I Wanted to Say Yes

The doctor examining me asks if there has been a trauma to my eye. He is looking through my pupil, somewhere inside of my head. He sees damage. I'm not surprised.

The street light filters through long curtains, making the room blue and black. He takes off his clothes. There is a large tattoo covering his lower back. "Use me like a toy," he says. Even though that had been my intention, I no longer want to.

I have been thinking about how much I love the sound of the local woodpecker, working his way through the telephone pole up the hill.

I have been thinking about how hard this winter will be, waking up before dawn and without the spread of light from across the bay.

I have been thinking about one local idea of glamour, high heels with jeans and French manicures, like hooker-housewives from the 80's.

I have been thinking about my volunteer crew, how eagerly they tore in to their new case files, and how many of them left our last meeting with wet eyes.

I have been thinking about all the remains of past life, all the dormant art curled up in shreds of paper, as I edit down for the move to our next home.

I think a lot. I just don't write.

There is a guy in the park across the street. He is wearing a black sweatshirt and he is running towards us. He is firing a gun.

The people who were standing next to me have thrown themselves to the ground. The people in front of me are standing as they were, waiting for the community event to start. I have dropped into a crouch and scuttled to put a stack of metal folding chairs between me and the intent to kill.

This is not a dream.

At the event, I am showing a family the house that will be theirs. It is still mostly concrete and studs, and together we are imaging the living room, the bedrooms, the sweep of the famous skyline beyond what will be windows, the view of the park across the street. She can hardly believe it, she still wears 20 years of hard labor as her skin. She turns to me and her eyes are wet. She asks me:

Is this a dream?

I'm not done watching the sun go down from this particular spot in the world. But the man that owns the house is done, rolling up his family and his failures and heading back to Minnesota, and taking the lease with him.

On the car radio the woman says "I was acting as a bridge" and I come across the boy on his way home from school. He is walking up the hill, his hands full of wild onions.

Tomorrow, I will be married.

I've lost my guidepost. My commute is 100 miles every day, done only with an eye towards getting there. Halfway through the highway miles just over the left lane marker there has been a dead animal. I've been watching it stiffen and flatten through days of rain, just a brief moment just before a rise. But now it's gone, and I miss it.

On Monday she came into work looking like the time my cat got out and and slept all night under a car in a rain storm. On Tuesday her eyes were rimmed with red. She's young enough and far enough from home that any number of things could be going on. I noticed, but said nothing. On Friday she tells me she needs time off. The symptoms are worse, she needs tests, it could be a brain tumor.

It's spring migration here. Last week it was monarch butterflies, this week swallows. There are calla lilies in the yard and the neighbors down the hill have early roses, but I keep thinking about the woman who sat next to me at a bar last night, with a surgically altered nose, dyed hair, and hands that were older than her face.

This place will teach you everything you need to know about gray. Not the acidic gray of a Michigan winter. Not the narrowing gray of a Manhattan rain storm. This is expansive, widening, merging sky and water and rocky shoreline, blurring and fusing edges. It looks like the forgotten corner of a Whistler painting, the hazy images in a silvering mirror, a vista that lets you know you should be paying attention but does not care if you do.

That phone call wasn't returned. That email went dead in my in-box. It's because I don't know how to respond, don't know how to swim through my day and come out with any one piece that applies what I have learned with what I am seeing. People here will show their beautiful cloak, whirl around and let you get close to its dancing fringe, but will not let you touch it. I lose patience with the displays of grace or affluence or wellness or whatever currency is held inside the mouth set just so.

I miss my writing. I miss my own voice. Mostly I miss gathering stories instead of miles.

Sometimes you get a second chance. Sometimes you get your first chance. Sometimes you get a chance you never thought you would have.

I was storming and grating in the bone-yard at the bottom of the hill, and if you were walking on the railroad tracks on the ridge, hopping from tie to tie in the only shoes you thought you deserved, I wouldn't have seen you.

The light is soft here today. It makes lace out of the bridge spanning the bay, blooms the calla lilies in the yard, dissolves edges. If that is the reward for making a woman out of the oubliette, I only want it by half.

I'm leaving work on time, but already the horizon is pinking and the full moon is well up. On the sidewalk is a man in a waiting posture and he sees I've got a slew of hula hoops slung over my shoulder and waves his hand in a circular motion at me.

The highway on-ramp is slowed by an underpowered overburdened little pick up truck. Its suspension is roached out and it bellies and sways up the slope. A magic song comes on the radio and at the end of this week, finally, satisfaction and a quieting. and I am grateful to have had an enormously rich life. To have shown up for it fully present means I know about The Dog Suit and the Bicycle; Dr. Zaks Pyramid of Doughnuts; The Great Banana Experiment; What You Can See in the X-Ray of a Dog; The How to Curse in Hungarian Thanksgiving DInner. The sun is lowering behind the hills that ring the reservoir and now I'm on my way home.

In the too-bright restaurant there is a Mexican variety show on the plasma TV. The devil and Gene Simmons are meeting in hell. It is at the end of a day with too many blank spots in it.

These days I find my joy with a pair of tweezers, allocate my patience with the same implement. The parking lot is the most beautiful place at work. The guys from the tool and dye makers across the way take their breaks under a makeshift tin pergola. The ladies who work at the bakery next door emerge from parked cars at the end of lunch as their boyfriends drive away. Sometimes it smells like croissants and I can sit alone on the bumpers in the tandem handicapped parking spaces that noone ever uses.

Someone on the radio is talking about the mechanics of acting. I could dearly use a lesson. I am not nearly as proficient as the people I see every day.

I am driving an ungainly large car through suburban streets made strange by winter's early nightfall. I am looking for a floppy boy with dark hair. It is a small comfort that I am passing any number of them, just none the one I need to find right now, the one who has again gotten bored, or frustrated, or impatient, and caused himself to disappear. Back at home the smell of simmering green peppers and anger has made me lose my appetite. The heat comes on, and I start to sneeze. My eyes well up and I go to bed early listening to the local stumbling public radio station. If there has been an accord made in the house, I will not learn of it until morning.

Yesterday was the last day. I expected any number of last-minuters, but there was really no way to prepare for the desperation, the hope, the faith that people are so willing to give me. The woman with the completely blank application and four foster children, the woman with four children and a husband doing a long stretch for possession, the woman with the disabled child and birth records wiped out in Katrina. And questions, hundreds of questions, piling up and swirling all over each other and I am spinning all over the room trying to give the right answer in the best way. There is a moment, as there always is, where I am so overwhelmed with gratitude, with the grace of others, that I cry.

So, here is the money shot: I have already marveled at the birth certificate. Here is Thailand, it is 1938, and the paper is rich and textured, the writing careful and beautiful. It is a time and a place where a birth is still honorable and notable. The certificate is untouched by its 70-year journey into my hands and we handle it so gently as we make the necessary copies. At the end of the process I shake their hands to thank them in a way that the translator by my side does not need to help me with. I shake the grandfathers hand, I shake the sons hand, I shake his wife's hand. When I reach out to the grandmother, she leans towards me. She is holding her infant grandchild in one arm, extending the other to me. As I grasp her hand, I am looking into the babys face, his enormous round eyes, a thick river of clear drool, the open mouth with two tiny teeth. And really, here is everything. I am looking at the reason for everything, right in its tiny wondering face. I don't think I got ten paces away before I felt my own face slip.

Long after we have gotten up each day, I make the bed. After showers, the brushing of teeth, dressing, the eating of breakfast, I go upstairs, pull the sheets up, fold them back, ready them. When I slide my hands under the pillows to straighten them, they are still warm.

I keep running an image through my head. I went out to get a cheap burrito at lunchtime. At the edge of the Tenderloin, there are a lot of places to get cheap food, but I am only crossing the street. Waiting for the light, I can hear him before I see him, mostly lying on the sidewalk, partially leaning against the wall of the diner. He is howling a broken toothed duet with a passing streeter--Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. By the time I step out of the taqueria with my lunch he has fallen silent. A bundle of worn grimy clothes, one arm thrown up over his face. At the end of that arm is his hand, thick and red from the chill with spalling chelated nails, waving ever so slightly, like a lobster's claw at the bottom of a restaurant tank.

The burrito was good. Only one piece of gristle so tough I had to spit it out.

I'm not sure how I got here. I mean, I do know exactly how, I was fully awake for all of it. And what I am doing is the most valuable thing I can do in this life. But it keeps bumping around in my head that I have made the transition from someone who makes art to someone who consumes it. It's not like I get to consume it very often, even, and when I do, it is not as enjoyed as when I make it myself.

I live in a place where human interaction doesn't really happen. Peoples cars interact with each other, peoples shiny happy interacts with each other. I work in a place where people think they are good because they do good. It's the laziest kind of self-satisfaction I have ever seen. I haven't met a real person yet, one that if I flipped them over wouldn't reveal their cardboard backing.

In my garden in Brooklyn the new vines have grown over up over the barbed wire. There is a new bakery opening up around the corner. I wonder what it will smell like in the room I used to sleep in, the room with red walls.

I seem to be allergic to this state. Some of my skin has gone rubbery and hot, like an octopus tossed onto a bed of asphalt. For this, I am taking any number of pills each day. I smell like chemicals and lizards are licking the inside of my skull.

It may be full of beauty here and the lovers walking together and the tourists with their cameras strapped would be proof that it's true but it's not my kind of beauty and I am left starving for something else. I am too tired to look for more and too full to receive it anyway and the people in front of me are telling me things I don't want to know.

The woman who sits in the ferry seat next to the slot for wheelchair access. She is making an ugly bet that no-one will need the space and she won't have to house her clutter of bags around her ankles. With her naked skin she would like you to think she is gorgeous naturally but I know each one of her eyelashes is fake and the spill of hair down her back is fake too.

This woman is wobbling across the trolley tracks risking her neck with virtiginously high heels. From behind that danger is eclipsed by the fountain of her hair, a stiff spread of radiated halo. I can smell it from 5 feet behind her. She has downgraded to the the $.99/can spray, economic downturn forcing her into Aqua Net territory.

In line at the 7-11 I watch the street worker nodding out standing up at the front of the cash register line. It's an amazing feat, baffling the Sikh guys behind the counter. I'm baffled too. I examine her careful get-up, the matching pink plastic sandals, belt, purse, her arms and legs bared by clothing way too stingy for an overcast day. I can't find the track marks, she has been doing this long enough to get clever but not long enough to get sloppy. It's a fine and awesome balance.

It hasn't rained here in months. There is a summers worth of urination layered along the side of the building, rich, vile and potent. At the corner someone has vomited orange and chunky onto the crumbling edge of the faded movie palace. A few doorsteps down a streeter is listing slowly to the ground. He got the pick of the used men's clothes from his shelter this morning, a good pair of suit pants, a good pair of dress shoes. He has no socks and is talking into a cellphone which may or may not be a geniusly elaborate pantomime. I am waiting at the corner for the light to turn when an ambulance comes screaming the wrong way down Market Street. The subject of that attention is standing in front of my building, supported by two policemen and I am relieved that there is no blood, no yelling, and by the time I get a large half-caf coffee with skim milk from the open air stand, he has been bundled away. DIstance from parking garage to office: one block.

All Staff Retreat

It's way past my bedtime and the poker game is still going on. The construction crew has drunk all my scotch. A jovial slab of pink-cheeked Ohio Irish has outbluffed a skillet-faced hatchet from Michigan. I am standing with a man from a farm in the southwest. He wonders how he got here. I know my route has had more turns than my grandmother's spinning wheel, but I know exactly where I am.

This book is making me remember. About the man I used to date, who would crack my back by coming up behind me and squeezing me. Hard. So hard that once he burst blood vessels in my eye. About the time I got into the car with the man I was married to. There was a greasy film on the inside of the windshield. "Don't let your girlfriend smoke in the car anymore, okay?" I'm sure I could not keep the weariness out of my voice. About the men I was in love with previously, a bookend pair of blond, casual, wealthy, and insurance that we would always be playing out an F. Scott Fitzgerald of class desire with me in the soon-forgotten role of the girl who arrived at the party with the wrong shoes.

I bought the book today at the bookstore that always feels horribly barren, not much better than an airport magazine shop shoehorned between the coffee and tired pastry stand and the place that sells whatever-city-you-are-in sweatshirts and snowglobes for those who have just realized there might be value in leaving, even if value is only a 50/50 poly blend t-shirt in the size your child was the last time you thought you knew. Even if I didn't already know this bookstore is about shopping for a lifestyle, as opposed to looking for a treasured friend, that would have been borne out in the row of cash registers, a line of eight, with only one lonely skinny college boy, shuffling from foot to foot. Still, I have to work my way through a colon lined with specialty chocolates and pocket sized cat calendars to make my purchase. On my way out I can't help but notice the soaring syrupy string rendition of "Ave Maria" as I pass the Help Desk. It's prominently located and I have to give them props for understanding how helpless their customer base is. On cue, she walks up, 45 years of sun damage and so many varicose veins her skin looks like Silly Putty left on a cheese grater. With her white terry cloth sun visor acting as muse she demands, "Do you have any Rachel Ray cookbooks? On sale?"

I'll read for the rest of the night. Tomorrow, I start working again.

I'm in the kitchen of a community room in yet another worn down neighborhood. It smells like all community room kitchens, like transit terminal grade disinfectant and elementary school grade bologna. I have the job offer tucked into my bag.

I haven't accepted the job yet, but by being here tonight, I have accepted a responsibility. This night is the first public meeting for trying to give away a public benefit to a population both bitten and hungry. I've been in this position before, and it's hard not to look like Marie Antoinette with a basket of petit fours.

Towards the end of the evening, I stand beyond the exit. I can see their faces as they leave the meeting. When I let them know I am a resource for them, they tell me the stories they need to say, don't want to say. The impending divorce. The financial mistakes. The illegal housing. One man lets me know he is a stranger to this country, and is afraid to live amongst people not his own. Him I cannot help. He will have to eat cake.

There is a jam up at the off ramp and when I finally creep up past the blockage, it is two people pushing a car. The car is shiny new, too new to be broken down. The people are very young, young enough to play chicken with a gas gauge on the highway.

At the book store I am a training opportunity. It's the first back-to-school day in September, and three new empty-nesters stand behind the counter in their twin sets. This is clearly their first user experience with a cash register and as they bend their blondedness to the task, I'll bet none of them last past the shock of their first paycheck.

Another on-ramp and I am looking at a Montana license plate. Don't think I've ever seen one before. I would imagine that's because there are just not a lot of them, and this one is making up for it, jammed with images of mountains, the state bird, state flower, a tree. It's stuck to the bumper of a rusting honest pick up truck, and the way it hiccups up the grade I can tell it's a manual transmission.

The man at the loading bay at the Goodwill knows me now enough ask me why I am giving away such good stuff. I laugh and tell him that's what happens when you get married at 40--you have three of everything. It's the easiest way I can describe it, as I am not married. I'm not 40, either.

Every day I set little secret goals for myself. I don't tell anyone what they are. Partly because they are boring as dirt, partly because if I don't get them accomplished I will feel incredibly inept. Weeks of getting settled in have turned into months, and it's not an unsubstantial task of sifting, melding, sorting, discarding, replacing. Watching people as they sit or sprawl or offload bags or pile papers, so I can set up systems that maintain some kind of order while accommodating how people move through space, what their natural order is.

I had a boyfriend once who was a son of wealth, wildly creatively talented, and disgustingly messy. One time, he called me "tidy" and even though he might have been admiring the difference in our operations, I felt slapped, like he had said I was small-minded or petty or stupid. It took me a very long time to realize that I set a neat daily framework not to ward off chaos, but to be able to let it strike as it would. Any number of unexpected things could happen in the exterior world, things delightful or distressing, and I would be able to accept or deflect them because uncertainty and crisis points were not coming from me. Example: if I get stuck in a subway tunnel until after the laundry store closes, it's ok, because either I didn't wait so long to take my laundry in that I am out of socks or because I picked a laundry place that is open early in the morning and it only takes 4 minutes to walk out and get my stuff in the a.m. That's a lot of thinking about a system for getting your clean underwear, but once it's done, you don't ever have to think about it again. In my world, that's what makes for artistic freedom.

Still, sometimes, I feel terribly bourgeoise with my little accomplishments: ordering a couch; getting all of the recycling and garbage from the last move picked up; taking a load of surplus to Goodwill; unpacking a box. I know that taking care in setting up this household will pay off in any number of ways once I start back to work, but right now it feels so small.

This book is not doing it for me. Written 10 years after the last set of bank failures and housing slumps and 10 years before this round of same, I thought it might be either amusingly prescient or hilariously pious. Look, if this art history major knows where you, world macro economics guy, are going 15 pages before you get there, it's just a sad day. Or I'm a genius. OK, which I am, but I expect you to be geniuser.

I surely am putting all my mighty brain power to good use. Today, I was overwhelmingly frustrated at the princess parking brigade at the grocery store. I called someone a bitch out loud in the parking lot, not that she could hear me, hermetically sealed in her SUV. There were two parking spaces available but she had to wait for the one that would make sure she and her slumping spawn would be 8 feet closer to the store. One of the other Mercedes princesses got so upset at the hold up she actually honked her car horn. Same scene again at the donation bay at the Goodwill. I cannot figure out how these women get to be about the size, shape and flavor of a tongue depressor. They are so insubstantial they disappear when they turn sideways. Really, how do 2 dimensional people even get a drivers license?

So I need a new book. I've had half of my evening drink and put a Zyrtec on top of that and I am fuzzy at the edges. Life after 40 is a festival of awesomeness. Woozing over to the bookcase I think I have my antidote "Thinking Insects." Oh, that looks interesting. Except it's one of the man's geek books "Thinking in Sets." I guess I'll just sit here and suck on my brain for a while.

I've got the attention span of a gnat on crack today. My face is cleaned but my teeth aren't. The dishes are half done, a box in the bedroom is half unpacked, half of a recycling project is completed. Maybe I should just unload something.

I have been thinking about Michael Allen's first day of high school as a freshman. I stole his lunch. Stealing is perhaps not the right term, as is connotes a sneakiness and a wrongness. I simply expropriated it, in front of his and my friends, by sliding it along the table where it was resting, and onto my lap. "Hey! That belongs to Mike the Indian Guy! You can't do that!" Sure I can. It's my first day at this school too, but I'm a junior. I'm a bigger, barelegged dirt girl coming off a six month stint in foster care. That ended when my mother called, crying, begging me back home, telling me she was on a new medication and that "it won't happen again."

When I look into Mike the Indian Guy's lunch bag and see his neatly wrapped sandwich, a little box labelled Dinosaur Egg, his special treat for his first big day at the big school, I know I have swiped the right lunch. His mother loves him. There will be more food for him when he gets home. His lunch will be packed for him again tomorrow, and the next day, and there probably won't even be any screaming involved. So I don't mind at all practicing my petty Marxism on him, everybody gets according to their need, and my need is greater.

I am thinking about this because I have been packing the boy's lunch for his first days at his new high school. I want to make sure he has enough to eat, that it's what he likes to eat, that it will take care of him without making him look over-protected, or attracting the attention of girls like I was. I don't want him to meet a girl like me. I don't want him to know about that kind of life, not yet, at least.

It's dark out and I am watching the lights of the cars on the bridge. I am thinking about the times my father beat me. It was not often, but notable in the suddenness, the viciousness. The boy comes into the room, wobbling an arc on his way to the back balcony. I show him the fog pouring over the the shoulder of the mountain, how it moves in front of the full moon.

Today is the New York Times fall fashion magazine. There are 94 pages of ads before you even get to the index of articles. The regular Sunday Style section has pictures of handbags, and more handbags, and a article about a woman who is spending a year of her life trying to live by Oprah Winfrey's tenets. How to dress, how to resolve fights with her husband, what products to use to dye her hair. A photo accompanying the piece is a coffee mug with an Oprah quote on it "live your own dream."

I don't know how to sew these things together. I am not sure what is relevant . Here is classic beauty and contemporary blindness like two shades occluding each other. I don't know what to make of it.

What I like about living on the side of a high hill is the community cooperation needed for anyone who lives here to get home. The road is snaky, with five blind curves between the bottom of the hill and our driveway, and in some places not much more than one lane wide. Or it could be as generous as a lane and a half, with little niches carved out of the hills flanks for additional parking. In most places there is no guardrail, so a miscalculation could send you tumbling down a steep slope into someone's yard, or more likely, into their hot tub and outdoor fireplace. So this means if you are coming up the hill and someone is coming down at the same time, you both have to figure out who is going to pull over onto the not-really-a-shoulder so one of you can creep by, or back up to the last little side niche you can remember passing. It's a small collaborative effort that I rather enjoy and appreciate the good-natured eye contact and hand wave that goes with it.

That makes the people who refuse to engage in this politesse stand out rather starkly. Occasionally someone will barrel past, forcing you to stop short or cut over hard. In my experience to date they have always been women. They drive cars that look like mine, slick, foreign made, silver (because white is too princessy, black is too mafia, and red is too LA). But they don't look like me. They are all pale-skinned, sheltered indoor creatures and blonded and sporting enormous glamour sunglasses. They look like those albino cave fish, driving blindly with huge blank eyes, unaware of their freakishness.

This morning he pulls his arm over me and it is rough where he was a good father, fighting thorns to pull down more blackberries. I've left the door to the deck open all night and now fog is rolling over the eaves. The air is so chill I can feel the warmth rising from his arm. He smells good. I make a point to tell him this. In some ways, it's more important than telling him I love him.

The day is fading now and I would like to do something today other than spend money. So I rearrange garbage, compact recycling, boxes and wrappings from other days of spending money. I like to rustle around out in the carport at this time of day. This time of day my favorite neighbors come out, the deer that emerge to go up the slopes to forage, the buck that sits with his neck braced under his crown of antlers and works his cud with surety. I look down the side of the property line, the path they like to mosey up to the road. They are not there, but a new nest of beer cans is.

San Francisco, CA

The public radio station here is not so good. There is the announcer with the right stentorian voice, but his ad-libbing is awful. The one with an interesting voice and nice personality who cannot read the news without copious flubs. And it will take some time before I get used to traffic reports done in hushed, serious NPR tones. Especially when traffic issues in Tinytown tend to be appropriately tiny--slowdowns caused by debris in the road, and I imagine all these we're-all-free-and-western drivers barreling around with unsecured loads in their pickups. I particularly like that the station will tell you what it is--traffic is slowing down near Vallejo due to plastic buckets in the road. Or lawn chairs. Or cabbages. Today it is stuffed monkeys.

Denver, Colorado

I am wrestling two large cups of coffee into the elevator, sugar and spoons and other accoutrement threatening to spill out of my pockets at each step. He offers his assistance, but I eschew it, out of years of suspicious living, say I can handle it. "Like an 8 year old with chocolate milk!" he says, and his gentleness surprises me. I wish I had let him help.

Grand Junction, Colorado

I am looking at a sliver of the Rocky Mountains. The view is notched between two tanker cars, across a field of railroad tracks. I am standing at the end of the platform. I had been walking alone, but here comes the circus now.