combing through notebooks

After work I went through my current spiral notebook. It’s time to start working on my ~~next long project~~ book again after a long break over the holidays, and I wanted to see what notes I’d made. (KFC is Monday, and I really want to have something. Anything. I no longer worry about wasting their time.)

There were a lot of one-page blocks I wrote in the early mornings, mostly recounting dreams. I have no memory of a lot of them, even when I read them in my own handwriting. But it’s still neat to know that my brain came up with Colin Powell trying to build a filing cabinet around me in the garage.

And this notebook had reminders that Louie’s last few months were hard, especially before we knew his death was imminent. The first page, August 29th, starts with

The dog doesn’t get off his bed now. He doesn’t come sleep on the bedroom floor to be with us. He’s here when I come out to the living room. Yesterday I got a wagging tail; today just a measuring look.

In his last few days, it was easy to be resigned and indulgent with taking him out all the time, and cleaning up after him. I forget that when the end was not quite in sight, it was much more adversarial:

There is this old dog, and he is trying to kill me. Or he is trying to get me to kill him, is what I would like to believe, because I want to. He is trying to kill me with guilt. He has watched our struggles with guilt all these years–it’s coming from inside the house!— as we do or don’t yell at him over puddles of pee on the floor. As we yank his leash, then hug him. He found it pretty funny, the whole thing, and now he is going to kill me by panting and stomping.

Jo Ann Beard wrote a beautiful essay with her old collie in it, and that is nothing like this, because I am sleep deprived, deprived of time without toenails clicking and dragging on the linoleum, time without panting amen.

And the next day:

The dog is whining from across the room. From seven to eight I ignore him. That is how we can live in peace. I don’t even know.

The notebooks will never be a representative sample of my emotional life, because I write more in some emotional ranges than others. They are a place to lie, too, and to alternate between bitter kvetching and making fantasy lists and schedules. But sometimes they remind me of some things. I save a few lines and then shove them in an overcrowded box in the basement, or recycle them. I no longer think anyone will want to pore over them in an academic library after I die. They do pile up.

Dress Shopping

The short version:

You guys, I bought a dress for my sister’s wedding next May! See photo below.

The long version:

Last fall I’d made a few forays into vintage, thrift, and department stores, but managed only to narrow down the list of styles that were likely to look good. (High necks and twirly skirts = good; sheaths and anything with darts that presume to know where my boobs are = bad.) Then I spent a day on Northwest 23rd Avenue, the fancy street in Portland that seemed to have all the dress boutiques I’d found on the internet, as well as high-end vintage. I came away from that with:

1. A seven-dollar “security dress” from Goodwill that met color requirements and was wearable, but had unfixable fit problems that I’d have to wear a wrap to cover. I bought it first thing in the morning to give me the courage to say no to anything else that wasn’t quite right.

2. A business card with handwritten details about a dress I tried on and whose clone I could order if I gave the shop 16 weeks’ notice. It would be sewn from fair-trade silk from the mill in India they work with exclusively, would be handmade in Portland, and said to me in the mirror, “Hello, I am the Platonic ideal of the bridesmaid dress you and your relatives had in mind!” The fabric was so light that it was like slipping into a cocoon. For all that, I was not wholly in love with it (there was a tie in the front that looked great when the shop attendant tied it, but weird when I tried) and wasn’t sure I would wear it enough to earn out the daunting figure on the price tag.

3. A lovely pair of palazzo pants, the kind that look like a long skirt as long as one is standing still, in blue-purple-gray. An impulse buy, attributable partly to the hard work of the saleslady bringing me outfit after outfit to try on, and partly to my being pretty sure I’d wear them a lot no matter what. And it was always possible I’d find the stunning top that would overcome my qualms about showing up as The Lesbian In Pants.

The next week, I tried a few places in Southeast. Most notable was a store by the Hawthorne Bridge that apparently specializes in pageants and proms. I went in with Sanguinity and Bookherd, and as Bookherd said, there was no place to stand. Big circular racks of big circular dresses all around, and the store was mobbed with high-school-age girls in groups and their mothers. I remember some squealing, but I might be making that up. I was told I needed an appointment to try anything on, booked, and dismissed. (Later I called and canceled my appointment, because as far as I could tell all the dresses there had sequins and sparklies and would be completely over the top for me. There was still someone there at 10 p.m. when I called. That place is intense.) Out on the sidewalk, we were all a little dazed, and decided to adjourn for pho.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law had emailed me to suggest David’s Bridal, a chain that seems able to outfit a passel of bridesmaids in cute dresses at reasonable prices. Confident that I had begun to gain experience in both full-service shopping and the bridal-industrial complex, I headed to Clackamas with Sanguinity as soon as they opened on Saturday. Inside the front door was a desk, with someone there to hand me a form and assign me a shopping attendant. The form and the staff wanted to know about the bride, not about me. I kept saying things like, “Well, yes, that is her last name too, but she’s in Colorado and already has a dress.” The idea that a lone attendant would walk in hoping to buy one dress, for herself, seemed foreign to them.

We were assigned a fitting room, which was spacious but had no mirrors inside it at all. To see yourself, you have to step out into the hallway between the fitting rooms, so the sales staff and your bridal party can weigh in. There’s also a little stage which had three honest-to-god pedestals to stand on, plus mirrors and a few rows of folding chairs for the audience. I watched a girl try on a First Communion dress complete with veil; she looked absolutely delighted.

Business was hopping at this place too– I asked the woman at the desk why now, and she said it was everyone who’d gotten engaged over the holidays. The week or two after Valentine’s Day will also be frantic, she said.

The dress I’d spotted online didn’t work out, so we tried a few more. The woman in the next fitting room was trying on puffy wedding dresses, and the stash of them on the clothes-rail outside her door got wider and wider until Sang and I were pretty much barricaded into our room by foofy white fabric. Also, whenever anyone in the store decides on a wedding dress, a bell rings (clangclangclang, like at Trader Joe’s) and everyone cheers.

Sanguinity knows how to persevere in shopping. Long after I would have left, we came up with this dress (but in blue, instead of black):

It was in the Mother of the Bride section, but whatevs. I guess I’m old enough that I could be the mother of a bride. (Though that model doesn’t look like she could.) It feels simple and comfortable. It’s a little darker blue than I’d hoped for, but there are slightly lighter blue and purple beads at the waist. And, Sanguinity offered to knit me a lace stole in a coordinating brighter shade! That will redeem the dress from its navy tendencies and also come in handy in May in the mountains. We picked pattern, yarn, and beads when we got home. Victorian Lace Today, you are a wonderful book.

So thanks, Shellynoir, Bookherd, Marian, and Refgoddess, for your interest and assistance! And of course thanks to Sanguinity, invaluable shopping advisor. It may not be her favorite thing to do, but man is she good at it. Now as I go around town and pass clothing stores, I don’t have to ask myself, “should I go in and look for dresses?” Ahhh.

Glad to be home

Happy New Year! I have been away–very far away, it felt like. To be specific, I was on a cruise in the Caribbean. The cruise-ship culture sometimes seemed as far from home for me as the islands are from Oregon.

“Are you having a good time?” people asked me everywhere I went. Yes, I said, I am! Then– all these people had been on multiple cruises, and there was the faintest hospitable air of recruitment–they always asked, “So would you go on another cruise?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Not for the sake of going on a cruise? Not as a means of travel? I loved meeting the new-to-me cousins we traveled with, and seeing the blue water and the rainbows over the islands as we pulled into harbors on misty mornings. Yet we were a 14-story hotel pulling into those small harbors– as Sanguinity said, it was like the cruise ships warped space and time and economies all around them.

So all that is still sinking in. I’ll leave you with just a bookish note or two. The Carnegie libraries we found in San Juan and in Castries, St. Lucia, were closed on the days we visited, but we did get to go to the library in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas: I reflexively check the Daniel Pinkwater holdings when I visit libraries, and Sanguinity checks for Peter Dickinson books. We saw one of each on the shelf.

In St. John, Antigua, there was a really good bookstore called The Best of Books. The children’s books were from British publishers, and there were shiny new paperback reprints of Enid Blyton’s books from the 1940s! I even overheard one girl in a school uniform tell her friend, “I just LOVE Enid Blyton!”

In Castries, we stopped in at a bookstore with lots of school supplies and textbooks. In the fairly small young adult fiction section, there were at least 15 copies of Sarah Ryan’s Rules for Hearts (which features lesbians in Portland)! Maybe a teacher ordered a classroom set and then the curriculum changed? Sanguinity wondered what Caribbean teenagers would make of the Portland setting. It felt so different and so far away.

Traveling was a full day in each direction– the redeye on the way out, and downtime in San Juan and Chicago on the way back, arriving at 11 p.m. Portland time and 3 a.m. by the clock we were used to. I’d caught a cough by the time we left the ship, and then there was jet lag and a day of stomach trouble when I got home. After awhile I began to feel that watching bad airplane TV to get through the second leg of the flight had been a bad, poisonous idea, and maybe part of my soul was still trapped up there in a United Airlines jet, going back and forth. When I was falling asleep and got that floating-away sensation, I tried to impress on myself that no, I didn’t feel the motion of the ship, I was in Portland. Home in Portland.

So glad to be home, but for days I was still clinging to each little Portland thing like I was stitching myself in. The chow dog that lies by a bench in Ladd Circle every morning! The cedar waxwings mobbing a tree! I was actually glad to go back to work, too, especially since the cough was finally departing by then.

So now I’m back, and I’m not minding the gray days or the chill or the rain at all, and things have been happening. Bookherd is staying with us for a few weeks before her next adventure, and we helped evannichols put together a lot of IKEA furniture, and refgoddess is renovating her shed to move into so her B&B can expand, and I went shopping for a bridesmaid dress on Northwest 23rd Avenue and actually enjoyed it. (Good thing, too, because I’m still shopping. One way or another it will be sorted out by the end of this month.)

In reading news, I added eleven new favorite books that I read in 2011 to my LibraryThing collection. If you want the whole long list of books I read in 2011, let me know and I’ll email it.

In writing news, I was turned down for the Oregon Literary Fellowships— congratulations to the winners announced yesterday! I hope to apply again next year. With a story that I haven’t even met yet–exciting.

I am busy again, so busy. (Some of you would laugh at what I consider busy.) I hope 2012 treats us all well and we all stay in touch.

Leftovers

Sanguinity and I have been eating turkey, bread stuffing, and gravy for at least one meal a day, sometimes two or three, every day since Thanksgiving. We have taken to calling it Coma In a Bowl. I am not tired of it at all yet.

We got ingredients for a green salad for Thanksgiving dinner: it seemed like the grown-up thing to do since everything else but the jello and cranberries was beige. Then we all decided before dinnertime that we didn’t care about green salad, and didn’t bother assembling it. But after a couple of days eating leftovers, the green salad was awesome.

Gravy is what we keep running out of. Today Sanguinity cooked up a third batch.

I am dismayed that I wish I could turn my brain off

Tomorrow and the day after I’m taking this online class at work that starts at 6 a.m. It was either attend online with east-coast people and start at 6 a.m., or find some classroom in Beaverton by 8 a.m., so I figured it was about even. Still, I am feeling slightly pre-emptively desperate. I will leave my house at five and park the car on this side of the bridge, and catch a very early bus. My usual bus line doesn’t start that early.

I am washing out the coffee pot and finding a travel mug and packing my lunch and laying out my clothes. I guess lunch is going to be at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. I am resenting the way I’m worrying about all this already, and resenting the way jobs dominate non-job time.

dog ashes and Tualatin river walk

The self-assigned chore for Sanguinity and me yesterday was to go pick up the dog’s ashes from the pet funeral center in the suburb across the river. And to get out of the house and go for a walk, because Thursday was all cooking and cleaning and eating and talking, and neither of us stepped any farther outside than the compost pile.

There are bike paths and parks very close to our destination, down by the Tualatin River, so I tossed a water bottle and some cold turkey in the car and we set out. The pet funeral place is in a business park, in one of those not-quite-industrial strips on a busy street. Wooden pallets and gravel parking lots and puddles. But you step in the door and suddenly classical music is playing and there are little urns and memorial stones on shelves lining all the walls, and prayer flags with pawprints, and books about grieving for pets.

While the lady was going to get Louie’s ashes I snooped around some more. In the next room there were urns for horse ashes, which didn’t seem big enough to hold a whole horse’s worth, and a dog-proportioned wooden coffin with a satin lining and pillow, and an urn showing the Twin Towers and Statue of Liberty (?). The little waiting room had a Buddha statue in it. Between that and the prayer flags, Buddhism definitely trumped Christianity in pet funeral representation. I wonder why that is.

We were quizzed on Louie’s other last name, which made me wonder if pet-custody-ashes-stealing is common, but turns out there was another set for a Louis with a last name similar to mine, so she was just making double-sure to hand us the right box. (Tin box like cookies come in, but small, with flowers on it.) We’d been curious about whether his surgery hardware would still be in there, so I asked, and she said no, that stuff is taken out before final processing (grinding everything up so there aren’t big chunks of bone). But, she offered to go get the pins and staples for me if I wanted! She clearly didn’t want to, but she was game. I assured her it was okay, I would have no regrets about leaving them behind. I had thought the funeral people might be overly solicitous or smarmy, but she was a touch snarky and hilarious.

We made our way to Tualatin Community Park. They have a really good playground, suitable for bigger kids (and us), with a tall rope web structure and interesting pivot-and-twirl metal things. We walked along the bike path by the river, stopping to watch the dogs at the dog park, and continued over the pedestrian bridge to Cook Park, which is in Tigard. There was a small garter snake, a kingfisher, oak galls, rose hips, geese…reminded me of the bike trails in my Colorado hometown.

We wanted to cut over to a nearby trail to make a loop back through Durham City Park toward the car, but there were railroad tracks and blackberries in the way. We decided to walk around on the streets and find the trail from the other side. Bad idea. The streets were busy and we trudged along with cars whipping past until we were hungry and dispirited and possibly lost. A pedestrian we met was a visitor herself, but told us she’d come from the city park via a certain street. We were ecstatic when we got to that street, but it turned out to be a wandering fancy-houses development which led us in a big curve back to the busy street. (If we’d gone down the right cul-de-sac, we probably would have found trail access. But by then we were in forced-march mode and the thought of traipsing down each one to look was not appealing.)

Business parks, closed medical offices, business parks, fenced utility offices, business parks. Sanguinity pointed out that everyone who worked here must either bring a lunch or drive somewhere for lunch. We were kind of starting to hate the suburbs.

We finally saw a Taco Del Mar. Fish tacos and Fanta gave us hope that maybe we could find the car again before full dark. Sure enough, we crossed the street to a parking lot with a map and saw that we were only a block from the park! Total hiker moment of being so glad to see the car and drive home to where the food and books are. Which felt a little silly, but hey, we had walked through three different cities.

Now Louie’s ashes are up on a shelf next to the cat’s. We don’t have plans for them, other than realizing we should do something with them before we die too. Maybe there will be a summertime hike when it seems right to take them along and scatter them somewhere Louie would have liked. (Which means somewhere smelly and interesting, not one of those boring viewpoints we keep insisting on stopping at.)

Louie-Boo

Sanguinity and I have set Louie’s final vet appointment for tomorrow, here at home. He rallied for a few good days, but it’s time now.

He’s still willing to be tempted by food (not his food, but our food), intermittently. I’ll see if I can make some good dishwashing work for him tonight; he takes his duties seriously. We were hoping he’d make it to Thanksgiving– here he is in his element, i.e. a turkey bag, last year.

NotANaNo Update

I am on pace for mileage and words. Having two daily targets, each of which can be reached in under an hour, and in activities that complement each other, is working out well. The house is rather a pigsty, however. Maybe tomorrow I can address that.
Words: 2717 / 15,000
Miles: 15 / 90

Hello, November.

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I’ve got a few Wrimos and Wrimo Rebels to cheer on. And for myself, I want to write 500 words of fiction each day this month, and walk three miles each day. My progress so far: 1115/15,000 words, and 6/90 miles. (I tried a little online wordcount meter, but it’s not working today… perhaps swamped by Wrimos.)

Louie went to the vet today, after several days of asking to go out every hour or two. They think he has Degenerative Myelopathy, which is most common in German Shepherds (he’s a shepherd mix) and matches his symptoms. Draggy feet, check; hoarse bark, check; hard to control the peeing and pooping, uh huh; tippy hind end, yup. It’s not strictly age-related, as dogs as young as five get it, but if he has it, it will almost certainly be the cause of his demise. He’ll be getting palliative drugs (mostly for his arthritis pain), but there’s no treatment for the progressive nerve stuff.

He’s sixteen, so we certainly knew something was coming. It will still be hard to say goodbye.

He had x-rays, and they swear they only sedated him a teeny bit, because they know he’s sensitive to anesthetic, but omg he was dopey when we brought him home! Sang went to pick him up and was sent away again so he could have another hour or two to recover…then I went to get him and he almost had to be carried to and from the car. He did the red-membrane-devil-dog-eyes routine passed out on his bed for several hours, and has only just started moving around again. He still sinks unpredictably down to the floor or just stands there like he forgot where he was going. Poor pup, he had a rough day.

Dead Tri-Met Literary Boyfriends

~Spoiler warning for Henry James’ The Ambassadors~

Very soon after I started Henry James’ The Ambassadors, it became my bus book. Bus books are the ones I really do want to finish, but they don’t make it out of my backpack when I’m home– there’s always some other book (or the internet) that grabs my attention first. They end up living in my backpack for commuting and lunch hours, and get read eventually, maybe with a non-bus rush at the end once momentum has built.

Many of my bus books are classics or Good Hard Books, like the ones by my Dead Literary Boyfriends, Nabokov and James. In the case of The Ambassadors, Henry James himself told the Duchess of Sutherland to read it five pages at a time, “but don’t break the thread…& then the full charm will come out.” Some kinda nerve to give your friends their reading instructions, huh? This book was his favorite and I think he really wanted it to be liked. Anyway, five pages at a time it makes for a great bus book.

It was my first “late James,” and sometimes I wondered if I was actually understanding what the characters were talking about. Sometimes I wondered if any of them ever did, said, or thought anything straightforward. (How Henry James would hate Twitter.) Sometimes I marveled that anyone reads this book, even though I myself was loving it. I laughed when I ran across this Amazon review by David K. Hill:

When the topic is obvious and simple, his characters question one another intensely trying to determine what it is they are talking about. When the topic is strange and hidden, amazingly they all understand each other perfectly and silently.

My favorite small thing is how every now and then, in all the thickets of clauses and commas, there’s a rush of adjectives spilling out like their subject has flashed too bright and quick to be slowed down and contained by grammar:

What was clearer still was that the handsome young man at her side was Chad Newsome, and what was clearest of all was that she was therefore Mademoiselle de Vionnet, that she was unmistakeably pretty–bright gentle shy happy wonderful–and that Chad now, with a consummate calculation of effect, was about to present her to his old friend’s vision.

Or this one:

It was of Chad she was after all renewedly afraid; the strange strength of her passion was the very strength of her fear; she clung to him, Lambert Strether, as to a source of safety she had tested, and, generous graceful truthful as she might try to be, exquisite as she was, she dreaded the term of his being within reach.

And Jeanne, married off to an aristocrat, goodbye, sank without a ripple like Isabel Archer. Damn. And what of Maria Gostrey? All I know is if I see someone online using the handle Maria Gostrey, I will think there’s likely an interesting person.

The reason I decided to read The Ambassadors now is because one of my alphabetical-reading books, Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, is described as a “photographic negative” of James’ novel. Eh, a bit, particularly in the comparison of Europe and America, which for me is pretty much the least interesting aspect of James but one of the most talked about. I did Ozick’s book no favors by reading it right after The Ambassadors— the multiple points of view in Foreign Bodies mostly brought home to me how masterful James was in keeping to Lambert Strether’s perspective through that whole long knotty novel. There was some good writing in the Ozick, and some that didn’t move me. I copied down one culminating quote that for me held the photographic-negative effect:

She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life.
And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

Now I’m reading Terry Pratchett’s The Wyrd Sisters. My friend Pat played Granny Weatherwax in the stage adaptation last year, and I have a slight case of picturing the actors as the book characters. Especially Magrat, for some reason. Most recent quote I swooned over in the “it’s so true” way that Pratchett induces:

The castle was full of people standing around in that polite, sheepish way affected by people who see each other all day and are now seeing each other again in unusual social circumstances, like an office party.

Wyrd Sisters will be with me at home and on the bus til I finish it, because today I gave up on another O book and bus book, George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The protagonist was too angry-sad-sack, a la Lucky Jim, and I didn’t want to spend one more minute with him.