. I still lived alone and worked as a technical writer at a big government contractor. I had recently changed offices, making my daily commute twenty minutes longer than it already was. That fall, a sniper was driving around the DC area in a white van shooting people in parking lots. Life just felt too unstable and terrifying.

Meanwhile, I worked with computer programmers, a lot of them young single men. Some were interesting, most weren’t. And the ones who were interesting were often not interested, but a couple of them had potential. Then a few days before I left to visit my friend Ginger, this tall blond guy walked into the office. I knew him. I thought his last name was funny. He was shy but had a nice smile. He would be working on my project, and no one had met him at the door. He didn’t even know where to sit, let alone where to set up his computer, etc. So I ended up being his welcoming committee. I brought the IT guy over, helped him get set up, introduced him to our team.

During my visit with Ginger, she said two things that stuck with me. First, she said it seemed like I was thinking of a romantic relationship as a reward I would get — like an ice cream sundae — for getting all fixed and being perfect. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “Relationships just offer us new and different opportunities to keep growing and learning.” When I told her about the few potentials at work, she said, “It looks to me like you have several doors available to you. Why not just walk through one and see what happens?”

It was good to see my friend. But really, the biggest moment of the trip arrived that afternoon at Betasso Preserve. I looked out over sloping fields and the overlapping layers of evergreen in the canyon, down into the town of Boulder, and I knew deeper than I could say that I belonged there. Those are the words that came out, as I laughed and cried at the same time. “I belong here, I belong here.” I laughed and cried like that — loud, embarrassing, gasping sobs and laughter — for a few minutes. At the time, I thought it meant that I belong here on the planet, despite my mother’s death, despite the sniper and my dad and the fears of this life.

And I think that is still all very, very true. But it turns out that my innermost self also knew a second truth. Because here I am in Colorado, an hour’s drive from that very spot where I cried and laughed and found myself. I followed my friend Ginger’s advice and walked through one of those doors. That shy, tall guy with the nice smile made me laugh and won my heart without even meaning to. And he’s the one who has brought me here to Colorado, full circle.

Today I drove to Betasso alone. I stood out on that same meadow, looking down at the rolling fields and canyon trees and the flat plains beyond. I acknowledged all I’ve done since my last visit there. I have married and created a new person, a son who lights up my life and challenges me daily. I have a master’s degree and three unfinished books. And the thing I feared so intensely in 2002 has come to pass: my dad is gone, too. I looked out over that beauty and told him and my mom that I miss them so much. I wish so deeply that they could be here in the world with me and with Jack and with their dear son-in-law, Brian. It will never be OK that they’re gone.

But I am OK. I will be OK. I still belong here. And here I am.

Conflict

I will never forget the fiction writing workshop I took in undergrad. I remember the first story I turned in was called “soporific” by the instructor. I had to look it up. It means “inducing sleep.” Um.

OK, so it was about two sisters at bedtime in their grandmother’s house. But I didn’t take it as a good sign. Enter piece #2, a fictionalized version of my boyfriend trying to teach me to drive a stick-shift car. I hoped maybe the non-fiction foundation would make it more interesting. “There’s not enough conflict here,” said pretty much everyone in the workshop. And on, and on.

In my mid-twenties, I worked with an Episcopal priest who was only a few months older than I was. She asked me once, “What do you think of when I say the word conflict?” And without thinking, I cringed. She shook her head. “OK, there. That’s the problem. Conflict can be good. It can teach you. Why do you avoid it?”

“Because it sucks?” I answered.

My fiction doesn’t have enough conflict, because I don’t want anything bad happening to my characters. Truth is, I don’t want anything bad to happen to me, either. But the “bad” stuff that happens to us is the meat and potatoes of life. I don’t want to tempt fate, here, but I know it to be true. When my mom died, I didn’t want to keep living in a world that didn’t have her in it. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to go to work. When I did go to work, I didn’t want to do anything. What was the point? But my dad, and my meditation teacher, and my coworkers, and my friends, at different times and in different ways, kicked me in the ass and got me moving again. I had an hour-long commute, and I cried through every minute of it. I lived alone with a cat in a townhouse, and I cried a lot there, too. And I took my little red wagon of grief wherever I went.

But I went. I’ve said this before, but it’s still a great idea. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger, it just doesn’t kill you. And you have to believe, or at least hope, that that is enough. And I kept moving, kept going, dragged myself out of bed day after day. And eventually, I did feel stronger. Because there wasn’t anything that could happen at work, for instance, that was harder than what I’d already been through. I joined a public speaking group at work, and I was never nervous about getting up in front of people and talking, because hell, what could they do to me? I took a graduate English class at George Mason because, well hell, what could happen? The worst had already happened, and here I was.

At one point when I was still unable to leave my house, my meditation teacher said to me, “If you saw someone who had been beaten to a pulp lying on the floor, you wouldn’t blame them one bit if they just kept lying there, would you?” No, of course not. “But,” she said, “What would you think — what would you feel — if that person got up?” And my brain went back to the opening sequence from the movie The Matrix, when Trinity is running from the bad guys and tumbles down a flight of stairs and is lying there, looking up, and says, “Get up, Trinity. Get up, Trinity. Get. Up.” — I knew she was talking to me.

It turns out, I come by this aversion to conflict honestly. I learned it at home. When my dad died, my dear friend Cindy rescued a manuscript of a short story he had written decades ago, when I was only eleven or twelve. I only just read it a few weeks ago. It’s not a great story. It could be the outline of a much longer and more interesting work. But reading it gave me a great insight into my relationship with my dad, and how alike we really were. Like in most of my fiction, his characters were likeable, the dialog was interesting, but nothing happens. I mean, stuff happens. But there’s no conflict, no difficulty that the main character has to face, no growth, no change in him. Aha. I see a pattern here.

My dad and I did the same thing with each other my whole life. We tried so hard to protect each other (and ourselves) from conflict that we never grew past a superficial understanding of each other. We knew some things — favorite foods and movies, sense of humor, etc. But we never got underneath that, because we didn’t let ourselves engage in real, healthy conflict. Oh, we fought. We definitely fought. But it wasn’t like a real battle, more like two walls banging into each other. Somehow, miraculously, maybe because of Mom’s death, or maybe because of all the help I got afterward, but eventually, I learned about conflict. I’d say conflict is one of the better aspects of my marriage with Brian. We argue, yes, but we really engage, and nine times out of ten, we learn something we didn’t know about each other — or ourselves. We resolve the conflict and actually grow as a partnership. I love that about us. But it isn’t easy, and it isn’t convenient. It’s hard work.

So now I need to create a story with a hero who suffers, and I’m balking. I still don’t want anything to happen to this guy. I like him. But I also want him to grow. I want him to change. I want him to learn something about himself and human nature that he didn’t know before. And it occurs to me that I know the answer now to my meditation teacher’s question from years ago. What would I feel if someone bloodied and beaten, lying on the floor, showed the gumption to finally get up? Hope.

 

 

The Other

In grad school, I took a Research course with my thesis director. She invited several guest lecturers to come and speak to our class about their process of researching for a piece of creative writing. One guest, Daniel Nathan Terry, was a recent graduate of the program, and had recently had a book of poetry published about the Civil War. Titled Capturing the Dead, the collection follows a well-known photojournalist of that era who photographed battlefields and soldiers—dead and alive—to document the events (and horrors) of the war. The poet addressing our class was a gay white man born in twentieth-century South Carolina, who previously knew almost nothing about the Civil War. But his subject, a real man, fascinated him, and he pursued the story that would win him the 2007 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. From the historical personages, Terry extrapolated and created a fictional character whose story he follows most intimately. For the poet, it involved a synthesis of real historical fact, his own fictional plot, and the various forms and rigors of poetry.

One student asked Terry if he ever doubted his ability to deliver a faithful account of people and an era he had never known. Terry’s response rang true for me. He first discussed the issue as a larger argument in poetics: women writing as men, men as women, black writers as white characters and vice versa. “It’s done all the time,” he said. “Sometimes, yes, it’s done badly. But when it’s done well, it opens our eyes and our hearts to a different perspective previously unavailable to us. I think that the moment a writer is no longer willing to see ‘the other’s’ perspective, the moment we become unable to at least consider a point of view different from our own, our hope for world peace is gone.”

A Discovery-Times Channel documentary (produced in 2004) follows four former Ravens who return to Laos. They’re looking for closure, for peace of mind, for some resolution from their time at war. At least one of them wants to sit down with the surviving Hmong natives and apologize for leaving so suddenly. When the peace agreement for Vietnam was signed in January of 1973, the United States agreed to pull all personnel out of Laos as well as Vietnam. Many who had fought alongside the Hmong felt very deeply that they were abandoning their friends to a most cruel fate. (And they were right on that count. Hundreds of thousands of Hmong fled Laos and took refuge in camps in Thailand. Many were sent to “re-education” camps by the incoming Communist leaders.) Many of the Ravens felt ashamed of themselves, of their country. The United States left the wars in Southeast Asia, in large part, because the American public was so violently against the action, and it became an untenable political position. As one former Raven said, “It’s a very dark and shameful chapter of our history.” Not only did they face the brutalities of war, but they weren’t allowed to speak about it for over twenty years after they left Laos, when the work they did there was finally declassified. So these four men returned to make what peace they could.

The Ravens were led by a Laotian interpreter and guide, a retired military officer in the Communist army. Their guide was, in turn, monitored by a government “minder,” who made sure that the visitors would not cause trouble, or see anything they shouldn’t see. One large problem they encountered was not being able to visit Long Tieng, the site of their home and headquarters during the war. The issue was safety. Guerrilla troops had recently attacked a vehicle on the road near Long Tieng, killing four people. These guerrillas were likely Hmong, still fighting the Communist government after forty years. Instead of going to Long Tieng, the Ravens were rerouted to a city in northern Laos, near the Communist stronghold of Sam Neua. Here, they faced recriminations about the damage left by their forces during the war. At one ruined temple, the monk blessed them but also scolded them for staying away so long without an apology.

Finally, the guide led the Ravens to a village of natives who were supposedly Hmong, but Laotian interpreters examining the video back in America realized the villagers were from a different group, and not Hmong at all. The Communist minder had suggested this group. Watching the video, I felt enraged and betrayed on behalf of the veterans who had only wanted to make amends to the people they’d been forced to abandon so many years ago. One of these men also told about returning from Laos to his wife and children after five years overseas. “I was absent from my family for five years,” he said. “And when I came back, I was a stranger. And I lost that family.”

It is this tragic side of the Ravens’ experience that I am so drawn to. I have never been a soldier. I have never fought in a war. I was barely an infant when these men came home. But I am a human being, and my heart breaks for men who lost friends, lost families, lost parts of themselves in a war they could never win. And despite my comfortable civilian life, I was raised by a man scarred by his own war. I know what it’s like to try to reach someone, to strive endlessly for resolution, for peace, and be denied.

Lord, Here Comes the Flood

I wanted to look up this song by Peter Gabriel before using the title, to make sure it was appropriate. Then I did, and I cried. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0GcqYGv1AA. I’m not even quite sure what the song is about, but one site I came across suggested it was about World War II. Knowing that Peter Gabriel’s political conscience often enters into his music, it made sense to me.

Just to clarify, I’m not writing this post about World War II. But I am writing a larger work about the Vietnam War and the concurrent CIA operations in Laos, and war is war, and it pretty much sucks for everyone involved (except maybe those who have the power to send other people to war, but I digress). And for years later, it haunts people. In the case of the men who served in Laos, they’re also haunted by having to leave their mission and go home, abandoning the native Hmong fighters to hold off the North Vietnamese Army by themselves, without our air power or even our equipment.

It seems like a strange segue, but I’m really writing about an actual flood, here in my backyard. It happened nearly two months ago now, and I feel guilty admitting that for us, in our part of town, it was really a non-event. It rained for a few days, and our grass got really green (an unusual occurrence in Colorado). But around us, people were reeling. The local school district had students in the mountains on a retreat, and they had to get them out by helicopter. Farms were destroyed. The road up to Estes Park, one we’ve taken before, is gone — completely washed out — and isn’t expected to be drivable until spring, at the soonest.

Yesterday, I drove to Boulder to meet a mosaic artist whose work I love. (See her stuff here: Kasia Mosaics.) Her work was up in a gallery in downtown Boulder, but I had missed the show, so she generously invited me to her home studio to see the pieces I had missed at the gallery. Now, I don’t just love the work, I love her! It was a selfish errand, but I learned a lot along the way. Kasia lives about seven miles up a road called, ironically, Fourmile Canyon Road. It’s a side road off of Boulder Canyon, an area hit very hard by the September floods.

Kasia and her neighbors were forced from their homes by the flood and weren’t able to return until over a month later. And the work continues. On my slow journey up the canyon, I passed at least three crews hard at work, replacing the road bed with fresh dirt and gravel, clearing debris from the sides of the road. And by “debris,” I mean uprooted trees, furniture, tools, laundry baskets, and in some cases, homes. Two houses had fallen into the creek behind them, turned sideways and backward. And that’s just what I saw from the safety of my car. Kasia assures me that the area looked many times worse the first time she saw it. “I was walking (because we couldn’t drive in), and the pole of someone’s mailbox was nearly even with my head. That’s how much of the road was gone. It looked like a dinosaur had come and just eaten sections of the road.”

Boulder County is wealthy, and they can afford three or four crews to repair a damaged road and restore a sense of sanity to the people who live there. But I think of all the places in the world that can’t recover from a disaster like this. Too many to name. And even here, life changed in an instant. No amount of money can repair the inner damage that can do. And despite the strange connection, I can’t help but keep coming back to this idea of water and war. In either case, Gabriel’s lyrics ring true.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You’re a thousand minds, within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
Use up what we used to be.

Failure

I found out today that I didn’t get a big grant I was hoping for. I wanted to use the money to travel to Laos for two weeks to do research for a book I’m working on. I knew I didn’t get it by the first line of the e-mail: “Thank you for applying….” Thank you for playing, but you lose. I shouldn’t be surprised. Fifteen hundred people applied, and it’s a large grant. But it’s still a bummer. So it’s on to Plan B.

Which is to get my ass in a chair and start writing again. In a way, I’m relieved. I know that sounds Pollyanna, and I’m sure there are folks out there who would put me in that category. But the truth is, I would rather be working on the book than working on a trip about the book. And one of my source books, The Ravens by Christopher Robbins, was written without any benefit of travel to Laos. Just lots of interviews and reading and research and hard work. Good model for me.

Brian was encouraging and sweet. He brought me flowers. He said we’ll make the trip happen, anyway, eventually. And I believe that. But I’ve been trying every trick in my little book to avoid sitting my ass down and just writing. Flailing, you might say. You know you’re desperate when you wail on Facebook, “What do I do with my life???” I got some wonderful, thoughtful answers to that question. But really, I already knew the answer. It was burning inside of me. It reminds me of a complaint from the writer Richard Bach, who says that he only writes when the thing that needs to be written busts through the walls of his house and forces the issue. Amen.

November 1 marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal for the program, according to their website, is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 1,667 per day. I’m scaling back the goal for me to 500 words a day, which is still a lot of damn words. But being on the website, logging my word count, going to weekly “write-ins,” will keep me honest, I hope, and moving forward. I’ve also started volunteering at a local elementary school, doing writing conferences with fifth graders who are working on stories and essays. I’m glad to have my own project moving along, so I can feel honest about the advice I give to the students I work with. Writing is hard. It’s good to have company.