Here by the sea and sand, nothing ever goes as planned

Beautiful lyrics, not entirely true. There are some things you can count on. The ocean will amaze you. The sand will be soft and cool enough that you won’t think about it beyond its inconvenience when you’re washing off. Despite your great efforts—even better than last year’s—you will inevitably miss a spot with your SPF 9000*, and that spot will worry you for several days. It’s the end of August and the seagulls will be behemoths who hover overhead in order to steal your first-born and your snacks. You will marvel at the ocean, and you’ll fear its power and its contents, and you’ll wish the latter were not true. You’ll stand in its shallow surf and see things that are not there, fins of things you don’t understand who can do to you things you don’t want to think about. You’ll watch your darling companion, your fearless prince, go out deep into the waters and you’ll tell yourself he knows what he’s doing. A wave will hit, he’ll disappear from sight, and you’ll realize that he’s gone forever. You’ll wonder how you’ll get the car home in your grief and with your fear of driving. He’ll re-emerge and you’ll pretend you’d never thought those things. You’ll look for sea glass and not find it, you’ll find sea glass when you’re not looking.

You’ll wonder why you ever spend time anywhere but here.

I am in Montauk, one of the places in my heart. Tonight we looked at the night sky, saw constellations, planets, planes, satellites—satellites move in slower, calmer, eerier trajectories than most things in the night—and in the stars I saw my Louie’s face. So clearly. And probably, it was not him. And maybe it was.

I prefer to believe in the possibility of magic. I prefer not to assume that this is all we have.

Happy end of summer, my friends. I am sentimental and optimistic and exactly where I need to be. I wish for you the same.

*PSA – wear sunscreen, and get yourself checked, every year or more, for a skin cancer screening.

Darlin’, you’re the best

Alas, here it is, the post I knew I’d someday write and yet never really believed I’d have to.

My little guy has gone to the great dog park in the sky, where he will find all the tennis balls, cookies, and people-who-give-him-just-enough-but-not-too-much attention his heart desires.

Louie Louie Louie … my sweet little babushka boy, the spy who loved me. That was one of the songs I used to sing to him, that and “Girls” by the Beastie Boys.

I suppose I should tell the story of Lou and me. Here’s where you learn what a horrid, unethical, fake-animal-loving person I used to be … I got him at a pet store. I know, I know, but I didn’t know then, and I was 31 and grieving and of COURSE I would do things differently now, were I to acquire another animal, but I have zero regrets about how it went down because Lou and I were meant to hang out for 16 years. One-third of my life thus far.

Here’s what happened. I have to back track a little to June of 2002, when six of my girlfriends were pregnant at the same time—’twas the season—and while I had always feared the physicality of childbirth, I’d also always kind of assumed I’d be a mom someday because that’s what women do. So I’d started to research international adoption, which freaked my mom out a bit at the time, but as I explained then, it wasn’t as though I was going to make a rash decision about adopting a kid. I was merely researching. I mean, I pretty much knew how the getting pregnant and having a kid thing worked, so I figured it made sense to learn this method of motherhood as well.

And then the unthinkable happened. What was then the unthinkable, anyway, and is now clearly possible. My friend Laura died in childbirth. And though I’d suffered losses of loved ones before, I’d never experienced anything like that, hearing the message on my answering machine to call Diane back and knowing by the tone of her voice that something wasn’t right, deciding to shower first to stave off the bad information that was trying to find me (a borrowed quote from another tragedy), then crumpling to the ground in tears and shock and disbelief and all those myriad stages of grief that whirl around you like a swarm of gnats and sneak up on you when you think you’re thinking about something else. When you think you’re going to the corner store to buy milk or cigarettes or whatever you buy at the corner store and you wind up livid and in tears. Or when you dream a beautiful dream in which all is right in the world and you’re walking off into the sunset hand in hand with your true love and then you wake to have the anvil of reality plunge to your gut.

So that went on for a couple of months and as I’ve said before, I’m pretty sure I think about Laura on some level every day.

And then one day in mid-August we went out for brunch, a couple of us. I was living on Charles Street at the time, and as we walked down Christopher to meet our friends we passed Urban Pets. It’s no longer there. I glanced in the window and there was a jumble of puppies doing puppy things, all tails and teeth and oversized paws, and there, in the very front of the window, staring out, pleading to be rescued from the mundane mayhem of so many puppies, was this little black foxy thing that reminded me of my childhood German Shepard, Lovable. We went in and inquired about him and learned that he was that newfangled Japanese breed I’d been seeing all over town—which, in fact, is one of the oldest fangled dog breeds around, dating back to many thousand years B.C. and, since 1936, a “precious natural product” of Japan. I held him, all six or seven pounds of him, and asked questions. I still had no idea I was going to be getting a dog, I just knew that I liked holding puppies. I’d been doing a fair amount of that in the aftermath of my friend’s death. It was comforting.

We went to brunch, and on the way back stopped in again for more puppy-holding. The wheels started turning and the then-partner started panicking. Over the next 48 – 72 hours I phoned everyone I knew who had ever owned, walked, or looked at a dog. I wrote lists of pros and cons and realized that not being able to jet off to Tahiti on a moment’s notice had never been an issue, and that having to leave my house every day was a pro.

I lied—I wasn’t living on Charles Street at that point, I was living on 9th.

So I went back and visited him several times and eventually took him home. Before I did they gave me his papers; his parents’ names were Foxy Lady’s Nikki One Leg (dad) and T-Dallas Rebel’s Sungirl (mom). I commented on the names and the man at the shop said, “Well, he came from Nebraska. You know how they are in the south.”

I may have altered those names slightly – I will look at the papers later and edit.

I believe we took Louie home on a Monday, and by Friday he still didn’t have a name. There were several contenders including Hiroshi, which is Japanese for generous. And then one day I realized his name was Louie.

For the first week or two Louie stayed in the bathroom; he could not be coaxed out of his hiding place. I was afraid I’d made a terrible mistake, that this little thing I just wanted to love adamantly refused to let me do so. And then one evening we were watching TV and he came out, sat in the doorway, and stared at us. If you knew Louie, or any Shiba, really, you know that that is the mark of true affection. At long last, I’d earned his trust. And his love.

Louie and I spent almost sixteen years together. He screamed the first time he saw the sunrise, and was elated on his first visit to the sea. We spent a couple of summer vacations on a lake in Maine, and several summers on the beach in Montauk. He’s been to Philadelphia and Baltimore and Sea Isle City and had the opportunity to meet and mingle with the late, great John Barlow at a party in Soho. He loved tennis balls, food, and watching rain fall.

There is so much more to say about Lou, but if I were to say it all this post would never end. I will write more about him, I’m sure of that.

For now I say this: thank you to everyone who was part of Louie’s life, and thank you, sweet Lou, for being my bearcub and lovebug and faithful companion. Keep visiting me in my dreams, dear one.

 

Here by the sea and sand

This photo was taken at the Montauket during what would become the most brilliant sunset I’ve seen in quite some time. I have a feeling this couple wound up in many photos from that day. They were summer’s end personified,  and were it not for his unfortunate man-bun, they could have been of another era. Timeless.

We spent the week in Montauk, a perfect way to celebrate summer—the ocean and shooting stars. So many stars—Montauk is aptly nicknamed the end of the world and when you’re out there, looking up at the night skies and listening to the symphony of crickets and tree frogs and things that go chirp in the night, it feels like the most remote spot on the planet.

Then you drive past the Surf Lodge and realize it isn’t.

I did a lot of reading and a decent amount of writing while there—fell short of my writing goals but made progress, and more than that, I was inspired. I seem to have written myself into a corner in terms of the relative ease with which I write anywhere but home. My writing retreats to New Orleans, my time in the Berkshires earlier this year, Montauk … one of the speakers at the conference last month advised that we “not be too precious about our writing environment” — and that is good advice. It’s important to have sacred writing space, but it’s equally important to get words on paper when and where inspiration strikes.

To that end, I scrawled some notes on a piece of paper one evening while enjoying an exquisite sunset and a decent cocktail. I had just read The Alchemist on the recommendation of a very young man who, much to my delight, reads books. The kind with pages. I understand why this book is not to everyone’s liking, but I enjoyed it—and it’s a story, an allegory, about finding one’s true purpose in life and pursuing it, while remaining open to change. About trusting the process. So this is what I scrawled:

If we can remind ourselves how vast and unknowable the universe is, we can better enjoy the ride. We can weather misfortune, even the greatest of all, the death of those we love, because it is all part of the process of being alive. We are all on a pilgrimage toward the same place, and that is really the only fact about living that there is. Complaining, lamenting, manifesting conflict, all become futile, then. Let it wash over you and know that there is not a single experience from which we can’t somehow become richer and wiser.

I was reminded of someone I met shortly after college, when I was having a tough time and was overwhelmed by the responsibility of being human. This was long before we were bombarded with messages about “living in the moment” and “being present”. I met a friend of a friend at a party, a guy who happened to be deaf. I don’t remember much about the conversation, though I imagine I was dwelling on the malaise of “the real world” and the days I’d wasted, and he said, “No day is wasted. If I have a good conversation with someone, or see something beautiful, the day was not wasted.”

I try to maintain that outlook and I often succeed, but I do need to be reminded of it from time to time.

Autumn is a good time to be productive. I have another draft to revise by the time I go to my next writer’s conference in October. And then, soon, I’ll be calling on those of you who’ve offered to be beta readers.

Happy end-of-summer, friends.

When mountains crumble to the sea

One of those internets thingies is making the rounds today – a scientific study on happiness, which purports to reveal the one tiny secret we all need to know. As I tend to do with these things I saw just enough to get to the punchline (have I mentioned that I figured out the twist in The Sixth Sense fairly early in the film?), and that is that feeling gratitude augments our happiness. Now then. “Happy”, as I’ve said before, is a fleeting concept. Content, tranquil, has better days than not – that’s, I believe, what people mean by “happy”. The gratitude part makes sense. What’s challenging is this – when I’m feeling blue (give me the beat, boy), I can appreciate and be aware of my gratitude, but I have a hard time gauging the degree to which I actually feel it. 

Overthink things? Never.

I’m grateful for many things and, much more importantly, many people. Like the vast majority of you – you know who you are. The people who see me and try their best to understand me and accept me despite my many flaws and missteps. Not feeling sorry for myself – we all have flaws and we all misstep.

I’m grateful that I can recognize beauty in the obvious and also in places where others may not, and that, as much as I might fight it at times, I am, at heart, an optimist. 

I’m grateful for past experiences and for getting through the dark times; this means I’ll likely get through them again. And my dark times have infused me with more love and compassion than I can handle.

I’m grateful for words and for language and for this forum.

I’m grateful for Louie. And I’m grateful for me. 

I’d build a road in gold …

…just to have some dreaming.

Actually, I slept beautifully last night – eight fairly solid hours – woke up once and fell easily back to sleep. However … you see one movie about a global war caused by marauding gangs of desperate flesh eaters, you have cataclysmic dreams for a week, apparently. Nothing I can’t handle – I eagerly await World War Z2 – but it’s been interesting. Last night’s featured explosions and falling buildings (no casualties that I can remember), but they were all part of films that I was watching. There was also a disturbing film about a little girl people were trying to save – that one felt far more sinister.

In the weeks and months after 9-11 I had regular dreams about things like this – and they weren’t films. I’d dream that buildings were exploding all over the city. I dreamt that I was in my parents’ old building and a Pan Am plane fell from the sky. These were much more literal. Although it still seems far too soon to delve into, perhaps the distance between that wretched day and today has enabled me to put a celluloid filter on my nightmares.

Going to touch the ocean this weekend and not a moment too soon. I learned to love it a couple of years ago (is six a “couple”?) – in Montauk, actually. Prior to that I loved the idea of it but found the execution to be overwhelming. Now it’s overwhelming in a good way. During my years with the wandering minstrel I had the great fortune of traveling on a relatively small budget – touring musicians of a certain level know how to do this like nobody else – and seeing parts of the world I might not have otherwise. When I encountered a body of water, no matter how cold, I at the very least waded in up to my ankles – and so I experienced the North and Irish seas. Some day I hope to encounter the Mediterranean and Adriatic. I’m very drawn to Croatia and I’m not sure why, but that’s on my list of places-I-might-someday-see. There are many, many others. As Andrew Marvell wrote, in a poem that was actually about getting the object of his affection to sleep with him, Had we but world enough and time.

Travel is good. It’s, to me, the best investment of time and money that there is. And so off to the Atlantic we go.