It's Grand

My family is a classic example of the modern norm: People moving far away from families of origin for school or jobs or other adventures, and then starting their own families in relative isolation from extended relatives. I currently live 500 miles from my parents and air travel isn’t a great option since they live two and a half hours from an airport of significant size. My husband’s parents live on the other side of the country and his siblings are scattered about as far and wide as you can get within the contiguous United States: Seattle, Columbus, Pittsburgh and Austin. I didn’t think much of this situation one way or the other until we had a child.

I have a fantastic relationship with my parents and I’ve always missed them, but now I miss them like crazy. I am insanely jealous of friends who have their parents down the street, in the next town or even within a couple of hours. I fantasize about how much easier my life would be if one of Chester’s grandmas were around to pick him up in a pinch, provide a much needed date night or spend a couple of hours with him so I could get to a yoga class on the weekend. And I’m not just envious of the built-in help that nearby grandparents provide; I’m also jealous of the time spent together and how it nurtures and benefits all the relationships involved.

My mom recently headed home after a wonderful week and a half visit. I had a rather obvious, but profound nonetheless, realization the night before she left. We were having dinner at our neighborhood Thai restaurant. Chester and my mom were laughing and playing on their side of the table, Matt and I were having a pleasant conversation on our side. It felt so natural and normal and good, and it hit me like a ton of bricks, “Wow, this is how it was for the vast majority of history!” (Maybe not eating lemongrass tofu and drinking Singha, but the extended family part.)

While the nuclear-family-in-relative-isolation trend is recent considering the course of human history, I’m not the first generation in my family to do it this way. For most of my childhood, we didn’t live near any of my grandparents either. There was a brief stretch of living two or three doors down the street from my mom’s parents when I was around four years old, and I still remember it, these 30-some years later, as a charmed time.

We lived several states away from my dad’s parents – I can probably count the times I saw my dad’s father on one hand. We only visited my grandma every few summers, and because she ran a bar for a living and slept during the days, I didn’t see her much. When I was eleven years old, we moved to my dad’s hometown where his mother lived. Even then, I only saw her occasionally – mostly on holidays – and we were never close. She came across as judgmental and seemed to care far more about her Daschund than any human-being in her life. As an adult, I’ve heard stories about her – how she spent whole summers as a young girl trekking through the Oregon wilderness on a horse, for example – that make me wish I had gotten to know her better.

I had a close relationship with both of my mom’s parents, but my grandpa Chester and I had a special bond to say the least. The year or two we lived next to them was truly magical for me. I loved being able to run down the street and see my grandpa any time I wanted. I told him secrets. We built towers and cities out of blocks. We played “Barrel of Monkeys,”  “High Card Takes the Trick,” and “Go Fish.” We grew pollywogs in my plastic pool. We made trips to A&W for root beer floats. He was particularly fond of taking walks and I was always willing to tag along – he had a way of making a simple jaunt around the neighborhood seem like a grand adventure. To put it simply, my grandpa was the coolest, most fun person in the universe as far as I was concerned. He even had a “hook” instead of a right hand. It was like having the kindest and most loving pirate in the world as my very own grandpa. What could be better than that, for crying out loud?! (Answer: nothing.) He occupied a place in my heart and a status in my mind that no one else could fill, not then and not since. 

Me and my Grandpa Chester

  

When we moved to Brookings, Oregon in 1983, my mom’s parents decided to move there too. Any anxiety I felt about being the new girl, in a new town was completely overshadowed by the excitement of living near my grandpa again. I couldn’t wait to sleep over at their house on the weekends, explore new walking routes and have all sorts of adventures. It was, indeed, as wonderful as I had hoped . . . for a few short months. My opportunity to live near my grandpa again ended tragically and much, much too soon when my grandpa took his own life. After that, my grandma moved to California to be near my uncle. She passed away about five years later when I was in high school. I never got to know her very well – when my grandpa was alive, I was attached at the hip to him. After he died, my grandma was (understandably) depressed. She cried every time she called our house and that was difficult for a self-absorbed teenage girl to handle in an empathetic manner. I got into the habit of passing her off to my mom as quickly as I could when I did end up with one of her calls.

I don’t think a day has gone by in my life that I haven’t thought of and missed my grandpa. The emotions have gone back and forth over the years from shock to confusion to anger to sadness, but mostly I just miss him and wonder what my life and our relationship would have been like had he been around long enough to know me as a teenager, a college student, an adult. I still admire him and hope that he would be proud of me. When I had my son, there was no question that he would be named after his great grandpa. There is a photo in my son’s room of my grandpa wearing his signature cowboy hat. Chester asks about him a lot “Where is his arm?” (Good question. He lost it in a farming accident.) “Was he a cowboy?” (Yes, he was.) “Did he ever see me?” (Sadly, no, he did not.)

Given my relationship with my grandpa Chester, it has been fascinating and emotional to watch the relationship develop between my son Chester and my mom. To say they are “close” is a gross understatement of reality. They are like two peas in a pod. Seeing the two of them together is like watching my own memories – it’s as if they are a reflection, a remnant, a recreation of my grandpa and me. I could just sit and watch them together for hours, and I’d very much like to do it more often than two or three times a year.

Chester and his "Grammy" (aka my mom)

Chester was not happy when my mom left after this most recent visit. He took to calling her “Grammy” during her stay and for days he made tearful demands for her . . .

“Chester, what would you like for dinner?”

“I want my Grammy?!”

“Have a good day at school. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Will Grammy be with you when you pick me up?”

“No, Chester, Grandma had to go home.”

“I want Grammy!”

“OK, Chester it’s time for your bath.”

“I want Grammy!”

“Hey Chester, do you want to watch a movie with me?”

“I want Grammy!”

You get the idea. It has been a little over a week now and he has finally settled back into day-to-day life without “Grammy,” but we all miss her and the easy happiness that seemed to flow when she was here.

Chester doesn’t get to see my parents nearly enough, and he has even fewer opportunities to see Matt’s parents. We live on opposite sides of the country, which makes frequent visits problematic for a number of reasons, both financial and logistical. The times Chester has spent with his “Grandma and Grandpa B” have been truly wonderful. He was immediately drawn to my father-in-law the first time they saw each other when Chester was a year old. I will never forget him sitting in Grandpa B’s lap, pulling and snapping his suspenders over and over again with smiles and giggles of delight. Since our last visit with them a year ago, Grandpa B and Chester have a running joke about potato chips and Chester’s reluctance (OK, downright refusal) to share them.

Matt’s mom is the quintessential grandma in the spoiling sense. If there were such a thing, she would be the undefeated, world champion of doting grandmas. She adores Chester and makes everything all about him (in a beautiful, self-esteem-nurturing way). When we visited them last Thanksgiving, Grandma B kept telling him “Chester, this is YOUR party! This is all for you.” He was eating it up and Matt and I kept shooting each other this-is-really-sweet-but-he-is-going-to-be-unbearable-when-we-go-home looks. One day, while they were snuggled up on the couch together watching a cartoon, she said it again, “Chester, this is YOUR party. You are the STAR!” He thought for a few seconds and said, “If I’m the star, does that mean everybody else is just ornaments?” Now if that isn’t how a grandma is supposed to make you feel, I don’t know what is.

Fortunately, the love runs deep in all directions between Chester and his grandparents; deep enough to translate through cards and emails and phone calls and sharing photos via the internet. I still wish we got to see them all more often and I dream of how wonderful it would be to have them living close by. For now we’re counting the days until we go to “Grammy” and grandpa’s house for Christmas, and I’m not-so-subtly reminding my mom that there are many lovely homes available for sale, right here in our neighborhood.   



I Rock(ed)

Apparently last weekend was the Weekend of the Rock Show. Somehow I missed it and no one bothered to tell me. But, in the interest of honesty, my weekend wouldn’t have looked any different had I been in the know, so it doesn’t really matter. Friday night rolled around and all I wanted to do was go to bed early. As I sat on the couch, too tired to drag myself to bed, I scrolled through my Facebook newsfeed. An astonishing number of people were at Key Arena seeing Journey, Foreigner and Night Ranger; some were enjoying Ryan Adams at Benaroya Hall and still others were gearing up for Death Cab for Cutie on Saturday. Heck, someone’s ten year old daughter was rocking out at a Taylor Swift show. Me? I really wanted to stay up and watch the premiere of Pearl Jam Twenty, Cameron Crowe’s new documentary with never-before-seen archival footage on PBS. Sadly, I didn’t want to stay up and watch it nearly as much as I wanted to go to bed. I know. I rock.

     

I wasn’t always so lame when it comes to rock shows. In fact, I’ve spent far more than my fair share of time experiencing live music . . . in dark clubs with sticky floors, in stadiums with terrible acoustics and at festivals with Honey Buckets and lemon-fights. (Does anyone else remember the Frankfurter lemonade lemon-fights that were de rigueur at Seattle area outdoor rock festivals in the mid-nineties?) I moved to Seattle at a great time in the storied Seattle music scene. I arrived two and a half months after the death of Kurt Cobain, so I was a little late for the grunge explosion, but there were still plenty of fantastic things happening, especially for a girl who had spent the previous four years in sleepy Corvallis, Oregon. During my early and mid-twenties, I practically lived at Seattle’s best music venues of the era: the Crocodile Café, RCKCNDY, The Off Ramp, Moe’s Mo’ Rockin’ Cafe and the OK Hotel.

It used to be that I wouldn’t miss a great rock show. (Well, except for that time I foolishly decided to stay in my dorm room and study for a midterm instead of seeing Nirvana at a small venue right after the release of Nevermind. That was some fantastic decision-making right there.) I drove ten hours, round-trip, through the night to see Morrissey. I stood in line for three hours in the snow (no kidding) to get tickets for Smashing Pumpkins at the Moore Theater in the days when they could have sold out the Key Arena. I devoted hours to studying the Bumbershoot line-up each year and spent all day, every day at Seattle’s famous music festival. (Keep in mind that this was back when Bumbershoot lasted a full four days, not the measly, wimpy three days that it currently spans.) I never missed a Lollapalooza or an Endfest, and I made regular trips to the Gorge, fighting horrendous traffic and exerting super-human effort to stay awake on the drive home.

Ah, those were the days. Time has passed (as it does) and things have changed (as they do). These days, I can’t even get motivated to give up a couple of hours of sleep to watch a rock documentary while seated comfortably on my own couch. What has happened to rocker Ronda? I attribute my descent into live music apathy to three factors: 1) I am old, 2) I got burned out, and 3) I give at the office.

Number one: I am old

“I am old” put more accurately is “I am in a phase of life where I have significant responsibilities that do not happily coexist with a rock and roll life style.” Among my responsibilities are a demanding job that requires me to work late nights regularly (see number three below) and a demanding young child who requires me to wake up early in the morning. Are you seeing the pattern that makes staying out late at a rock show, stumbling home in the wee hours and waking up with a hangover and ringing ears a problem? It works when you’re in your 20’s and don’t have a kid or a job where the buck stops with you; not so much when you’re in your late 30’s and have both. Like I said, I’m old.

Number two: I got burned out

As my equally live-show-apathetic husband said recently, “I’ve been there and done that, and not just a little bit – I’ve done a lot of it. In fact, I did so much of it, for so long, I was beginning to lose my dignity.” I don’t know if he was losing his dignity, but he has seen quite a few rock concerts. He set the bar high with his first – The Rolling Stones, “Some Girls” tour at Chicago’s Soldier Field in 1978 when he was barely 15. That’s a tough one to beat. (I sent him a text asking what year it was and which tour. Two simple questions and I got an instantaneous, enthusiastic and lengthy reply claiming it was, and I quote, “the best day of my teenage life,” citing the exact day – July 8 – and providing me with the set list. In case you’re wondering: Let It Rock, Honky Tonk Women, Lies, All Down the Line, Starfucker, When the Whip Comes Down, Tumbling Dice, Beast of Burden, Just My Imagination, Shattered, Respectable, Far Away Eyes, Love in Vain, Happy, Sweet Little Sixteen, Brown Sugar and Jumping Jack Flash.) As if his first concert wasn’t enough to be jealous of, he was in attendance at Pearl Jam’s famed 1992 concert at the Moore Theater - the one in the Even Flow video. The list goes on like that for many years and many concerts.

While my rock show resume is nothing like Matt’s, I’ve also been there and done that quite a bit. My first show was INXS on the “X” tour in 1991. Not the Rolling Stones, but certainly a solid first concert. At a particularly amazing Violent Femmes concert in 1992, I didn’t notice or bother to care that I was getting squished against the barrier at the front of the stage so hard that I woke up the next morning in excruciating pain with a giant black bruise across my hips and belly. I’ve seen great shows and bad shows. I cherished every time (and there were many) that I watched Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley sing from his precarious perch atop a monitor – each time thinking it would be the last. I saw Sonic Youth at their worst – Thurston Moore so wasted he couldn’t stand up, much less play – and at their best – the extended noise jams for which they are so well known. I saw Jane’s Addiction play a small venue in Salem, Oregon, where the show lasted maybe 20 minutes because Perry Farrell kept yelling insults at the audience before storming off stage. I’ve seen Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel more times than I can count. I’ve seen unbelievably amazing shows like David Byrne and unbelievably awful shows like Bush opening for No Doubt at the Tacoma Dome (the ticket was free, in my defense). Anyway, the point is, after many years of rock concert-going, I realized I could only crowd surf and mosh and have bloody tampons flung at me from stage (yes, it actually happened at an L7 concert) so many times before it all started to blend together and lose its luster.

Number three: I give at the office

I’m a performing arts presenter. Putting on shows is what I do, day in and day out. Now granted, the shows I’m doing aren’t Alice in Chains at the Off Ramp or REM at the Gorge, but I do see and hear a lot of music. I’m accustomed to listening to demos for about two minutes tops or watching live showcases at conferences that last twelve minutes, so it’s no surprise that when I’m an hour into a show as an audience member my mind starts wandering. All I can think about is whether the band is easy to work with or if they are a pain-in-the-ass. I find myself wondering what their hospitality rider entailed. Did they request all raw, organic, local foods or did they insist on fried chicken? Did they demand one hundred pre-cut orange slices or did they want their fruit whole, uncut and unpeeled? Did they need obscure British throat lozenges? Were they adamant that they needed access to the venue from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. the night before the show? Did they accuse the presenter of being racist because he or she foolishly forgot to provide properly sized dinner plates? Yes, each and every one of these scenarios has, in fact, happened to me. As a result of my experience as a presenter, I have both a short live music attention span and a lot of show-related baggage.

Now, lest I come across as completely jaded and lame, I’m happy to report that I do still occasionally get out to concerts for leisure, and sometimes I even surprise myself by having a great time. It was just two years ago in Boise, Idaho (of all places) where I saw a Gogol Bordello show that completely blew my mind. I danced and drank (PBRs no less) excessively. I left sweat-drenched, with my ears ringing and a smile on my face, thinking “Now THAT’S a rock concert!” I see Neko Case any chance I get. Her poetic lyrics and gorgeous voice (I read a great review somewhere that said she sounds like the tortured ghost of Patsy Cline) never fail to leave me practically weeping over the beauty of it all. While I do go out and see shows for fun, these days most of my amazing music moments happen at the shows I present – seeing Suzanne Vega perform “Tom’s Diner” for a group of high school students so transfixed you could have heard a pin drop, watching Al Stewart sing “Year of the Cat” or Arlo Guthrie do “This Land is Your Land” in my tiny little venue, witnessing the Blind Boys of Alabama bring an audience to their feet in joyful dancing – these moments fill my heart with hope and happiness that live music still speaks to my soul.

More often than not though, even at a show that’s really great, when I get past the twelve minutes of a typical showcase, my feeling is “Yep, I’ve got it. I came, I saw, I rocked. Can I go home and go to bed now?”

Did you hear the one about the mermaid and the whale?

Autumn is, without a doubt, my favorite season and it was a beautiful fall morning in Seattle – gray, slightly misty and chilly enough for a cozy sweater and boots.  My morning was great.  Pandora treated me well during my trip to the gym. (I’ve long suspected that a great Led Zeppelin song has near magical capabilities and now I know that it can specifically take a treadmill run from “meh” to amazing.) I got lots of hugs and kisses from my sweet son, and there is really nothing better than that, and my commute was “easy, peasy, lemon squeezy” as Chester would say.

I parked my car and had a brief “driveway moment” as I finished listening to the ever-fabulous Dolly Parton beg Jolene not to steal her man, even though she can. After obtaining my beloved morning chai latte, I contentedly settled in at my desk. When I logged in for my routine pre-work Facebook check-in, I saw something that bothered me – the Mermaid versus Whale story – on several friends’ pages. I’ve seen it, in various iterations and settings, a number of times over the past year or so.  In case you haven’t read it, or need a reminder, here it is: 

Recently, in a large city, a poster featuring a young, thin and tanned woman appeared in the window of a gym. It said: THIS SUMMER DO YOU WANT TO BE A MERMAID OR A WHALE? A middle aged woman, whose physical characteristics did not match those of the woman on the poster, responded publicly to the question posed by the gym.

To Whom It May Concern:

Whales are always surrounded by friends (dolphins, sea lions, curious
humans). They have active sex lives, get pregnant and have adorable baby whales that they raise with great tenderness. They have a wonderful time with dolphins, stuffing themselves with shrimp. They play and swim in the seas, seeing wonderful places like Patagonia, the Barren Sea and the coral reefs of Polynesia. Whales are wonderful singers and have even recorded CDs. They are incredible creatures and have virtually no predators other than humans. They are loved, protected and admired by almost everyone in the world. Mermaids don’t exist. If they did, they would be lining up outside the offices of psychoanalysts due to identity crisis: Fish or human? They don’t have sex lives because they kill men who get close to them, not to mention how could they have sex? They cannot bear children. And who wants to get close to a girl who smells like a fish store? Yes, they would be lovely, but lonely and sad. The choice is perfectly clear to me; I want to be a whale.

P.S. We are in an age when media puts into our heads the idea that only
skinny people are beautiful, but I prefer to enjoy an ice cream with my
kids, a good dinner with my husband and a coffee with my friends. With time we gain weight because we accumulate so much information and wisdom in our heads that when there is no more room it distributes out to the rest of our bodies.  So we aren’t fat, we are enormously cultured, educated and happy.

So there you have it, Mermaid versus Whale.  Every time I see this piece, it is inevitably followed by innumerable comments agreeing that it would be far better to be a whale than a mermaid, proclaiming what a beautiful sentiment it is and thanking whoever posted it for sharing. And every time I see this piece, it irritates me.  Here’s why:

“Whale” is the wrong answer.  So is “mermaid.”  The right answer to the question “Who would you rather be?” is “Me.”  I don’t want to be a whale, I don’t want to be a mermaid, and I’m tired of the false dichotomy that this story and others like it creates.  Yes, we are in an age where our brutally pervasive media heavily influences standards of beauty.  People come in all shapes and colors and sizes, and there are many variations of beauty.  We should celebrate that without putting down any of those shapes and sizes of people, including the skinny ones.

I’m thin.  It’s partially my genes, but it’s also because I am thoughtful about what I eat and I exercise regularly.  I do those things not because I’m obsessed with obtaining a mass-media-defined ideal of beauty, but because I want to feel good and be healthy.  And guess what?  I enjoy every second of all of it.  I love eating reasonable quantities of healthy foods because they taste good and make me feel energetic and well.  Exercise is at the very heart of my existence – physical activity is where I clear my mind, release stress, give thanks for everything good in my life, refocus and have a plain, old good, entertaining time.

Why do pieces like Mermaid versus Whale imply that being thin means being miserable? Mermaids may not exist, but happy, healthy, thin women do. I’m not lonely and sad. I don’t have identity issues. I have wonderful dinners with my husband and coffee with great friends. I have a beautiful son and I eat ice cream with him plenty. We also do lots of other fun things together like take walks, ride bikes and play tag. Eating ice cream isn’t the only way to have fun for heaven’s sake. I don’t eat ice cream every night and I don’t eat a gallon of it at a time, because I don’t need to do that to have fun and it wouldn’t be healthy.  Sure, eating ice cream is enjoyable. The same could be said of smoking. I don’t smoke because it isn’t healthy for my body and I don’t eat ice cream in great quantities because it isn’t healthy either.

I’m all for broader definitions of beauty, especially since so much of what makes someone beautiful is who they are and not what they look like. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Haven’t we all had the experience of thinking someone was gorgeous and then, after having gotten to know them, found ourselves wondering why we ever thought they were attractive? Or, conversely, meeting someone who didn’t catch our eye at first, but who became absolutely breathtaking after getting to know them?

Some years ago I attended a conference where performer/inspirational humorist David Roche spoke during a plenary luncheon. Because I served on the board of the organization at the time, I sat at the board table with our speaker throughout lunch. Mr. Roche was born with a severe facial disfigurement – the kind of disfigurement that is difficult to handle because you don’t quite know how to look at him without noticing it and being afraid that you are obviously noticing it and either over or under-compensating for noticing it. Lunch felt somewhat awkward as a result. As the meal wrapped up, Mr. Roche took to the stage and began telling his story – and what an amazing and touching story it was. A half-hour later, several hundred people were on their feet, with tears in their eyes, giving Mr. Roche a standing ovation. When he returned to our table, I noticed something strange – it wasn’t awkward to look at him anymore. After discovering how beautiful he is on the inside, it was almost impossible to pay any attention at all to his external disfigurement. Mr. Roche’s message was that we all have elements of darkness or ugliness to deal with. That ugliness can be hidden when it’s on the inside. He considers his disfigured face a gift, because his challenge is on the outside where he is forced to deal with it.

So no, you don’t have to be skinny to be beautiful, or tall or tan or without deformities for that matter. Beauty isn’t narrow; it’s broad and it should be defined more broadly by society, but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse to be unhealthy. Let’s not kid ourselves. The fact is that many people in our modern society eat terribly unhealthy foods in ridiculously large quantities and exercise very little.  Obesity is a health issue of epidemic proportions in our country. So while it’s great to embrace diversity in our definition of beauty, let’s not confuse that with celebrating and perpetuating unhealthy habits. Women don’t “gain weight because they accumulate so much information and wisdom in their heads that it distributes to the rest of their bodies.” Please. We all know perfectly well that isn’t the way it works, and while a fat person can certainly be cultured, educated, happy, and even beautiful, sometimes we need to call a spade a spade.

A lot of people seem to think the Mermaid versus Whale piece is about celebrating beauty in all its forms. I don’t think so. If you have to put one form down to elevate another, you’re not celebrating beauty at all. In fact, putting others down to make yourself feel or appear better is actually pretty ugly.

When I returned to my job after three and a half months of maternity leave, I weighed less than I did before I was pregnant. I didn’t do anything unusual to make that happen – I ate and exercised sensibly both during and after my pregnancy. On my first day back at the office, a woman who had begun working for my organization while I was gone saw me for the first time. Before even introducing herself, she loudly proclaimed, “Oh, you must be Ronda. I HATE you!” and walked away. I had no clue who she was or what she was talking about. Some other co-workers witnessed the scene and explained that she knew I had recently had a baby and was referring to the fact that I was so thin after just a few months. Something similar happened at a friend’s wedding when my son was five weeks old, and it continues to happen in dressing rooms, grocery stores and coffee shops. I think these people have the strange notion that they are paying me some sort of bizarre compliment. Note to all of them: proclaiming you “hate” someone with a tone of disgust and an eye roll does not make them feel good. The same goes for insinuating that someone is obsessed with being thin over having a healthy, happy life and taking care of their children with “great tenderness.” I’m pretty sure I’d be thought of as an awful person if I approached an acquaintance or a stranger and announced, “Oh my God, you’re SO fat. You must eat everything in sight. I HATE you!” So why is it okay for someone I barely know to say to me, “Oh my God, you’re SO skinny. I HATE you!”?         

We shouldn’t buy into the very narrow definitions of beauty that the media perpetuates.  We also shouldn’t combat those definitions by attacking and putting down the body types that the media seems to hold up as the standard of beauty.  By doing that, we’re being just as judgmental as the media we’re complaining about. So please, stop setting up dichotomies between fat and thin, tall and short, pale and dark, young and old, mermaid and whale.  We should all just choose to be ourselves – our best, healthiest, happiest selves.  That would be truly beautiful.

Ronda and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Annoying Day

It has been a very annoying day.  Before I begin ranting about the super-annoying events of my very annoying day, let me offer a disclaimer for those of you who are not well-versed in the children’s literature genre.  The title of this blog entry is a nod to the book “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” so please, no accusations that I’m being overly dramatic.  Not that I’ve ever been accused of that before.

It’s raining today, and it’s not the typical light Seattle drizzle.  This is pouring down rain, the kind where you actually get pretty wet if you go out in it without a hood or an umbrella or one of those clear, plastic head-scarf-things that little old ladies wear.  The rain in and of itself does not annoy me.  I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly two decades now, which means I’ve pretty much earned my “Not Only Can I Handle Rain, But I Actually Really Like It” badge.  The problem for me today is that I didn’t have a jacket with a hood – at least not one that worked with my outfit.  I do not own a clear, plastic head-scarf-thing, because, while I might not be what you’d call a “spring chicken” anymore, I’m not THAT old.  And, while I most definitely own at least a half-dozen understated (read: solid black or grey) adult umbrellas, I could not find a single one of them this morning.  “Do you know where any of the umbrellas are?!” I yelled to Matt as I attempted the near impossible feat of carrying my purse, my gym bag, my lunch and Chester’s backpack to the car, while simultaneously herding Chester toward the door.   Being pressed for time as usual, I didn’t wait for a reply and simply began loading the car.  Just as I finished, Matt, appeared on the porch, triumphantly holding up . . . Chester’s teeny-tiny robot umbrella.  I gave him the “Are you kidding?” look.  He was not.

I can only hope the people who saw me using it today chuckled and thought, “Oh, look at that poor mom who couldn’t find one of her own umbrellas to use this morning as she was frantically rushing her child out the door to make it to school on time.” instead of, “Oh my God.  Look at her.  She thinks she’s being all hip and ironic, carrying a child’s umbrella.  What an idiot” or even worse, “Aw, look at that developmentally disabled woman.  How cute is it that she’s using that little robot umbrella?”

The problem with an itsy-bitsy child’s umbrella (besides the fact that it is emblazoned with primary colored robots, of course) is that it doesn’t provide a lot of coverage.  So, despite looking like a cross between a frazzled mom, a Harajuku girl gone wrong and someone from the neighborhood group home, I still got fairly wet.  See previous description of pouring down rain.  Combine this with the fact that I am WAY overdue for a haircut and it makes for a very, very bad hair day.  I think we can all agree that there isn’t much more annoying than a bad hair day; especially when it involves looking like Tom Petty after a particularly sweaty concert or being submerged in a dunk tank.

Don't get me wrong, I love Tom Petty's music, but his hair is not really the look I'm going for.

I know for a fact that I look like a drowned rat version of Tom Petty today because I had more than enough time to stare at myself in the sun visor mirror of my car.  My commute is typically 25-30 minutes.  Today it took well over an hour thanks to Semi-Truck versus Compact Car.  I’m not sure who won the battle, but I can tell you it was not the hundreds of commuters who sat stranded on the rainy road as the minutes of their morning tortuously ticked by.  Stand-still traffic is almost as annoying as bad hair.

At last, I inched past the fender-bender and traffic began moving again.  I took a deep, cleansing breath and silently, cheerfully promised myself the day would begin looking up.  Sadly, right then, I happened to look up and see a billboard promoting some new TV program starring Zooey Deschanel.  I really don’t know anything about her as an actress, but I find her incredibly annoying and here’s why: Zooey Deschanel is to eyes what Renee Zellweger is to lips.  Renee Zellweger is constantly puckering her lips in photographs and on film, leading us to believe that her lips naturally fall that way.  Well they don’t.  Lips don’t do that unless their owner is puckering them.  Ms. Deschanel displays the same behavior, but with her eyes.  Why does she insist on opening them so freakishly wide when she is photographed?  Seriously, it looks weird.  We get it already; you have great big, pretty, blue eyes; you don’t have to beat us over the head with it.

At this point, my only hope for recovery was the hot, creamy perfection that is my morning chai latte.  My prospects for saving the day seemed promising as I approached the Starbucks near my office.  I could see through the windows that only two people were in line.  “Yes!”  I thought, “My luck is turning around."  Unfortunately, I was mistaken.  The first person in line turned out to be a former employee and wasn’t so much ordering as she was having “old home week” at the counter. 

“Oh my GOD!  I haven’t seen you in FOREVER!” one of the baristas shrieked.

“I know, right?!  How ARE you?!” she replied.

Another current employee emerges from the back room and more shrieks of delight ensue.

“Hey you!  You better get over here and give me a hug right this every second!”

More screaming, giggling and lots of hugging happen.

The current employees shower the former employee with compliments, “Oh my GOD! You look fantastic!”

I was trying to be patient, I really was, but all I wanted to do was say, “Oh my GOD!  I’d hate to see how fat your ass was before if you look fantastic now.”  That and perhaps strangle her.

Next up was a couple, a perfect example of what I like to call “Starbucks Shoppers.”  These people don’t have any idea what they want to order and they don’t give it any thought until they are at the counter.  Never mind that they’ve likely spent at least two or three minutes in line, staring straight at the drink menus and pastry case.  When the cashier inquires “What can I get started for you?” they seem surprised, caught off guard even. 

“Oh my goodness, this nice young lady wants to take our order, Bill.”

“Hmmm . . . well, let’s see . . . what do they have.”

They absent-mindedly peruse the pastry case.

“Um, I guess I’ll have a  . . . I’ll take an old fashioned donut,” the woman says (I’ll call her Jill) "and then maybe . . . . A vanilla latte.”

“What size would you like,” asks the barista.

“What size?!” Jill ponders,  “Oh boy, what size?  Hmmm . . . ”

“Uh . . . well . . . um . . . make it a tall, I suppose.”

“You always wish you had more,” reminds Bill.

“Actually, you know what, let’s go with a grande.  Can I get a grande?”

“Sure, a grande vanilla latte and an old fashioned donut.  Will that be all?” asks the unbelievably patient barista.

“Um, yeah, but . . . actually, forget about the donut, I’ll get a coffee cake instead.  And do you have sugar-free vanilla?  Can you make that a sugar free vanilla latte?”

You get the idea.  By the time they were done ordering, it was all I could do to keep myself from beating them senseless with my tiny robot umbrella. 

I finally arrived in the office, cranky and desperately needing to pee.  “Please don’t sneeze, please don’t sneeze,” I silently begged myself as I raced to the bathroom, where I made the next annoying discovery of the day.  My pants are missing their button.  This was not the case when I put them on at my house.  I distinctly remember buttoning my pants, which were too loose, causing me to add a belt.  How does a button that is fastening loose pants and that is held in place by a belt just randomly jump ship?  Where did we go our separate ways?  At Chester’s school?  In my car?  As I squirmed in line at Starbucks?  I will never know.  All I do know is that fussing with button-less pants all day is . . . you guessed it, annoying.

I went to the gym at lunch.  This is usually a highlight of my day, despite my gym having the dumbest women’s locker room in the world.  The genius who designed this thing created tiny cubicles, only big enough for two people to stand in, and then lined them with rows and rows of lockers.  In the middle of each pod of lockers is an itty-bitty bench, probably only two feet long.  Now, I said two people can stand in each area – that is assuming they are both fairly small people and that they are close enough friends to not care about being in extremely close proximity to each other while getting naked.  I followed my friend Dea into the locker room today and paused at the mirror to gawk at my Tom Petty hair.  Finally, unable to bear the horror any longer, I tore myself away and headed to the first locker pod.  There was a nearly naked woman there.  Upon noticing what looked like Dea’s hair and a tattoo on the same shoulder that Dea has a tattoo, I began to squeeze in next to the panty-only-clad woman.  Just as my hip brushed hers, I noticed that her tattoo was a cluster of stars, while Dea’s is a butterfly.  Star girl gave me an annoyed look (now I’m even passing my annoying day onto unsuspecting, innocent others) as I scurried to the next pod, muttering my apologies.  There I found the actual Dea and began the annoying process of getting undressed and redressed within the confines of a small box shared with another person and a useless little bench.  I know the dimensions of this ridiculous space well and have developed an uncanny knack for functioning within it.  Much like Houdini escaping from a locked box while bound in chains, I can magically move within the space.  But today there was an unexpected obstacle for which I was unprepared: someone had left a locker door open.  I pulled my shirt off and felt a sharp crack as the back of my head smacked into it.  Was I seriously injured?  No.  Was I at a whole new level of annoyance?  Yes. 

The annoying just kept coming all day long.  No serious problems; nothing truly distressing or awful, just annoying, annoying and more annoying.  Each time, I tried to remain positive.  I tried to acknowledge the annoyance bubbling up inside me and let it go.  I thought I could de-sour and maybe even sweeten, but after the locker incident, it was over.  My day was officially annoying.  “Ronda and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Annoying Day.”

Can you spare me the change?

My son started kindergarten last week.  Kindergarten!  I have no idea how this could have happened already, but it has.  It isn’t like it crept up on me.  I spent a lot of time preparing for it.  Hours were invested in researching schools, visiting schools, applying to schools, building cost-comparison spreadsheets for schools, and finally, choosing a school.  Then, in the weeks leading up to the fateful first day, I fretted about how Chester would handle the transition.  I did plenty of worrying about Chester (because I’m his mom and that’s what moms do), but I didn’t worry about myself and apparently that was an error.  I completely failed to realize what a difficult transition kindergarten was going to be FOR ME. 

Chester on his first day of kindergarten. 

Me on Chester's first day of kindergarten.

I expected leaving Chester’s preschool to be difficult and it was.  He has been going there since he was three months old and it has been a special place for our whole family.  Chester went through each classroom at the center, so we knew practically every one.  When we walked through the halls, everybody said hello.  When I pulled into the parking lot each day, it felt like I was home.  As we said goodbye on Chester’s final day, I felt a sense of loss and grief for the chapter we were closing.  A couple of slices of pizza and a scoop of ice cream later, I was feeling like I was through the worst of it.  Closing a chapter would be much more difficult than the adventure of beginning a new one, right?  Wrong.

The past week has been surprisingly angst-filled, emotional and downright exhausting for me.  I’ve felt like that awkward person at the party who doesn’t know anyone.  I’ve wracked my brain wondering what Chester is doing and how he is feeling at every minute of every day.  I’ve worried that his new teachers don’t know him yet and might pigeon-hole him into a persona that he is not.  I’ve gotten lost in daydreams of Chester as a baby and snapped out of them into stereotypical “My baby is growing up!” tears.  I’ve longed for the familiarity of my old commute and have been absent-mindedly taking the carpool lanes even though Chester is no longer my commuting companion. 

I like to think of myself as an adventurous and spontaneous person, but the last week has made me wonder if I’m not actually more of a hardcore creature of habit and stability junky.   Compared to many of my peers who have undertaken cross country moves, launched new careers, bought second houses and had second and even third kids, my life seems like a bastion of stability. 

Despite the fact that I’ve been in the same house, in the same city, with the same job for a decade, and even longer in some cases, I don’t think I’m THAT change averse.  I’ve been through some major changes in my life.  I went to kindergarten myself once upon a time, after all.  I don’t remember it being so dramatic when it was me.  I honestly don’t even remember my first day of kindergarten and I only have a couple of clear memories of the whole year.  Both of which, on a side note, are amazingly indicative of how the rest of my academic life would progress.  I remember the thrill of learning to read.  Figuring out that I could put the letters of the alphabet together in different combinations to make an unlimited number of words was an exciting discovery, and it was the beginning of my enduring love for school.  On the flip side, I also remember my very first encounter with the severe stress that school had the ability to inflict on me.  During some sort of standardized test, I came across a question I couldn’t answer and became so distraught that I began to cry.  Somewhere in my five year old brain I knew that my stress-induced reaction far exceeded what the situation called for and I was embarrassed by that.  When my teacher asked me what was wrong, I didn’t want to admit the truth, so I told her I was upset because my uncle died.  My little white lie worked like a charm, except I spent the rest of the year living in constant fear that my teacher would talk to my mom and express her sympathy for the passing of my mom’s brother when he was, in fact, very much alive and well.

Lest anyone think kindergarten was the last major transition in my life, I can identify some others.  My family moved to a different state in 6^th grade.  That was huge and although I recall some apprehension, I was mostly thrilled with the adventure of it all.  Leaving home for college was certainly a significant change, but again, I approached it with eager anticipation.  I couldn’t wait to move to the heart of a major city right out of college even though I had previously only lived in rural towns.  And there certainly have been other changes and adventures in my personal and professional life – graduate school, getting married and becoming a parent to name a few.  In general, I think I’ve handled most of these transitions, even the big ones, better than sending my child to kindergarten. 

So I’ve been pondering, what’s going on with this particular transition?  My current conclusion is that two things are at play.  The first is pretty straightforward: change is hard.  Even if the change at hand is wonderful and exciting, it still involves, well . . . change.  Change brings newness, unfamiliarity, uncertainty and, worst of all, loss of control.  I know, I know, I’ve heard all the lectures about how control is an illusion, but it’s an illusion I thoroughly enjoy and therefore choose to embrace, thank you very much.  With kindergarten, Chester’s world just expanded a little further beyond the one he shares with me.  That’s a good thing, but it makes the control freak part of my brain scream “Loss of control!  Red alert!  Loss of control!  Danger!  Loss of control!”

For example, I no longer know the exact classroom schedule like I did when Chester was in pre-school and because they don’t send home a detailed daily report in kindergarten, I have to rely on a five year old boy for my information.  This experience ranges from confusing to completely hopeless.  It goes one of two ways.  Like this:

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Good,” Chester replies flatly. 

“What did you do?” I inquire.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Did you do anything fun?” I persist.

“I can’t remember, Mom.”

Or, like this:

“How was your day?” I ask.

“It was good.  We played dirty yard in P.E. and the balls were garbage like if you had a party at your house and there was garbage and you had to throw it in the other person’s yard.  It was a party where there were helicopters.  Not big helicopters but littler ones.  And there were like a hundred million and six of them and they all landed on our porch and then they exploded “KABOOM!”  And I rided them but then they started shooting poisonous and they bruke, I mean broke.  Then there was Luke, he’s in after-care with me, but not in my same class, he’s in the other after-care, but I was still reading with him and he was at the party too.  And I don’t have to ask to go to the bathroom because I was signed out all day because I wasn’t signed in, but I just have to find a buddy to go with first.  Oh and mommy, I want those brown, crunchy crackers in my lunch – the ones that Eleanor has.”

I’m either left completely in the dark with zero information or overloaded with a confusing jumble of possibly real information mixed with crazy fantasy.  As if those two scenarios weren’t bad enough, Chester came up with a new response that nearly stopped my poor, frazzled mommy heart:

“How was your day?” I asked.

“TERRIBLE!” he groaned like he was about to cry.

I stopped in my tracks.  “Oh no, Chester, what happened?”

Long pause.

“Ah ha ha, just kidding!”

Chester the comedian.  Hilarious.

I also felt a great sense of comfort and control at Chester’s daycare/preschool because of the bond I had developed with many of the other parents.  I reminded myself that it took time to create those relationships and it would simply take time again.  I was doing great with that mantra until it occurred to me that one important thing I had in common with all the other moms at Chester’s daycare might not be the case at his new school:  We all worked; that’s why our kids were in daycare.  I had a mild panic attack when I received a group email from a mom at Chester’s new school letting everyone know that she was organizing an ADO (that’s “after drop-off”) workout group.  “After drop-off workout group,” I groaned.  “Who are these people and don’t they WORK?!”  Thus began visions of every other mom spending hours in the classroom each day, developing the kind of deep relationships with teachers that I could never hope to cultivate.  Well, I must sheepishly confess that I had a little lesson in making assumptions when I found out the ADO workout organizer not only works, but is a doctor.  So I’m not the only “working” mom, whew. 

In addition to all the plain old newness and uncertainty I’m dealing with, there is another dynamic: the uniquely emotional nature of parenting.  Of all the challenges of parenting, I was, and continue to be, least prepared for the emotional exhaustion.  When I was pregnant, I had myself all psyched up for the physical exhaustion.  Of course I never could have imagined how bad the physical exhaustion was going to be, but I had some sense that it was coming.  What nobody warned me about, probably because it’s impossible to describe without experiencing it, is just how emotional it is being a parent.  I had no idea how much I would care, how profoundly I would worry and how deeply I would love.  Change involving Chester really is much, much harder than change that simply impacts me.  Sending Chester to kindergarten has been much more harrowing than going to kindergarten myself.  Thinking of Chester having a bad day is far more awful than having my own bad day.

When Chester was a baby and I was overcome with the intensity of emotion I was feeling, I told myself that surely it would fade a bit as he got older.  I was very wrong and now, more than ever, I realize that the overwhelming emotions of parenting will never go away.  As I fought back my tears dropping off Chester at kindergarten, I thought of a friend who admitted to crying after sending her daughter off for the first day of high school.  “Oh my God,” I said as it dawned on me, “this is never going to end.”  I’m going to be emotionally strung-out for the rest of my life – fraught with worry, bursting with happiness, battered by the bitter-sweetness of constant change.  That’s parenthood, I guess. 

I’m excited about Chester’s new school.  I really think it’s going to be great for him and a wonderful place for our family, but the newness is still hard.  I feel like I’m being exposed to sunlight for the first time – everything is too bright, too loud and too fast.  I remember feeling this way when I brought Chester home from the hospital after he was born.  Every nerve feels over-stimulated and raw.  Nothing is on auto-pilot and it’s exhausting.  The good news is that it’s getting better already.  We are meeting wonderful families and teachers and administrators who are going out of their way to make us feel welcomed.  The new routine is starting to feel “routine,” and, as a result, I’m finding myself able to think more rationally, accept the challenge of change and, dare I say, even enjoy it.

When we arrived to pick Chester up from the after school program at the end of the first day of kindergarten, the kids were outside on the playground.  I searched the play structure and didn’t see Chester.  I scanned the whole play yard and didn’t see Chester.  Just as I was beginning to shift into irrational panic (“Oh my God, I knew this was going to happen!  They lost my child on the first day!”), I spotted him.  He was way off in a corner of the chain link fence, playing with an older boy.  They were bent down, concentrating intently on something.  Chester’s new friend was a third grader, but in my mind he was definitely shaving and driving.  As I walked toward them, my thoughts raced: What is my baby doing with that big, grown-up kid?  Are they playing poker?  Smoking pot?  Looking at porn magazines?  It turns out they were playing an innocent game with a tennis ball and two cones, and, judging by Chester’s smile, he was having a great time. 

Finally Chester saw me and I got that smile I’ve been getting since he was a baby – the “Hey, there’s my mommy!” smile that makes my heart fill up and overflow and feel like it’s going to explode – followed by the running leap into my arms.  The smile and hug that say, in a world of constant change, there really are some things (the most important things) that always stay the same. 

Won't you be my neighbor?

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of neighbors.  Maybe it’s because when I was growing up we didn’t really have them.  We essentially lived in the woods and none of our neighbors were visible.  Sure, you could hear them if they fired a shotgun or started up their chainsaw or four-wheeler or something, but I didn’t have that quintessential cul-de-sac experience where I could get to know my neighbors, watch them coming and going, and pretty much keep track of what was happening in their lives.

My first real experience with having neighbors was my freshman year of college in the dorm.  It was novel and delightful to live in such close proximity to my peers.  Being able to walk out my front door and end up in a friend’s room seconds later was a big shift from always having to make arrangements to drive or be driven anywhere from 10 minutes to a half hour get to my friends’ houses. 

About halfway through my freshman year, the girl who lived directly across the hall dropped out of school, leaving the room vacant.  I had not gotten to know her and I still had other neighbors, but her absence felt like a small step back to a more isolated living situation and it bothered me.  The room sat empty for what felt like quite a while, until I came home from class one afternoon to find the door of the room open and boxes stacked inside – finally, we were getting a new neighbor.  It would have been easy, not to mention rational and mature, to knock on the door and introduce ourselves, but for whatever reason, my roommate and I took turns monitoring the peep hole and making what we thought were nonchalant trips to the bathroom to see if we could get a glimpse of our new neighbor.  When we finally saw her, we were intrigued and pleased.  She was equal parts Goth and Rave with ripped up black clothes, vivid dyed-red hair and piles of jewelry – bright plastic mixed with heavy silver.  She was clearly not one of the all-too-common sorority girl types and we considered that to be a very good thing.  Unfortunately our new neighbor was completely uninterested in meeting any of us.  I think the best I ever got was a muttered “hey” as she slipped into her room before shutting the door.  She wasn’t mean or rude, we just rarely saw her, which made her that much more intriguing.  In fact, the only thing more intriguing than her was her boyfriend, Captain America.  That wasn’t his real name, or at least I don’t think it was, but that’s what we called him because of the red and white striped Lycra pants he wore with black combat boots and an overly-studded leather jacket. 

The Captain Americas were good, if somewhat strange neighbors (and I say “they” because we were quite certain Captain America was living in the dorm even though he didn’t seem to attend the university.)  They were mellow and minded their own business.  Shortly after they moved in, they embarked on a mysterious and epic project.  We caught glimpses of lumber and paint being hauled into the room and occasionally heard hammering sounds.  One evening their door was halfway open and I subtly peeked inside as I walked by.  What I saw was beyond perplexing – a bright green picket fence standing in the middle of the room.  Art installation?  Indoor garden?  Class project?  We never did find out.  After the construction stopped, the Captain Americas threw a party; presumably to celebrate the fence’s completion.  One of their guests threw up at the end of the hallway, just past our rooms.  The puddle of puke sat through the next day and eventually dried, at which point Captain America vacuumed it up.  My roommate and I had given up trying to figure out the green picket fence and didn’t think much about the party or the puke until the next time we used the shared vacuum.  Then it all came rushing back – literally.  We plugged the machine in and started it up.  A few moments passed before it hit us both at the same time – the rancid odor of vomit being blown, in the form of hot air, throughout our room.  Gagging, we struggled to turn the vacuum off as it continued to blow puke-air.  We finally gave up and left it running in the middle of the room as we ran to the hallway window, gasping for fresh air.  I don’t remember how long it took us or how we determined who got the job of going back in to unplug the thing; I’ve probably blocked it from my mind.  I do remember that the vacuum was sent away for deep cleaning and our windows were left open for many days.  I lived in the dorm all four years of college.  I had neighbors that were as uptight as elderly librarians and neighbors who seemed to be practicing for careers in the porn industry and neighbors who became wonderful friends, but no one ever topped the Captain Americas in terms of interesting neighbors.

The first apartment I had on my own after college was on Belmont and Howell in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.   My building was called The Emerald Arms and it was colorful neighbor headquarters.  My first look at the building was on a sunny spring afternoon.  I called on a studio that was advertised in the paper and was told that while the unit was likely taken, I could come and take a look.  My friend Marla came along to keep me company and provide a second opinion.  The Emerald Arms is a lovely, old, six-story, brick building, covered on two sides with ivy.  Directly behind it, canceling out the idyllic ivy vibe is a bright orange garage with no roof.  Or maybe it’s a parking lot surrounded with bright orange walls.  Either way, Marla thought it was weird.  As it turned out, the weird was just beginning.  Julia, the building owner, answered the door with her long hair braided and wrapped into buns atop each ear à la Princess Leia, except Julia was 60-some years old, five feet tall and chubby.  She was wearing enormous round glasses and an alarming number of silver and turquoise necklaces.  Her flowing white blouse was cinched with a belt that had more heft and bling than a heavy-weight boxing champion could handle.  Julia showed us around the building and I was immediately smitten.  While the outside of the building was classic and dignified, the inside was anything but.  The hallways on each of the six floors were sponge-painted various electric shades of orange, pink, blue and purple.  The studio that had been advertised was a corner unit on the first floor.  Julia pointed to a tree outside the window.  “Isn’t it pretty?” she asked, “When you look out the window it’s almost like you’re living in the country!”  Marla and I traded glances; clearly Julia didn’t know she was talking to two girls who grew up in the forests of rural southern Oregon.  The tree outside the window on Howell Street was about as far from the country as either of us could imagine and that was fine by me because being in the country wasn’t a selling point anyway.  It wasn’t the tree that did it, but I was, in fact, sold. 

Marla thought I was more than a little crazy, but the Emerald Arms spoke to me.  It was home to an autistic musician, who marched through the sixth floor hallways practicing his trombone at all hours, a kilt-wearing handyman who could fix anything and a number of other oddballs and eccentrics.  Julia left Christmas trees in the stairwells through August (a fire code violation of horrific proportions my architect husband would later point out) and rotting pumpkins in the laundry-room until April.  She left a basement window open a crack and put out bowls of cat food, making the building home to who knows how many stray felines.  I came to refer to The Emerald Arms as “The Island of Misfit Toys” and, at that time in my life, I felt like a bit of a misfit.  So, despite Marla’s are-you-sure eye rolls, I gave Julia my number and told her to please call me if an apartment was available.  The unit with the “country view” ended up being taken, but a couple of weeks later, I got a call about a studio on the bright blue second floor.  I took it immediately, thus beginning six wonderful and interesting years at the Emerald Arms. 

In addition to the colorful residents of my building, the transitional, low-income building next door was jam-packed with fascinating neighbors.  One evening, after just moving in, I was folding laundry near the window in my apartment and someone started yelling.  “Hey!  You!  Knock it off!  Goddamn it, you better stop that shit right now!”  I carefully peeked out my window and saw a man from the building next door yelling up at what seemed to be my window.  “I see you, you asshole!” he shouted.  I panicked and ducked.  His yelling stopped but I crawled around on my hands and knees for a good 15 minutes, heart-pounding, wondering if he was really talking to me.  Nobody ever accused me of being a domestic goddess, but I didn’t think my laundry-folding methods were THAT offensive.  Several months later, I came home one night to find the street in front of my apartment closed and filled with police cars and ambulances.  A small crowd of people had gathered and I joined them, hoping to figure out what was going on.  A nice man with three little boys filled me in – a resident of the neighboring building had been shot in an altercation inside the building.  We continued chatting as we watched the police work and it didn’t take long to figure out that my new acquaintance was the man who had been shouting up at my window that day.  “Oh no!” he said, “Did you think I was yelling at you?”  It turned out he wasn’t yelling at me.  He was yelling at the man who lived in the unit below mine who had a habit of coming home every evening, settling down on his bed and masturbating with the curtains wide open, right when the three little boys were trying to do their homework.  I didn’t know whether to be relieved that he hadn’t been yelling at me or horrified about the pervert living directly below me. 

After a couple of years in the studio, I moved to a one bedroom on the neon orange and pink third floor, where my neighbor was a 40-something, chain-smoking, heroin addict who made her living as a maid and played bass in a rock band at night.  She was always coming and going with her bass in one hand, a cigarette dangling out of her mouth and her ancient vacuum cleaner dragging along behind her.  She was a quiet neighbor, but I lived in constant fear that she would pass out and burn the building down with one of her cigarettes.  During my last year at the Emerald Arms, my now-husband and I got engaged and he moved in, leaving his larger and much nicer apartment because his landlord did not allow cats and I had two.  Had there been any question about how deeply Matt loved me, his willingness to move into The Emerald Arms would have put those doubts to rest.  In the year and a half we lived crammed in the small space together, Julia inexplicably had his truck towed from the parking spot we paid for, causing us to spend a very long, rainy night waiting outside a sketchy tow-lot to pay hundreds of dollars to get the truck back.  She also lost the kilt-wearing handyman and replaced him with a well-intentioned alcoholic that we routinely found passed out in hallways, with the ring of master building keys in plain view.  Some thoughtful neighbor started letting bums and addicts into the building to sleep in the basement and to top it all off, a couple of prostitutes began turning tricks inside the bright orange garage walls.  So, as much as I loved the Emerald Arms, the time came to move on. 

We bought our house in December of 2001.  Moving into a house in a neighborhood was strange.  Even though I never got to know my apartment neighbors – we always allowed each other the psychological distance that living in such close physical proximity requires – it felt odd to be in a building, however small, all by myself.  And it was so quiet!  There were no hookers screaming in the street at 3 a.m. that they wanted the money they just earned and they wanted it “now, goddamn it!”  There were no people hanging out windows telling the skater boys who were practicing their ollies and kickflips at midnight to “Shut the fuck up!”  It was eerily quiet.  That is, until we met Carol.  Carol is our next-door neighbor to the north.  One evening, the doorbell rang and there she was, dressed in head-to-toe red and green, wearing a headband with reindeer antlers, holding a plate of Christmas cookies and exclaiming, “Welcome, neighbors!”

Carol-watching quickly became an entertaining pastime.  She wears floral print moo-moo dresses and giant fake flowers in her hair.  She plays banjo in an old-time band and is always going to and from gigs in some kind of crazy costume.  On the first Easter we spent in our house, I glanced out the window to see her dressed as a giant Easter Bunny, serving lemonade to her guests.  Carol leaves her Christmas lights up year-round and her backyard is perpetually decorated in a summery Hawaiian luau theme.  She is a widow, but is constantly surrounded by her children, her children’s spouses and ex-spouses, her grandchildren and lots of extended family.  Before he died, Carol’s husband was a member of the SEAFAIR pirates – the band of men who spend every summer dressing up like pirates and storming Seattle area beaches, festivals and parades.  Carol still has pirate gatherings at her house and proudly flies the Jolly Roger from her porch. 

Carol is wacky, but she’s a great neighbor.  She has lived in her house forever and knows everyone.  She has parties with people doing karaoke in the driveway and drum circles in the backyard, but she always shuts things down at a reasonable hour.  Her seemingly endless family goes crazy on the 4^th of July, setting off more fireworks than the rest of the city combined, but she shoos them into the street if they get too close to houses and she insisted they take the whole operation to the far end of the block the year that Chester was only a few days old.

My all-time favorite Carol story took place one December night.  Matt was away on a work trip and I was going about my routine of getting Chester ready for bed when a phone started ringing.  It rang and rang and rang and then stopped.  A few minutes passed and it started again . . . it rang and rang and rang and then stopped.  The pattern continued and it started getting a little creepy.  We couldn’t figure out exactly where the sound was coming from.  I kept looking over to Carol’s house because she and her sons have a habit of talking on the phone on the porch, but nobody was there.  It was freezing cold and snowing – not even Carol’s clan would choose to take the cordless outside in that weather.  The more I listened, the more it sounded like the eerie unanswered ring was coming from our basement.  I imagined horror movies and CSI episodes; surely The Cell Phone Killer was hiding in my basement, waiting for me and my sweet baby to go to sleep.  Once I got Chester to bed, I decided to investigate.  There was no way I was heading down to the basement without checking all other alternatives first.  I could hear the audience yelling at me, “Don’t go down there you idiot!  The killer is down there!”  The ringing continued at odd intervals and I kept looking.  Finally I went out onto the porch and noticed the dome light on in Carol’s car.  It was snowing and I was dressed in just slippers, sweat pants and a short sleeved t-shirt, but I cautiously inched into Carol’s driveway, where I saw her – facedown across the front seat of her car, her legs sticking out the driver’s side door.  I was sure she had fallen victim to The Cell Phone Killer or perhaps keeled over from a heart-attack.  I called out her name, which caused her to pop up and smack her head on the door. 

The good news was that Carol was not dead and The Cell Phone Killer was not in my basement.  The bad news was that Carol had lost her cell phone and once I was standing in the driveway with her, I felt compelled to help her look for it.  Again and again Carol went into the house to use the landline to call her cell phone.  It rang repeatedly, as it had been doing for an hour, but it was maddeningly difficult to pinpoint the exact location.  We searched her car top to bottom.  We looked under the car.  We tore apart the trash and recycle bins.  We groped through dried leaves and debris in basement window wells.  Finally ready to give up, I looked under the car one more time and saw a flash of bright pink.  I got down in the snow, reached as far as I could and managed to get my hand on the object, but it wouldn’t budge.  That seemed weird until I realized it was UNDER the tire of Carol’s car.  “Hey Carol,” I called out, “I think I found it . . . you need to back your car up.”  Sure enough, there it was and besides the battery cover having popped off, it was totally fine.  I was freezing, my slippers were soaked through and it was only then that I realized the full ridiculousness of the situation.  Not only was I out in the snow, rescuing a run-over cell phone that I thought was a violent serial killer, I was doing it for my crazy neighbor who was dressed as one of Santa’s elves, complete with Santa hat, green felt skirt with jagged edges, red and white striped tights and little green boots with curly toes.  I believe some jingle-bells were also involved.   

We have lots of nice neighbors now in addition to Carol – the family to the south with three teenagers, the friendly empty-nesters who drink wine and listen to classic rock on their front porch and the elderly woman who was born in the house behind ours.  There is the family across the street – likable, despite their very loud diesel truck and the fact that they put the Baby Jesus out in their manger scene before Christmas day every year.  (I have no idea why this is a problem because I’m a raised-without-religion-heathen, but it drives Matt crazy.  Apparently every self-respecting Catholic on the south side of Chicago knows that you do NOT put the Baby Jesus out until Christmas day.)  There are several other families with young children, including Chester’s little friend Kyrah who lives on the other side of Carol.  Listening to Chester and Kyrah talk to each other across Carol’s backyard is adorable.  “Hey Kyrah, I’m playing cars!”  “Hi Chester, I’m swinging.”  “My cars go really fast!”  “You should come over and see how high I can swing!”  Their conversations go on and on that way and it makes me so happy that he has a little neighborhood friend.  Growing up in the woods was an amazing experience and I wouldn’t trade my über-urban twenties for anything, but now I finally have the neighborhood experience I dreamed about as a kid.  It’s pretty nice.