Ali and I used to talk about how the process of making new friends is oddly like dating: the initial meeting, the awkward discovery of each other's likes and dislikes, the more awkward arrangement for the next meeting. Now that all feels painfully true. I can be friendly, but I'm not adept at making friends. Today at the Boulder Farmers' Market, Mitike spotted another Ethiopian girl and marched right over to her, introduced herself. I followed reluctantly. I don't feel like I know how to function well in new social situations. Of course, I had to awkwardly name that: "Hi, my daughter's far more social than I am, but I decided I'd better follow her lead. My name's Sarah." The other mother seemed glad to meet us, relieved even to find another mother of an adopted Ethiopian child. Of course. Most people want connection. Why can't I remember that?
The awkwardness goes on, though: I feel compelled to sketch my difficult history immediately, to warn people about what they will be taking on if they enter into friendship with me. My partner died two years ago. . . we were in Fort Collins and now we're here. . . I didn't intend to do this alone. . . I out myself, too, making certain that I mention Ali's name or use the pronoun "she". There. Do you still want to be friends with me?
This woman does, I think. She emailed me later to say she was glad we had met. My daughter is two years older than hers, but they connected fairly well. Maybe I've found a friend in Boulder.
Regardless, I needed that interaction to nudge me out of the sadness I had cradled all morning. I woke from such sweet dreams of Ali, dreams I can't even remember except for the longing and the early-morning light and how content I felt. All morning, as Mitike and I biked along the creek trail and then wandered the Boulder Farmers' Market, I thought how unfair it is that Ali is not here in this life she wanted all along. Then suddenly Mitike announced she was going to introduce herself to the little girl across the grass, and it all catapulted me into now. This is where I am. Time to make friends. My name's Sarah. Do you want -- to get together sometime?
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
98.
When I told my grandmother, in a carefully written letter I mailed from Alaska, that my husband and I were separating because I had fallen in love with a woman, Gram wrote back almost immediately. Just days later, I opened my mailbox to find the legal-sized white envelope with Gram's graceful handwriting, the canary yellow paper inside. I wish I had that letter, still, but I know what it said: I love you. No matter what, I love you. Maybe she also talked about trusting my heart, or about sadness, but what I remember is her unconditional, unwavering love for me. "XOXOXO," she always wrote large beneath "Love, Gram".
That was seven years ago, when Gram was nearly 91 years old. An avid reader of The New Yorker, she possessed a clarity and a progressive awareness of the world, and so she was unsurprised to have a lesbian granddaughter -- or at least not any more surprised than she felt to have a granddaughter who had chosen to live so far away in Alaska, so distant from beloved Iowa.
Gram loved Mary Oliver's poetry, and she read every word Willa Cather ever wrote (every time I visited, Gram wanted to know if I had visited the sand dunes in Nebraska yet -- Willa Cather wrote so beautifully about them, you know). We never talked about the fact that both Oliver and Cather were lesbian; that wasn't the point, anyway, when we discussed Oliver's existentialism or Cather's astute observations about human beings' relationships to the landscape. It wasn't an issue with Gram. I think she might have said that people love whom they love.
Ali met Gram when Gram was 92, when we took her two kids on a whirlwind tour of Iowa before I traveled to Ethiopia to adopt Mitike. I knew Gram missed my husband Matt, his gentleness, his quiet appreciation of her garden, the way he loved to stand at her tall windows with his binoculars raised to study the birds. I knew she corresponded with him sometimes still. But she embraced Ali, pulled her in, found love for her, too. When Ali rose early to walk the neighborhood, Gram nodded at her from her chair, observing to me later that she appreciated Ali's wish to "greet the day". She had always dealt with hearing loss in her life, but she could hear most of what I said when I spoke loudly and slowly -- Ali spoke too fast. Gram just grinned at me. Later, in a letter, she reminded me about Mary Oliver's partner Mary Malone Cook, the photographer, whom Oliver said in Our World had always moved at a different pace, and so had enriched their lives.
When Ali died, Gram was 96. I couldn't write her for a long time; it was hard enough to breathe; it was hard enough to choose each morning to live. Gram wrote to me: "now live forward in the ways she showed you". Months and months later, I drove from Colorado to Iowa with Mitike in the car, arriving at Gram's house late at night to find a note on yellow paper on the chair by the door: "WELCOME! You are LOVED. XOXO." The next morning, while my younger cousins entertained Mitike, Gram and I talked for hours, sitting in the chairs in the living room, sometimes lapsing into comfortable silence while we gazed out the window at the sassafrass tree and the cardinals on the bird feeder. Eventually, Gram told me about what it had been like to lose my grandfather 31 years before, how it had been several years before she could remember him healthy, how her grief had sometimes threatened to defeat her. Tears blurred my vision. How often had I railed at the unfairness of what had happened to me and Ali, that we had found such real love and then lost it in such an awful way? Gram's voice: "Now when I remember him, I'm comforted." I nodded, feeling only sorrow.
Last March, Mitike and I flew to visit Gram, and I marveled that at 97 she was more current with world events than I was, that she was reading a thick tome about Thomas Jefferson, that she wanted to know if I knew of the poet Linda Pastan, who had just been published in The New Yorker. I had gotten healthier. I could feel my grief turning into something new in me, a stone, still, but more manageable, something closer to wisdom. I had decided to search for a new job, maybe move to a new city, and I had made a plan to memorialize Ali in the Yukon. Gram listened to all of this, observing my tears, too. I can't remember exactly what she told me, but later she would write in a yellow letter: "Go whole-heartedly with your decisions. They're good ones." And when I arrived at her house last week, for Gram's funeral, I found the piece of paper on which I had written the Whitman words I wanted to say in my Yukon ceremony. Gram had kept it close by her chair all those months.
As I stood at the gravesite last week in front of the oak coffin that contained Gram's body, I felt sad, but I also kept thinking how utterly incredible ninety-eight years is. I thought that Gram had gotten a rare chance to live that long and full of a life, and that she had made of her life something beautiful, and that she had loved so many people so well. Grief for my grandfather, who has been buried at that site since 1980, or for Ali, who became ash at only 42, is of a different category. Now, I cried for myself, mostly, for the loss of the person other than Ali who had always understood me fully. For Gram, though, I thought of the Oliver poem "When Death Comes": "I want to step through that door full of curiosity, wondering:/ what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?" I can see her there with her walking sticks, peering ahead, sharp and interested as always.
The strangest quality of being alive is that we must live knowing we will die. Wendell Berry wrote, "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." Gram did that. I touched her hand for the last time, reaching past the edge of the coffin, and thought, I could live like that, too. I could live joyfully though my heart aches, though I rage sometimes at all I find unfair, though I sometimes feel unbearably weary. I could make of my life "something particular, and real", as Oliver says.
Gram would write in response to all of this: "You ARE. XOXOXO."
That was seven years ago, when Gram was nearly 91 years old. An avid reader of The New Yorker, she possessed a clarity and a progressive awareness of the world, and so she was unsurprised to have a lesbian granddaughter -- or at least not any more surprised than she felt to have a granddaughter who had chosen to live so far away in Alaska, so distant from beloved Iowa.
Gram loved Mary Oliver's poetry, and she read every word Willa Cather ever wrote (every time I visited, Gram wanted to know if I had visited the sand dunes in Nebraska yet -- Willa Cather wrote so beautifully about them, you know). We never talked about the fact that both Oliver and Cather were lesbian; that wasn't the point, anyway, when we discussed Oliver's existentialism or Cather's astute observations about human beings' relationships to the landscape. It wasn't an issue with Gram. I think she might have said that people love whom they love.
Ali met Gram when Gram was 92, when we took her two kids on a whirlwind tour of Iowa before I traveled to Ethiopia to adopt Mitike. I knew Gram missed my husband Matt, his gentleness, his quiet appreciation of her garden, the way he loved to stand at her tall windows with his binoculars raised to study the birds. I knew she corresponded with him sometimes still. But she embraced Ali, pulled her in, found love for her, too. When Ali rose early to walk the neighborhood, Gram nodded at her from her chair, observing to me later that she appreciated Ali's wish to "greet the day". She had always dealt with hearing loss in her life, but she could hear most of what I said when I spoke loudly and slowly -- Ali spoke too fast. Gram just grinned at me. Later, in a letter, she reminded me about Mary Oliver's partner Mary Malone Cook, the photographer, whom Oliver said in Our World had always moved at a different pace, and so had enriched their lives.
When Ali died, Gram was 96. I couldn't write her for a long time; it was hard enough to breathe; it was hard enough to choose each morning to live. Gram wrote to me: "now live forward in the ways she showed you". Months and months later, I drove from Colorado to Iowa with Mitike in the car, arriving at Gram's house late at night to find a note on yellow paper on the chair by the door: "WELCOME! You are LOVED. XOXO." The next morning, while my younger cousins entertained Mitike, Gram and I talked for hours, sitting in the chairs in the living room, sometimes lapsing into comfortable silence while we gazed out the window at the sassafrass tree and the cardinals on the bird feeder. Eventually, Gram told me about what it had been like to lose my grandfather 31 years before, how it had been several years before she could remember him healthy, how her grief had sometimes threatened to defeat her. Tears blurred my vision. How often had I railed at the unfairness of what had happened to me and Ali, that we had found such real love and then lost it in such an awful way? Gram's voice: "Now when I remember him, I'm comforted." I nodded, feeling only sorrow.
Last March, Mitike and I flew to visit Gram, and I marveled that at 97 she was more current with world events than I was, that she was reading a thick tome about Thomas Jefferson, that she wanted to know if I knew of the poet Linda Pastan, who had just been published in The New Yorker. I had gotten healthier. I could feel my grief turning into something new in me, a stone, still, but more manageable, something closer to wisdom. I had decided to search for a new job, maybe move to a new city, and I had made a plan to memorialize Ali in the Yukon. Gram listened to all of this, observing my tears, too. I can't remember exactly what she told me, but later she would write in a yellow letter: "Go whole-heartedly with your decisions. They're good ones." And when I arrived at her house last week, for Gram's funeral, I found the piece of paper on which I had written the Whitman words I wanted to say in my Yukon ceremony. Gram had kept it close by her chair all those months.
As I stood at the gravesite last week in front of the oak coffin that contained Gram's body, I felt sad, but I also kept thinking how utterly incredible ninety-eight years is. I thought that Gram had gotten a rare chance to live that long and full of a life, and that she had made of her life something beautiful, and that she had loved so many people so well. Grief for my grandfather, who has been buried at that site since 1980, or for Ali, who became ash at only 42, is of a different category. Now, I cried for myself, mostly, for the loss of the person other than Ali who had always understood me fully. For Gram, though, I thought of the Oliver poem "When Death Comes": "I want to step through that door full of curiosity, wondering:/ what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?" I can see her there with her walking sticks, peering ahead, sharp and interested as always.
The strangest quality of being alive is that we must live knowing we will die. Wendell Berry wrote, "Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." Gram did that. I touched her hand for the last time, reaching past the edge of the coffin, and thought, I could live like that, too. I could live joyfully though my heart aches, though I rage sometimes at all I find unfair, though I sometimes feel unbearably weary. I could make of my life "something particular, and real", as Oliver says.
Gram would write in response to all of this: "You ARE. XOXOXO."
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Ague.
In the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I read to my daughter until she complained (and if she'd been able to articulate it in adult language, she would have said something like, "Mom, I'm African and you're making me listen to all these pioneer stories about YOUR ancestors!" but she just whined and rolled half-way off the bed and started kicking me with her feet, which is a six-year-old way of saying the same thing), people catch something called the "ague". Google defines the word as "a severe fever, like malaria," and Online Etymology explains that it's derived from the Medieval Latin word meaning "acute". Serious.
Why don't we use this word any more? We say people have fevers, or high fevers, or malaria, or they're dead. I will say it: I've come down with an ague.
Not really. I feel fine, except for the slight sneezy feeling I have from the downstairs neighbors' cat. Physically, I check out well: low blood pressure, fit, slim, exercises regularly (um, not really, since hanging out with a six-year-old all the time means biking at about 1 mile per hour for about seven inches until she throws her bike down and claims she's tired, at which point, I raise my heart rate by saying something my father would have said to me, like "Don't be such a wimp!" or "Come on! If you don't get back on that bike, we're not going to the pool this week at all!"). Yes, I'm just fine.
It's inside that I'm not fine. I ache. The simplest curve of a face, the curl of some stranger's black hair, the inside of a locker room return me to memory, and I miss her. Damn, I miss her. It's been two years since she died, and this morning I woke up certain that I had just walked with her on the sidewalk beneath the stars, because I had in my vivid dream, but then I fell asleep again and dreamed I walked into a room full of her bones and all the bones were fossilized. The cruel truth: she will not come back to me. We cannot salvage what we have lost. I cannot.
So I start this blog for no one, since I plan to give no one the address, thinking I could push myself into a greater community -- out of my lost sadness -- if I said, "Hey! I'm not just a widow! I'm a LESBIAN!" And I live in Boulder, so there's the rest of the title. But what the hell does it mean to be a lesbian without her? I focus on biking with my daughter, reaching the pool (we do), making dinner later, conducting the ritual of bedtime. Then: 9 pm, me and my brain and my broken heart. If I were childless (I'm not), maybe I'd go sit at a poetry reading now, or I'd go to a bar. Probably not. I'd probably be hiking across the spine of the Himalayans, writing fragments of poetry that ask the same thing over and over, "Where are you? Where are you?"
In the 1970s, maybe I could have gone down to Boulder's gay bar and found at least a sympathetic ear, but now there's no gay bar, and the lesbian community isn't one. Is it? There are the gray short-haired couples, or the tough single gray short-haired women with brown skin and buff arms, and there are the punk girls with the shaved heads or the pink hair and all the piercings. Where is there room for a 36-year-old English teacher who prefers the quiet of the wilderness or the sound of her own fingers tapping out words? Maybe my current location is my answer: my own home, alone. Maybe that's the answer.
What do I want?
The impossible.
Truly, an ague.
Why don't we use this word any more? We say people have fevers, or high fevers, or malaria, or they're dead. I will say it: I've come down with an ague.
Not really. I feel fine, except for the slight sneezy feeling I have from the downstairs neighbors' cat. Physically, I check out well: low blood pressure, fit, slim, exercises regularly (um, not really, since hanging out with a six-year-old all the time means biking at about 1 mile per hour for about seven inches until she throws her bike down and claims she's tired, at which point, I raise my heart rate by saying something my father would have said to me, like "Don't be such a wimp!" or "Come on! If you don't get back on that bike, we're not going to the pool this week at all!"). Yes, I'm just fine.
It's inside that I'm not fine. I ache. The simplest curve of a face, the curl of some stranger's black hair, the inside of a locker room return me to memory, and I miss her. Damn, I miss her. It's been two years since she died, and this morning I woke up certain that I had just walked with her on the sidewalk beneath the stars, because I had in my vivid dream, but then I fell asleep again and dreamed I walked into a room full of her bones and all the bones were fossilized. The cruel truth: she will not come back to me. We cannot salvage what we have lost. I cannot.
So I start this blog for no one, since I plan to give no one the address, thinking I could push myself into a greater community -- out of my lost sadness -- if I said, "Hey! I'm not just a widow! I'm a LESBIAN!" And I live in Boulder, so there's the rest of the title. But what the hell does it mean to be a lesbian without her? I focus on biking with my daughter, reaching the pool (we do), making dinner later, conducting the ritual of bedtime. Then: 9 pm, me and my brain and my broken heart. If I were childless (I'm not), maybe I'd go sit at a poetry reading now, or I'd go to a bar. Probably not. I'd probably be hiking across the spine of the Himalayans, writing fragments of poetry that ask the same thing over and over, "Where are you? Where are you?"
In the 1970s, maybe I could have gone down to Boulder's gay bar and found at least a sympathetic ear, but now there's no gay bar, and the lesbian community isn't one. Is it? There are the gray short-haired couples, or the tough single gray short-haired women with brown skin and buff arms, and there are the punk girls with the shaved heads or the pink hair and all the piercings. Where is there room for a 36-year-old English teacher who prefers the quiet of the wilderness or the sound of her own fingers tapping out words? Maybe my current location is my answer: my own home, alone. Maybe that's the answer.
What do I want?
The impossible.
Truly, an ague.
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
Origins.
I don't know who I expect to read my thoughts here. Maybe I'm writing to Ali, my partner and best friend of eight years who died in 2011. Probably. I'm always writing to her. Most of my work is in 2nd person. You, you, you, you. I want her to hear me.
But maybe I'm also hoping I'm writing to women who are like me. Like me? Lonely? Alone? Isolated? Intellectual, serious, conducting a day job in a professional world (if middle school classrooms can be termed professional) -- but LESBIAN. What does it mean to be a lesbian and be only one?
If Boulder had a lesbian bar like Seattle's Wild Rose, I'd be there tonight (I'm in the summer MFA program at Naropa -- my daughter's with my aunt in Breckenridge). But what would I do there? I've never been hip. I don't have fashionable short spiky hair, tattoos covering my neck and arms, piercings all over my face. Look at me: I look like I was brought up on a hog farm in Iowa. . .because I was. I grew up sitting in pews in a Lutheran church on Sundays. I don't even know what to do at a lesbian bar. Ali: have a drink there? That's what we did, when we visited the place together. In 2007, we visited the Lexington Club in San Francisco -- we had just decided to be out together after keeping our affair secret for two years -- and the bartender at the Lexington Club asked us if we wanted to play the board game "Apples to Apples". I've hated that game ever since. It represented the hum-drum. Where was the wild, sexy loving of lesbian bars in movies?
Now I'm all by myself. Now I'm in Boulder, because -- that's too long of a story to tell right now. I want to know: who am I now, alone? Maybe I will only love one woman in my life. I'm 36. When I close my eyes, I only see Ali and the soft peach fuzz of her cheek.
s
But maybe I'm also hoping I'm writing to women who are like me. Like me? Lonely? Alone? Isolated? Intellectual, serious, conducting a day job in a professional world (if middle school classrooms can be termed professional) -- but LESBIAN. What does it mean to be a lesbian and be only one?
If Boulder had a lesbian bar like Seattle's Wild Rose, I'd be there tonight (I'm in the summer MFA program at Naropa -- my daughter's with my aunt in Breckenridge). But what would I do there? I've never been hip. I don't have fashionable short spiky hair, tattoos covering my neck and arms, piercings all over my face. Look at me: I look like I was brought up on a hog farm in Iowa. . .because I was. I grew up sitting in pews in a Lutheran church on Sundays. I don't even know what to do at a lesbian bar. Ali: have a drink there? That's what we did, when we visited the place together. In 2007, we visited the Lexington Club in San Francisco -- we had just decided to be out together after keeping our affair secret for two years -- and the bartender at the Lexington Club asked us if we wanted to play the board game "Apples to Apples". I've hated that game ever since. It represented the hum-drum. Where was the wild, sexy loving of lesbian bars in movies?
Now I'm all by myself. Now I'm in Boulder, because -- that's too long of a story to tell right now. I want to know: who am I now, alone? Maybe I will only love one woman in my life. I'm 36. When I close my eyes, I only see Ali and the soft peach fuzz of her cheek.
s
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