In a moment

Me, July 2006, in a stunning demonstration of how not to Live In the Moment

“When’s the show going to start, Mama?  Are they late?  Is there going to be a real dog?  Is the witch scary?  How scary?  Where’s my program?”

The balcony was a cacophony of hyped-up kids struggling out of too many jackets and bouncing on theater seats that left short legs dangling and necks craning. Molly and Jacq, a few seats away, were burbling with anticipation.  Lizzy, to my left, hogged my armrest, jiggled, and interrogated me. To my right, my friend Mark took out a thick sheaf of paperwork, a ballpoint, and a headlamp.

“Grading papers?” I asked.  

My gut reaction was amused admiration. Usually, I’m the one who is told I’m taking multi-tasking to extremes – an accusation against which I defend myself by pleading necessity and efficiency.  If I hadn’t been able to nurse two babies at once while finishing my dissertation, I wouldn’t have earned those fancy-pants letters to go with my name! However, I sometimes question my choices, and perhaps even my mental landscape.

“Actually, it’s a grant proposal I’m reviewing.”  Mark shrugged a half-grin at me.  “I’m running out of time to get it done, so…”  And, as the four-year-old behind him kicked his seat, he set to work.

I considered Mark’s diligence through the lens of recent articles I’d stumbled across (in between emails, of course), and I was pretty sure I ought to be tut-tutting. There seems to be a growing backlash against the sort of mental gymnastics required to – for example -- simultaneously learn about important geopolitical events, mentally design a bicycle shed, and bake brownies.  People like Mark – and like me -- warn The Experts, are scattered.  They are stressed. They are not Living In the Moment.  They are not Mindful.  As a result, they cannot possibly be happy.

Was Mark, alone with his astrophysics in his bubble of light, not alive in the moment? Granted, as the house lights dimmed to darkness, he put away his flashlight and appeared to concentrate on the impending twister in an artificial Kansas inhabited by a rather tall Dorothy, a treat-obsessed Toto, and a witchy-sultry Miss Gulch.  But if he was still half-thinking about the National Science Foundation, was he insufficiently mindful?  More to the point, was my own general lack of mindfulness a deep-rooted psychological flaw that (although currently leaving me quite cheerful, thanks) would one day render me – I don’t know, scarred?   

On the stage, a horde of achingly adorable munchkins declared themselves to be the Lullaby League and the Lollipop Guild.  One, sporting a truly fabulous hat, aced the solo lines sung by the Coroner, and I recalled savoring that pompously over-rhyming ditty as a child: “As coroner I can aver I’ve carefully examined her.  She is not merely nearly dead, she’s really quite sincerely dead.”  Goodbye, Wicked Witch of the East!  But… with a puff and a bang her evil sister appeared.  Horrors!  Lizzy hurtled into my lap, there to remain for the next two hours. 

My memory flew to being five or six myself, and convinced that my dad needed to protect me from the black-and-white TV version of the same dread hag.  Really, Lizzy wasn’t doing so badly.  Just a few months ago, she’d been more scared than this by a puppet version of Oz. Would her apprehensions fade as quickly with the years as mine did, I wondered?  Would she plunge with relish into Edgar Allan Poe in junior high?  How soon would I be able to read her through the terrors of Mordor?  Even as the Scarecrow bemoaned his lack of brain, my own brain happily meandered back a decade or so, to revisiting Middle Earth syllable by syllable with Jay.  Prydain, Pern, Hogwarts… I loved them all.  Including, of course, Oz – where I was right now.  Mostly.

As the Tin Man explained his macabre history of self-destruction by axe, I wondered whether I even capable of being mindful. Mindfulness isn’t some new-age fad. I’m pretty good at ignoring those.  No, it’s at the core of several Eastern religions – religions of which I have scant knowledge, but at least a modicum of respect.  Years ago, I read Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hahn, thus gaining just enough understanding of Buddhism to make an idiot of myself if asked to discuss the subject.  Still, I do remember being struck by a few cogent points in the book.  For example: you do not actually hate washing dishes; you just think you do.  Why not enjoy the warm sudsy feeling, the squish of the sponge and the squeak of the clean plate, rather than muttering imprecations into a real or metaphorical beard? At the time, this idea felt like a minor epiphany.  

The charmingly effete lion danced along towards the Emerald City, and I recalled seeing the movie version of Oz in college, with a rowdy-nostalgic group of friends.  It was sponsored by the gay students’ association, and we all cheered for the King of the Forest with the bow on his tail.  Would gay rights seem so hard-won to my kids, by the time they made it to college?  My mind danced from past to future and back again.  In contrast, my daughter, eyes locked on the action, was most definitely Living In the Moment.

Most of what I sort-of-know about mindfulness had been gleaned – not without a ladleful of irony – from the soul-sucking wrecker of twenty-first-century Zen, the internet.  I am deeply in love with this conduit of endless and instantaneous information.  So is Mark, as far as I can tell.  Another black mark against us both.  In any case, the gist seems to be that in order to be happier, saner, and less of a frantic parody of everything that is wrong with This Modern Age, I should practice unselfconsciousness, engagement, and deep breathing.  I should savor each moment, and accept rather than fight life’s negatives.  I should lose myself in the flow of time.  I should avoid agonizing over the past or dreading the future.  And, of course, I should stop trying to do ten things at once and just… BE.

Um… okay.  I’ll get around to just being when I’m done planning our family vacation, packing tomorrow’s lunches, helping the kids with their homework, and sewing a cow costume, ok?

In truth, as I readjusted Lizzy to prevent total loss of circulation to my knees, I felt like I did get the point.  Sort of.  Unselfconsciousness?  Heck, yes.  I like myself better when I stop caring too much about what other people think of my mismatched socks, my inability to hold a tune, or the mysterious smears on my kids’ faces.  Life is better when I’m not cruelly judging over my own shoulder and taking notes on my lack of productivity, my disorganization, and my inability to curb global climate change.  Of course, there was some circular reasoning here, in that trying to decide whether I’m properly mindful is a comically self-judging pursuit.  If I then go on to blog about it? I don’t actually need to explain the incongruity here, do I?

Still, I bought into some of what I’d read.  Deep breathing?  Engagement?  Not fighting the negatives?  Yes, yes, and yes.  I’m a lot less of a screeching harpy if I fully oxygenate my brain before commenting to my kids on the subject of the Cheerios crunching under my heels… and then get down to their level and absorb the joy of making necklaces out of breakfast cereal… and then pretend to be playing Quiddich while we all sweep the floor.  Hands-on engagement, edible jewelry, AND witchcraft!  I was In The Moment!

Unfortunately, it was the wrong moment.  I wasn’t supposed to be thinking all this through while the Winkies marched and the Jitterbugs did backflips in hot pink satin.  As for Mark… somewhere around If I Only Had a Brain I’d noticed that he was not in Kansas anymore.  Or in Oz, for that matter.  His head was nodding gently chestward.  If you dream during a story that takes place inside a dream, which moment are you inhabiting, exactly?

Moreover, I wondered, if I enjoy almost all of my moments, but am often in the wrong one, I am failing or cheating somehow?  I do enjoy washing dishes, but not because of the unique awesomeness of each suds-bubble.  I tune out the reality of the grime in favor of enjoying the time spent chatting with Trusten or laughing with Margaret as they dry plates or wipe counters.   If I listen to novels while running -- which is also my morning commute – am I failing to savor the experience of running? Of commuting?  Of snow, car headlights, and the shadows of hundreds of spruce trees?  I’m certainly not In the Moment if I am mentally planning a trip to the Grand Canyon while correcting first grade math homework, or if I write a grocery list during a dull meeting. 

The Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion, in their efforts to save the heroine, knocked over a large piece of scenery.  For the kids, this was clearly a high point.  And, yeah, it was for me, too – although Dorothy had a lovely alto, and the witch melted beautifully.  This was community theater to the core, but it was enthusiastic, sometimes-inspired, sometimes-brilliant, fun community theater.  Still the best part of the show for me didn’t really have anything to do with the choreography, the sets, or the pit orchestra.  It came when I accepted that I’m ok with my state of mindfulness, even if I’m often ballooning through a twister somewhere between Kansas and Oz.

Technically speaking, I admitted to myself, I’m terrible at living in the moment.  For one thing, I have no desire to savor the precise moment when the cat retches a hairball onto the rug or someone screams, “I’m telling Moooooooommy!”  For another, my mind is about as grounded as a fruit-bat.  But, on the other hand, I don’t endlessly engage in the behaviors that are supposedly so harmful to the non-mindful – agonizing over the past, stressing over the future, and failing to enjoy myself in the now.  

I enjoy the minutes and hours of my days, not despite my flitting brain, but because of it.  I thrive on new ideas…distracting ideas…crazy ideas.  I relish linking the past and the present to an imagined future.  I need daydreams. I even (sometimes) am energized by doing six things at once (so long as none of them involve politics or vomit).  And while not everything has a funny side, I solidly believe that most things do (which is what makes The Onion an excellent news source).  

On stage, the Wonderful Wizard was booming impressively through his microphone.  And then, just as impressively, he flubbed his lines.  He offered the confused Tin Man a brain.  After a long and awkward pause he added, “Or… was is a heart?”

Don’t fight the negatives, I wanted to tell him.  Embrace them!  As I laughed (kindly and cheerfully, I hope) along with the rest of the crowd, I realized that just as the Wizard is a creature of smoke and mirrors, so too is the idea of being mindful.  If I feel like I’m Zen enough to please myself, then (with my lap full of semi-anxious kid and my mind full of semi-formed notions) I’m plenty Zen.  

The roar of laughter from the audience woke up Mark.  I’m not sure if he got the joke, but he looked quite ready to laugh along.  Perhaps, for him, a nap was exactly what he needed.  Maybe his brain was at its most comfortable floating somewhere between NASA rocket science, the Yellow Brick Road, and deep delta-wave somnolence.  Sure, he wasn’t living in the same moment as anyone else in Hering Auditorium.  Perhaps that grant proposal was not fully reviewed, either. But the world was a happy place in his moment.  As it was in mine.

And now for something completely different

“Whoops… sorry! ”

I backed away from a near-tragic collision with my coworker’s bowl of minestrone, and in the process almost did a backflip over the coffee-grounds-composting bucket.  The office kitchen is woefully small for the 30 or more people who use it on a daily basis, but in this case, that was only part of the problem.   The other part was me.

Although no one had ended up wearing hot tomato-y goodness, I felt like an explanation was in order – or maybe more of an excuse.  “Sorry -- I’m blind on that side,” I said with a smile.

“Oh!  Um…”  Now the poor hapless minestrone-eater looked embarrassed. “Um… oh.  I’m… um… sorry.”

Gosh, there’s nothing like a birth defect to inject awkwardness into friendly lunchtime banter!   Never mind that mine is a trivially minor birth defect that doesn’t hamper my existence in any way, other than rendering me worthless at softball and tragically unable to enjoy 3-D movies.  I don’t mourn my inability to solve Magic Eye puzzles, and I’ve long since accepted the fact that my large nose further eclipses my already sub-par field of view.  But in our society, discussion of imperfections is just… awkward.

As a parent, I’ve run across a few articles and blog posts that attempt to address the question of How To Talk About Differences.  One of the prime directives seems to be that they have to be called Differences, never handicaps, or problems, or disabilities, or “Hey, what’s the deal with your eye?”  As a corollary to this rule, we should never in any way suggest that it’s better two have two eyes than only one.  Cyclops rules!

I get the point, of course.  We don’t want our kids to stigmatize or bully other children, or try to pull rank on someone else by virtue of having cooler braces, a cast with more signatures, or a different number of limbs.  Since my own issue is so terribly minor, I don’t feel like I have any jurisdiction in this realm.  I don’t have any idea what it’s like to be genuinely-both-eyes-blind or to have a child with Down Syndrome, so I should probably just shut up.  Usually, I do.  To my soup-eating coworker, I merely said something cheery and bland, like “Oh, no biggie!”  I know the rules: Don’t Talk About It.  But as I popped day-old casserole into the microwave, my rebellious side goaded me into thinking that maybe our society is being so cautious that we’re actually being disingenuous to ourselves – or, at the very least, confusing to our kids.  

When I was in elementary school, it was easy to explain what the deal was with my eye, because other kids asked.  They asked with interest, and they listened with equal interest to my responses. My right eye doesn’t look like the left one; it’s smaller, darker brown, has a milky white pupil, and tends to wander when I’m tired, unfocused, or bored.  (Of course, if you observe its meanderings you should not assume that YOU are making me tired, unfocused or bored, unless you are leading some kind of meeting that has lasted longer than the capacity of everyone’s attention span and/or bladder.)   To be more specific, I have a congenital cataract; I was born with the lens of one eye clouded to the point of almost complete opacity.  Given that the surgical options at the time were rudimentary and risky, my parents made the decision to leave well enough alone.  This choice was irreversible, since by the time I was two, my left eye hogged up all the available neural connections.  I’d like to think this makes my left eye some kind of uber-eye that can see through walls and around corners, but my kids are doubtless glad that I have no such mega-Mommy-powers.  My long-ago peers wanted to know if what I saw out of my right eye was the same as what they saw if they closed their own: darkness.  No, I said.  What I saw out of my right eye was the same as what they saw out of their ears.  (Kids love this answer, trust me.)  Inevitably, the conversation led to my playmates making hilarious (read “inappropriate”) gestures just outside my field of view, to test whether I’d catch them at it.  It was funny.  Actually, it still kinda is.

But then everyone stopped asking.

The only other era of my life when people openly wondered what the heck was wrong with my eye was when I lived in a different culture.  In Jamaica, the social rules regarding personal comments are for the most part a lot… looser than they are in the US.  By the time I’d been there for a few months, I’d gotten used to being called “Whitey” by anyone who didn’t know my name.   I’d also made enough friends that I could engage in a conversation about why this would never, ever fly in my home country.  It wasn’t polite, at home, I explained, for a bus driver to say something like, “Hey, you, fat woman in the back!” or “One-legged guy, you take this seat!” My new friends found such rules amusing.  Doesn’t the fat lady know she’s fat?  Hasn’t the man with one leg, you know, noticed that the other one is missing?  Isn’t it pretty ridiculous, and actually kind of offensive, to pretend that such things are invisible?

Here in the U.S. we impose a deep, silent taboo around “differences.”   At the same time, we foster intense cognitive dissonance by trying to persuade our children that differences are something super-fabulous, even when it’s obvious to even the youngest child that some of them just… aren’t.  How is a first-grader supposed to parse these mixed messages?   

I’m not sure if I have a useful solution, but maybe we could begin by being a bit clearer in explaining what kind of  “difference” can be viewed as wholly positive, in the sense that differences render the polyglot of humanity that much richer and more complex.  I’ve talked to the kids about how we wouldn’t want everyone to be English-speaking, or white-skinned, or brown-haired, or five-foot-eight, or female – even if I’m perfectly happy to live with those characteristics myself.  It would be boring!  Difference is fun!  It’s ok to be the only kid in your class who loves zucchini!  I want my six-year-olds to wholly embrace the fabulousness of variety.  I want them to aspire to be different (especially when they reach the evilly homogenizing world of middle school when Conform Or Suffer often seems to be the social mantra).  Being a liberal-minded sort, I could happily espouse the variety engendered by classmates who wear nose rings or Islamic crescents or tutus or kilts or gay pride stickers.  But I don’t want my kids – or anyone else’s -- to differentiate themselves via monocularity... or worse.  Wanting to be different seems like a peculiar aspiration when “different” includes the profound autism of an unspeaking child on the playground, or their grandpa’s Parkinson’s Disease. 

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly want society to fully embrace everyone, and to celebrate whatever abilities and fantastic individual qualities that person may have.  But to six-year-olds, it seems confusing if Mommy uses the same language to talk about hair color, muteness, and wheelchairs.  I agree that it’s important that the kids know that the PERSON isn’t bad.  The person is wonderful.  The person has feelings, and commonalities, and great qualities such as a willingness to (wordlessly) spin the merry-go-round, or the patience to play (while seated) multiple rounds of Connect Four.  But the condition?  I’m not going to tell my children that autism is a fun form of human variability.  I refuse to say that Parkinson’s Disease is just a “difference” that adds to the exciting diversity of their world.  These are illnesses.  I want them cured.  Preferably now, this minute.  I also want everyone to become just a trace less anxious about talking about the “differences” that are less-than-desirable.  To children, anything that is hush-hush is likely to seem more scary and taboo, not less – and therefore more negative, and more stigmatized.  I also suspect – although again, I can’t be sure on this point – that our intense trepidation about imperfections can sometimes make it harder for the individual in question, not easier.

For me, of course, taboos about handicaps don’t make much difference, even if I do sometimes seem to be more bumbling than the average absent-minded professor.  When I think about my cataract at all, I feel lucky that I got off so lightly.  Congenital cataracts are often associated with other defects… such as mental retardation. Wait and see, my stressed-out parents were told, back in ’72.  Won’t that be fun?  There’s no telling how “different” your child may be! Sometimes my family tells me that the jury’s still out.

Ultimately, for all that I love diversity, I’m a pragmatist.  Given the chance, I would happily accept a functioning second eye.  At the same time, I am profoundly glad that I can see, and hear, and express myself (somewhat) coherently.  Yeah, call me crazy.  Or, if you prefer, call me “different.”  Then try making really rude gestures while standing to my right, and give yourself away by giggling.  Just keep in mind that if I accidentally sidestep into your minestrone, I’ll have a really good excuse.

All together now

"We are excited to share with you some early results from our survey! Thank you once again for participating. Your voice and your experience will contribute to research and policy efforts regarding cohousing in the U.S.”

My voice and experience!  How official-sounding.  But despite the chipper thanks of the team from the CohoUS Phase 3 Survey Team, when I filled out their survey several weeks ago, I was pretty sure I was no expert on community living.

When I first moved into a “cohousing” situation thirteen years ago, I didn’t even know the term, and even now that I’m a fully-vested shared-property-owner, I don’t actually explain my living situation that way.  Instead, I generally give a rambling description that starts off with, “Well, there are five homes on our property, plus a shared cabin…” I add, in random order, useful facts such as, “Only two of these kids are actually mine,” and “Sharing the washer and drier makes sense, but I do seem to end up with a lot of odd socks.” 

“The results presented here represent data from 502 cohousing residents.”

Well, I’m glad it wasn’t a mere 501.  Five hundred and TWO sounds so much more respectable.  Practically mainstream.  But, official surveys notwithstanding, I know that cohousing requires explanation.  Like biking at forty below zero, using a plywood privy, and thinking that science is super-duper-fun, it’s not exactly normal. 

Cohousing is rare enough that we don’t categorize easily.  Our little group had a lot of fun, I’ll admit, when the most recent census forms hit our (joint) mailbox.   How many bedrooms?  How is this person related to the head of household?  How many bathrooms?  Well, that’s easy – none.  Someone at the head office in D.C. was going to get twitchy and run out of space in the “other” column.  Likewise, when asked to give a brief description of our household on the twins’ kindergarten forms, I had to squinch my writing to fit the allotted space.  My kids are going to be earmarked as wacko Esterites before they even crack open the new Crayolas, I worried.

Of course, I could have just said that each child lives with her mommy, her daddy, her sister, three dogs and a cat.  It would have been perfectly true.  Our nuclear unit inhabits a boxy little house that looks remarkably like the iconic pictures taped to fridges all across the Apple Pie states (although there is not, last I checked, a rainbow hovering over us at all times).  But teachers get a year-long unedited window into kids’ lives.  That’s why they want to know about households in the first place.  If my child draws a picture of the dinner table and it includes thirteen people sharing the organic leek-kale-zucchini stir-fry, the teacher might start to wonder.  If one of the twins suffers from the dreaded Icky Tummy at school, and the person who comes to pick her up is a scruffy guy in his sixties with three layers of patches on his coveralls and no discernible relationship to me or Jay, will anyone believe he is actually supposed to be there – and has a nursing degree, besides?

“Eighty percent of the residents think of themselves as Democrats, 16% as Independents, and a little over one percent as Republicans.”

Several of my friends have gleefully labeled me as a communist.  My political leanings notwithstanding, I have to point out that my community-mates and I have not pooled our checking accounts or started referring to one another as “comrade.”  Eating dinner together five nights a week and pitching in for a Sam’s Club gallon jug of olive oil, a quart of chili powder, and toilet paper by the crate makes for some economies of scale, but does not really constitute nefariously liberal behavior.  Our dinner-table conversations, of course, are another matter.

“Sixty-six percent of the respondents hold a graduate degree and all respondents have at least some college experience.”

That’s right, at dinner we talk about not only how to subvert the dominant paradigm, but also the finer points of arctic vegetation composition and nutrient cycling, upper atmospheric auroral processes, and application of the Hosmer-Lemeshow test for binary logistic regression to other generalised linear models.  We’re a rocking crowd.

Recently, it has dawned on my six-year-olds that other kids don’t have dinner around a table that’s fifteen feet long.  The quarter-hour walk up out of our swamp-estate to the bus stop gives plenty of time for endless questions.  “Why doesn’t anyone else live in a community?” Molly wanted to know. 

On the theory that everything is a Learning Moment, even when Mommy has not yet had breakfast and is thinking about all the spreadsheets awaiting her at work, we talked about different kinds of neighborhoods, families, extended families, and communities.  Some people have nosy neighbors or reclusive neighbors or neighbors who hang up misspelled NO TRISPASIN signs on gun-shot plywood.  Some kids are adopted.  Some kids have step-parents or live with grandparents or have two mommies or two daddies.  Some have aunties and uncles who live nearby.  The most important thing, of course, is that (all together, now!) kids have a loving family that they can count on to take care of them.

The twins nodded along.  Parents, they seemed to be thinking, are really prone to stating the obvious.  “But, how come more people don’t live in communities?” Molly insisted.

I must have looked particularly stupid, because she elaborated.  Wouldn’t it be kind of boring, she posited, to have just Mommy or Daddy as the cook every night?  What a shocking lack of variety that would engender!  Having only one sibling to play with in the precious hour between dinner and bed would be sub-par, as compared to enjoying the fantastic activities of the resident nine-year-old, and even the occasional condescending attentions of the young lady of twelve.  Without a community, who would take care of Pippin, Polar, Remus, and Togiak when we went on vacation?  Without a community, there wouldn’t be someone who was best at fixing pretty much anything in the whole world, someone who can play the accordion, and someone who has an entire Solar System of planet beach-balls.  There would be no treehouse to share.

I realized then that Molly was asking the question not with a hidden agenda (why is our family weird, Mom?) but from her own personal biased perspective.  To the kids, our family – our community – is normal.  Why isn’t everyone else normal, too?

Sixty-nine percent of residents partake in community meals... About 80% of residents exchange services with other residents and about 90% exchange, share, or gift materials… About 17% are active in caring for elderly residents.

She was right.  What isn’t normal about sharing your easily shareable stuff (no one really uses their extension ladder, their shovels, or their Cuisinart 24/7 – do they?) and spending time with your friends and neighbors?  At what point did it become mainstream to go into our houses and shut our doors against the metaphorical (or real) village outside?

I gave Molly as clear an answer as I could muster, pre-coffee.  I told her that plenty of people – and possibly everyone – DOES have a community.  Community means different things to different people.  It can mean looking out for other people, or knowing who lives on your street, or dropping by when you’ve by-mistake-on-purpose baked too many pies and perhaps someone else would like one (oh, go ahead, twist my arm).  It means compromise and friendship and snuggling an extra cat to sleep when your community-mates are visiting Australia.

Communities like ours may be rare, I told the kids, simply because everyone else just hasn’t quite figured out yet how much fun it is, or hasn’t gotten past the initial hurdles.  I quickly outlined the complexities of buying land, and setting up guidelines, handling legal paperwork, and figuring out finances.  I recalled the day a decade ago when the horde of us piled into Yukon Title, ate all the free snacks, and signed off on our boggy kingdom.  I remembered the living-room meetings at which we invented “Bob” the mythical disruptive, disreputable community member for whom we were crafting careful rules of conduct.  I told the kids that in my opinion, it was totally worth it.

They agreed.

“Cohousers rate their physical health as better than others their age and their mental health as very good.”

It just might be true.  Or perhaps we are just remarkably and deludedly optimistic.  Either way, I’m good with it.

Maybe I AM a cohousing expert, after all.  Either that, or a communist.

Stranger Than Fiction

 

Photo credit: Jay Cable, Ireland, 2009

It was about ten p.m.  My friend Amy and I were biking along a deserted road.  The only landmarks nearby were a cemetery, a field full of musk oxen, and a whole lot of dense woods.  We were at least half a mile from the nearest house when a very small curly-haired person stepped out of the forest.  She was wearing a nightdress, cowboy boots, a large cross, and a backpack.   A dense cloud of mosquitoes was busily feasting on her dimpled knees and pale little arms.  She gazed about in what appeared to be mild confusion.

I squeezed the brakes.  “Um… hi there.  Do you need help?”

She considered this carefully.  She wasn’t sniveling, shrieking, or showing any other signs of little-kid distress.  “Yeah…” she said, with the hesitation of someone who is unsure whether they prefer chocolate or vanilla. 

Amy and I started questioning her, as gently as possible.  She was six – or, no, maybe she wasn’t six.  Her name was Kira – or, then again, maybe it wasn’t.  After the first few brief moments of simple trust, she was eyeing me with suspicion, her brow furrowed as if recalling a lesson. Oh crap, I thought.  She knows she’s not supposed to talk to strangers.

Don’t talk to strangers.  It’s one of the basics, part of Parenting 101, along with Don’t Give In To Whining and Don’t Fill the Sippy Cup with Mountain Dew.  But it was a safety precaution that –unlike the nifty outlet blockers, diminutive bike helmets, and many-strapped car seats --  I’d never actually done anything about.  Last winter, I felt caught out when notes came home from kindergarten with Molly and Lizzy.  My children – along with everyone else’s -- would be hearing a talk about “stranger danger” in school, unless I demanded that they NOT hear it.  It was unclear what would be done with students whose parents refused to comply, but of course I made no protest.  The school was doing the Right Thing – weren’t they?

Afterwards, I asked the twins what they’d been told, but they were noncommittal.  Trying to ask kindergarteners what they did all day in school is about as productive and informative as trying to ask the cat why she insists on shredding my bags of sewing supplies.  However, a couple of days later, as I was dropping the kids off in the morning, I witnessed an interesting scene.

A couple of first grade boys were chasing each other around in the snow, laughing uproariously as one wrestled the other to the ground.   Nothing unusual there; this is pretty much what all kids do until stopped and forced to wait in line by the boring Grownups In Charge.  But when these two came up for air, the kid on top jumped off and cheerfully told his friend, “Ok, now you can be the stranger!”  They took off again, shrieking and laughing and periodically shouting, “Stranger!  Stranger!” as they jumped on one another.

Yeah, I laughed.  Bad, bad, Mommy. But I also started pondering, then, just how useful the whole concept of “stranger danger” is.  Children DO occasionally get harmed by strangers, and the concept is too horrific for me to even try to say anything flippant about it.  But kids much more often get harmed by people they know.  Friends.  Neighbors. Family members.  Parents.  And no, I’m not going to say anything funny about that either.  But it does kind of convolute the message if the grocery cashier might actually be a safer bet than Uncle Cliff.

On that lonely roadside, Kira – or maybe not Kira – suddenly asked me, “Are you a mommy?”  My affirmative seemed to reassure her, but she still looked cagey.  Mommy or not, I was still, after all, a stranger. 

When we asked where her own Mommy or Daddy might be, she told us, big-eyed and with significant dramatic flair, that her mommy had been STOLEN.  

Oh, crap.  Stolen?  My mind raced down all kinds of avenues lifted straight from Hollywood.  An attack?  An abduction?  I started a sort of off-kilter game of 20 questions with the kid, trying to ferret out the story, but the details quickly became ludicrous and self-contradictory, and I caught Amy’s eye.  This little girl wasn’t suffering from trauma; she was suffering from a few too many movies, an active imagination, and a fear of telling the truth to someone she didn’t know.  We agreed that she would bike on down the road in search of other human life forms.  Someone must be responsible for this confabulating, engaging little waif.  At the very least, somebody had to have a phone, to call the cops. 

Police officers, of course, are almost always strangers, too.  Likewise, on the first day of school, the teacher is a stranger.  On the random Thursday when the teacher has finally succumbed to the fetid germs spread by hundreds of sticky little kindergarten fingers, the substitute is a stranger.  The pale teenager scooping Nanook Nosh is a stranger, as is the nurse who jabs you in the thigh with deactivated mumps, measles, and rubella.  There are six billion people in the world – including, presumably, my kids’ future coworkers, friends, spouses, and mildly annoying acquaintances.  They can’t all be scary.

Moreover, almost half of those six billion people are other people’s kids.  To them – to Kira -- I’m the stranger. 

In the end, no cops were called, and no damage was done beyond some parental heart-stress and a whole lot of mosquito bites.  Amy found a herd of frantic family members combing the streets and cemetery half a mile or more away.  Apparently the little cherub had gotten out of bed, donned her boots and backpack, and disappeared out the door while the rest of the family was watching TV.

“Honey, you can’t DO that,” wailed the not-at-all-abducted mother, alternately thanking Amy and me and hugging her wayward kid. 

I looked at little Kira, whose spirits seemed undampened, and considered that if she was capable of this adventure at age six, her mom might have her hands kind of full in another seven or eight years.  I couldn’t help but feel impressed by a six-year-old who had gotten up alone in the middle of the night, covered well over a mile on trails in the woods, and invented an abductor for her mother.  Of course, it was all wrong – totally wrong.  Pretty much the only thing this little girl had done right was admitting that yeah, she needed help – from a stranger.

It became clearer, then, what I’d always known: that ultimately, we all rely on strangers.  We have to trust them to brake at intersections, to measure the prescription accurately, and to serve the fries without spitting on them.  Sometimes, we have to trust them a bit further, too.  Fourteen years ago, I crashed a truck somewhere between Nowhere and Really-Seriously-Nowhere in northern Saskatchewan. I’m sure I looked like a very unpromising hitchhiker when stumbling down a dirt road in the dark with blood dripping from all over my face.  Nonetheless, a total stranger stopped for me. And turned around.  And drove me half an hour the other way to medical care.  And gave me a card and flowers the next day.

Thus, I’ve decided that the whole idea of teaching kids to avoid all strangers is a truckload of donkey manure – regardless of whether you have the kind of six-year-old who decides to hoof it alone cross-country in her cowboy boots, or the sort of overly-cautious child who is terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West even when she’s a marionette (not to name any names here).  Sure, I’ll talk to my kids about what kind of things no one should ever ask them to do, and I’ll try to make sure they know the difference between friendly and creepy.  But I’m not going to keep them on too short a leash, and I’m definitely not going to tell them to be afraid of everyone new.  I just can’t.  I like strangers too much – after all, they’re the people from whom I’ve drawn every single one of my friends.

And if you happen to be reading this and don’t already know me… go ahead, leave a comment.  I like talking to strangers.

You Are Here

NASA image

Last weekend I attended a wedding reception sporting a flying saucer on one bicep.   The groom was wearing a fuzzy cheetah-print fedora, so I wasn’t too worried that a red, green, and yellow temporary tattoo might seem over-flippant.  Nonetheless, when a friend joked that my personal UFO was the latest image from NASA’s rover, my laugh was a trace embarrassed.  

Google image search: Curiosity

Ok, I admit it.  For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been scouring the internet for new info from Mars.  My searching feels both juvenile and illicit, as if I’m clicking on Cosmo’s latest advice (“Ten Hot Tricks He’ll Never Tell You”).  Shouldn’t I be reading the real news?   You know, the stuff about wars and stock prices?   With the presidential election looming, bucketloads of impending environmental disasters, and the usual amount of unrest, bickering, and outright awfulness on our very own planet, and it seems irresponsible to obsess about what is happening on a reddish chunk of rock spinning 230 million kilometers from the sun.  Space exploration is, by definition, not a down-to-earth pursuit. It’s also an egregiously first-world hobby.  How much does it cost to blast a passel of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopes and X-ray spectrometers into the vastness?  Does anyone in Kinshasa or Dhaka know, or care?  

Thus, as I mingled in my sleeveless dress, I let everyone assume that my kids selected my embellishment from the 40 super-awesome options in the Toy Quest kit.  But in fact, the six-year-olds didn’t choose the spaceship.  I did.  .

Of course, I don’t really expect Curiosity to find little green men… or large mauve androgynous beings… or gymnasts who spiraled a bit too energetically on the high bar.   The Mars rover is just taking pictures of rocks, I remind myself.  It’s picking up bits of dirt, and maybe sampling some trace elements.  It’s merely a scientific instrument collecting data – and it’s probably not data that is even remotely connected to my own field of scientific endeavor, which requires atmospheres, oceans, and real-life creatures with cells and chlorophyll and DNA.  The Curiosity is a vastly expensive robot wandering around a frigid and almost airless wasteland.  How interesting could that be, really?

And yet… I can’t help myself.  Curiosity keeps getting the better of me.  I am a Mars voyeur.  No, it’s more pervasive than that.  I am a space-case.  I always have been.  And, as the ink on my arm conjured up memories of my 1970’s self, I began to suspect that my preoccupation hasn’t matured much.

When I was five or six – before space shuttles, and before I’d personally seen Star Wars (even if all the other kindergarteners got to see it when it was released) -- I told my mother that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.  She was supportive, but pragmatic.  She informed me that I couldn’t be an astronaut, because I didn’t have adequate eyesight to be a pilot of any kind.  Blind in one eye?  No Mars for you, kid.  

This set me back, but only a little.  I figured that if I couldn’t actually control the rockets, I could at least be a passenger -- in the near future, when trips to the moon became as commonplace as trips to the A&P.  And in the mean time, I could read up on everything out there, just in case someone suddenly needed info on the sulfurous volcanoes of Io. 

I absorbed facts about the solar system – not just the planets’ names, but their relative masses and composition, their moons, their orbits, and their charming idiosyncrasies.  Neptune’s magnetic field is tilted 59 degrees from its orbital axis!  The temperature on Mercury can reach 700 degrees Kelvin!  I was undeterred by the fact that not everyone seemed to find such tidbits riveting.  

At about the same time, I discovered science fiction.  Sarah stared in scorn at R is for Rocket and S is for Space as she checked out hefty volumes set in Civil War America or Victorian England.  I stopped trying to convince her to read my selections, but I didn’t stop bringing them home.  No one had introduced me to just-add-water- tattoos back then, but if they’d been available, I would probably have wanted to cover my whole body with rockets, robots, and amphibious-looking aliens.  I did the next best thing, and stuck glow-in-the-dark stars and planets to my bedroom ceiling.  

 

Voyagers 1 and 2 reached Jupiter when I was six, and Saturn when I was eight.  The known number of moons for each planet leaped dramatically, and Jupiter’s red spot was revealed to be a swirling storm vastly larger than Earth itself.  The fact that all this showed up on the news helped validate it as grown-up and important, even if my big sister rolled her eyes.  And then, in the fall of 1980, Cosmos hit PBS.  For thirteen glorious weeks, Carl Sagan enraptured me with his billions of stars. If the rings of Saturn were cool, then pulsars, nebulae, quasars, and black holes were mind-blowing.  

The real and the unreal sparked a Technicolor hodgepodge in my impressionable young mind.  I caught up on Star Wars and ET, with a little Trek thrown in.  Dad, my occasional astronomical accomplice, whisked me off to catch 2010.  By that far-distant year, I figured I would be pretty old – certainly old enough to travel to Jupiter and fend off robots with personality disorders.  “Open the pod bay doors, Hal…”  

By junior high, I had discovered Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, LeGuin, and other classics.  I dove into the related and sometimes overlapping fantasy genre, too.  Sentient plasma-beings?  Hobbits?  Bring them on!  Trashy sci-fi pulp and Tolkein knock-offs?  Why not?  Given that the other selections on the Young Adult shelves mostly seemed to be about teenagers who were either fashion-obsessed or drug-addicted, I was more than happy to remain in orbit. Science fiction allowed me to believe in entire galaxies in which acne did not exist and alien intelligences surpassed any I saw evidenced in the bowels of middle school.   I was the only girl in the Dungeons and Dragons club at the library, but the surplus of Y chromosomes didn’t stop me from attending.  There was lots of scope for the imagination.  Also, there were free Doritos.

But even as I imagined myself heroically patrolling the skies of Pern astride a golden telepathic dragon, I was even hungrier for truth.  Even the most rudimentary astrophysics granted me a view of reality that turned math and science into an orchestral crescendo of awe. I was both excited and saddened by the vastness of it all.  Sunlight reaching us from the edges of the cosmos, after millions of years of travel, was awe-inspiring.  But was the universe really beyond the scope of our oh-so-limited human reach and lifespans?  Could we really never travel faster than light?  Did our own clammy mass bind us to this time, this place?  I looked for loopholes, and made a valiant but incoherent attempt at a seventh grade Science Fair report about the Theory of Relativity.  I dreamed galactic dreams as I hit puberty.  The former was a lot more fun than the latter.

When I was in high school, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was published.  I was thrilled to receive a copy for Christmas.  Dad grinned.  “I told the guy at Book Review my daughter would like it,” he said.  “He tried to persuade me not to buy it for you.”  Well, how was the clerk to know that I was Sweet Sixteen and nerdy as all get-out?  I read it once quickly, and again, slowly.  

By college, I gained a small number of additional social skills.  I still chose Astronomy as an elective, and enjoyed the occasional literary wizard or troll, but I spent less time completely out of range of Ground Control.  Yes, there was the infamous Star Wars Trilogy in Puppets senior year, but that was more about hanging out with friends, grunting like a Wookie, and wearing the Millenium Falcon on my head than about pondering the space-time continuum.   

In the years that followed, my addiction to outer space became tempered to the level of occasional escapism.  Still, I was never entirely able to kick the habit.  On dark winter nights on the outskirts of Fairbanks, it’s easy to stare up at the Milky Way smeared across the sky until the unfathomable scale of it blurs my brain… or my blood begins to congeal in the -40 temperatures.

Star-gazing and aurora-watching are perfectly acceptable activities, of course.  But really, shouldn’t I have abandoned that little flicker of hope that one day SETI will sift a pattern – a glittering gem of radio waves – from the dissonance?  Shouldn’t I realize by now that space research is just a bunch of dry, dusty physics, not something set to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra?  It’s 2012 now -- two years past the date by which I should have been able to travel to Jupiter.  Time still refuses to warp, I’m still blind in one eye, and Greyhound’s routes still don’t include Luna.  Even if I still take an academic interest in sub-atomic particles and solar spectra, shouldn’t I be beyond the stage of self-decorating with multicolored UFOs?  

A few days after last weekend’s wedding, I saw that the spaceship tattoo was disappearing from my arm.   Well, that’s good, I told myself.  Of course.  I mean, I should have scraped if off immediately.  Shouldn’t I? 

But just as my flying saucer was fading, a friend – a young-enough-to-be-my-kid friend, which is something everyone needs -- shared a quote.  It was a passage from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. “Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us…”  I was instantly swept back to 1980, and the heart-leaping splendor of Cosmos.  

It’s not childish.  And it’s not unimportant.  Thirty-two years ago, I would have chosen the same spaceship tattoo – which is a lot more than can be said for a lot of people with real tattoos.  And if something is that much a part of who I am, then I’m not going to let go of it -- not the stories, not the dreams, not the astonishing scientific truths pulled from a boggling array of possibilities.  

Yes, space travel is expensive, and complicated, and limited to a tiny scope of what is out there.  No, we aren’t going to discover sentient beings on the dry red soil of our neighbor-planet.  True, there are problems enough on our own world, and we need to invest time, money, and human ingenuity in solving them.  But that doesn’t mean we should forget who and what we are, here on our little blue dot.  “Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe…”

Tonight I’ll take a Brillo pad to what remains of my UFO, even as I scrub the horse off Lizzy and the dolphin off Molly.  Then I’ll pack up the lunch boxes, feed the dogs, check my email.  And after that?  Well, maybe I’ll pull a couple of old paperbacks off the shelves – something by Bradbury or Clarke.  I never did take those to Gulliver’s as trade-ins.  And maybe then I’ll check the news for the latest images from Mars. 

Google image search: Curiosity

Humans made Curiosity.  Curiosity makes us human.

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

-- Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996)

Happily Ever After

Photo credit: Pandora Young

“No pictures!” Lizzy admonished, with all the authority of her 39-pound self.  “We are going to do our dance now.  But no pictures!”  

Then, fueled by more marshmallows that I cared to admit or even contemplate, she leapt onto the picnic table with her sister and their new friend A.J., ready to boogie for the crowd.

My view of reality did a few backflips.  This was my shy kid, my Velcroed-to-Mama kid?    

What is cognitive dissonance?  That would have been a good question for Game Night, I mused – a whole three days ago, back when the monitors were flashing impressively, and my daughter was using me as a security blanket. 

“The two types of io…” read the MC.

Six hands slammed on their buzzers before he could finish the question -- or the question-phrased-as-an-answer -- or the answer-phrased-as-a-question -- or whatever it was supposed to be.  It didn’t really matter, because in this game of pseudo-Jeopardy the rules were loose, the tech guy kept forgetting to hit “reset”, and several of the contestants were holding a beer in one hand.

Even I know that one, I thought. 

Lizzy nestled herself even more comfortably in my lap, and took a large bite of chocolate-covered strawberry.  She seemed content as a koala, but she was here at Jeopardy only because she’d snivelingly flunked out of babysitting, leaving me as the one encumbered adult in a room full of revelers. 

Even as I laughed along with the MC’s inability to pronounce Manish’s name and cheered Stefan’s dead-panning (“Do you want that in English or Elven?”) I felt fretful.  I’d so much wanted this to be just like the days when we played Trivial Pursuit in Cabot House, when Steve reliably knew the capitol of Djibouti or the third-largest river in South America, and I reliably failed to know who won Best Supporting Actress or anything at all about football.  I needed to believe that we were all the same people we were in 1994. 

Awash in bonhomie and jocularity, I was suffering from Reunion Anxiety -- not the kind that makes people get facelifts, hair implants, and Supportive Undergarments, but, the kind that questions whether we’ve all changed – whether I’ve changed -- in ways that can’t be assuaged with poor lighting.  Nostalgia twanged at my heartstrings.  I wanted to leap towards the nearest podium and buzz my way to personal humiliation.  But reality was weighing me down. Literally.

“What are ‘anion’ and ‘cation’?” said the first lucky responder – that is to say, questioner -- with the self-effacing tone of someone who knows that of course everyone else knows their ions, too.

And everyone did -- except the M.C., perhaps.  He wasn’t exactly trying to hide his incredulous amusement at the remarkably high geek-factor of this crowd.  I wondered what kind of events he normally hosted.  Bar Mitzvahs? Corporate bonding experiences?  Probably not parties chock full of 30- and 40-somethings who’d spent their long-ago university years playing esoteric card games, dreaming up high-tech pranks, discussing Life the Universe and Everything, wallowing in idealism, and attending many actual lectures.  We were a nerdy reunion -- even by Harvard and MIT standards. 

Then again, this wasn’t actually a reunion at all.  The two Cambridge Universities would never host a joint reunion – the horror!  No, I was at a wedding. 

Or, I should say, a quarter of a wedding.  Craig (my college buddy) and Mary (his fabulous bride) only got married once (there are laws about this sort of thing), but they divided the ceremony and the celebrations into four parts, and spread everything over four weeks.  The goal was to share the fun with family and friends from all the segments and chapters of their lives, while never having an overwhelming horde of people, and leaving plenty of time for kite-flying, Hoola-Hooping, and jigsaw puzzles.

It was a fantastic idea.  Weddings are always joyful, of course.  But the ebullience is usually at risk of being tarnished by a host of awkward factors: bridesmaids’ dresses with vast pink taffeta bows, bawling mothers-of-the bride, flower girls with temporary amnesia, yawn-tastic sermons touting a religion to which you don’t belong, pants-wetting ring-bearers, embarrassing great-aunts, and drunken toasts from that one guy who is bitterly divorced.  There is also, at the average wedding, no time for any of the guests to go whale-watching with the bride and groom, or to make s’mores with them.

I’d started hunting down airline deals and researching the locale the moment the invitation arrived.  This sounded awesome!  Recommend wedding garb included shoes that could be worn on a beach and whatever dress I could find in my limited wardrobe.  Child-flower-bearing would be gender neutral, universally available, and strictly optional. Readings were selected by the participants.  Not only would there be all kinds of fun with old friends, but Monterey boasted miles of bike paths along incredible coastline studded with posing seals and sea-lions, an astonishing aquarium, a children’s museum, and one of the coolest playgrounds ever.  It would be perfect!

Well… almost perfect. 

At the front of the room, there was another race for the buzzer.  Miraculously, no drinks were spilled in the process. 

I didn’t have a drink.  I had a kid.

I should have anticipated this, I thought.  I did know my child, after all – just as well as I knew her twin sister, who was still happily hanging out with the other knee-high people, enjoying a million craft projects, snacks, and games in the Marlin Room.  I could easily have predicted that Lizzy might have trouble finding her groove at this whirlwind week of fun, fun, fun.  I should have known that I’d have to skip Movie Night – at which she whimpered and cringed at the sight of the Shrieking Eels, and lost it completely at the ROUSs.  But I so much wanted to shout “Inconceivable!” at the screen, just like I did back when I was even younger than Buttercup.

At least we made it through Game Night without having to bail entirely.  The MC mocked the six blank stares he faced when the only category left was “Muscle Cars,” but for the most part the participants were stellar.  Colleen evidenced the same skills that allowed her to rescue my poor performance with Times Sunday crosswords two decades ago.  Because I’ve managed to see her semi-regularly -- despite my inconvenient decision to move to the middle of Alaska 13 years ago -- she already knows all the failings of my offspring and the peculiarities of my lifestyle (“Yes, I live in the woods in a cabin without plumbing, but I swear I have not created my own religion, written a manifesto, or started hoarding trinitrotoluene”). Already, she’d tolerated Molly’s card-sharking with the Sleeping Queens deck; meals with people who tend to ignore their cutlery; and a jog that involved chasing two wobbly kids on rented bikes a size too large for them.  And now, she proved willing to donate her Jeopardy winnings – a plush cheetah and a Muppety chicken – to my six-year-olds.  That bought a lot of juvenile happiness, but I still had things to worry about – such as the next evening, which was the Real Wedding. 

“It will be boring,” Lizzy told me, immediately after informing me that she was not going to be a flower girl.  “Weddings are always boring.”

“Not this wedding,” I told her, hoping I was right.

And… I was. 

As it turned out, Craig really was still Craig, and Mary really was exactly the sort of like-minded person who would appreciate readings from Frog and Toad and The Dot and the Line, and write vows inspired by Dr. Seuss.  At the reception, all of Craig’s college roommates performed a highly melodic tribute.  We sang happy birthday to Ezra who was turning nine that day.  We were also challenged to find the highest-scoring word with the place-tags at our tables – which were composed of Scrabble tiles.

In retrospect, that may have been when Lizzy turned a corner.  Despite my own table’s valiant effort with YELLOWJACKET, the contest was won by the JAZZY table, at which no one was older than the birthday boy.  He and ELIZABETH were instrumental in that victory.

When the dancing started, somebody produced a box of wigs, feather boas, and inflatable saxophones.  The groom looked fine with a grass skirt over his wedding duds, and the bride was smiling and whirling and looking radiant in a gorgeously not-white and not-poofy dress, with a couple of little kids hanging off her arms.  My shy child started to realize that these strangers really weren’t strangers any more.  And she danced.

We still had three days left.  As they flew by, Lizzy gradually relaxed – and so did I.  I was reconnecting with some of my favorite people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in way, way too long.  I was meeting a bunch of new folks, and – no surprise – Mary’s friends were fabulous.  So were their kids.  On Sunday we were wowed by jellyfish, sardines, and some educationally exhibitionist penguins at the aquarium.  On Monday we hit the high seas.

And hit them we did.  Over and over, in a rolling, lurching pattern that, over the course of four hours, turned almost all the faces on our little whale-watching vessel interesting shades of green.  Molly, for once unable to fulfill her duties as social butterfly, at least had the good graces to have good aim into the bucket.  I held her in my arms as she drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep.  Then I looked around for my other small charge, the one who usually never left my elbow. 

There she was at the rail, standing with a practiced-looking wide stance.  She spotted whales. She spotted seabirds, dolphins, walruses and seals. She even spotted a cardboard box that our captain fished out for proper disposal.  Catching my eye, she yelled to me over the sound of the engine.  “Mama, I’m hungry!” 

I staggered into the tiny cabin, where the bagged lunches stood in a forlorn huddle, untouched.  I retrieved a snack.  My kid stood munching and gazing seaward, happy as a miniature pirate.

It was that same evening when Lizzy took center stage on the picnic tables. Fueled by s’mores, the ultimate childhood ambrosia, she had found her groove.

And me?  Well, it was then, as I toasted my own marshmallow to golden perfection alongside Mary (whose years leading camp kids have made her a true artist in this endeavor) that I realized that my groove had been just fine all along.  I didn’t need to project my own uncertainties onto my hapless kids.  I also didn’t need to worry, because my friends hadn’t changed – not in the ways that matter.  And neither had I.  True, we were all having such a great time that we sometimes forgot that Craig and Mary were the King and Queen of this event.  But our hosts had planned it this way.  They didn’t want to be King and Queen, they wanted to be themselves.  They wanted to actually spend time – quality time! – with the people they cared about.  It was – just as I had hoped – perfect.

“And now,” shouted Lizzy, “We will dance!”

Mazel tov.

Chameleon

photo credit: Heike Merkel

“I tightened your brakes,” said Adam.

I took me a moment to register that the mechanic was trying to give back my bike, because I was focused on cramming greasy, blackened chunks of grilled cheese sandwich into my mouth, while at the same time crouching down to rummage through my drop-bag for my supply of frosted Pop-Tarts. 

Besides, I was distracted by the lyrics of Karma Chameleon, which had been bopping around my head ever since I’d overheard a few strains at the previous checkpoint.

Every day is like survival… 

That might not be true of every day, but sixty-five miles into a hundred-mile trail-race that included roughly sixteen thousand feet of elevation gain (and loss), it seemed somewhat apropos.

“Umph…”  I swallowed, and tried again.  “Thanks so much!”

Adam was looking at me as if he thought I might injure myself, or the bike, or both – even while not riding it.  “You had nothing left.  The rear brake…”  He shook his head. 

Well…yeah.  I was sure he had no idea how hard I’d been riding those brakes.  Why would he?  Any half-way-competent mountain biker can pick a line through roots, ruts, bogs, puddles, and rocks without getting all white-knuckled about it. 

I, however, was not a half-way-competent mountain biker.

In fact, I wasn’t any sort of mountain biker.  I was a bike-commuter and kid-trailer-hauler.  My trail-riding experience was almost entirely limited to an occasional shortcut through the UAF campus.  I showed up for the Sluicebox 100 with no rear shocks, no padded bike shorts, no Camelbak, and no clue. 

…How to sell a contradiction… Karma karma karma chameleon…

If anything was a contradiction, it was me.  I’d known, when I registered for the race, that I wouldn’t have time to train properly.  So, why on earth had I signed up for this madness?

There was a short answer: because I like crazy challenges, even though I can never adequately prepare for them.  I’ve muddled my way through the Sourdough triathlon, the Susitna 100, and the White Mountains 100 despite a lamentable inability to swim, bike, run, or ski with finesse, grace, or speed. 

There was also, I suspected, a longer answer – but I hadn’t quite worked out yet what it was. All I knew was that I’d started this event with my usual handful of goals: don’t embarrass myself, don’t hurt myself, have some fun, play well with others… and finish the darned thing.

I grabbed another chunk of grilled cheese.  Seeing me do so, Andrea grinned and did the same. 

Andrea was my best friend.  That is to say, she was someone whom I’d never seen or heard of, ten hours previously – until we discovered the happy coincidence of our similar pacing.  Due to her willingness to tolerate my intermittent prattling, Andrea now knew all about my six-year-old twins, my research at UAF, and my pathetic lack of knowledge of the trails that we were navigating.   I, in turn, knew that she was a nurse (handy if I pitched over the handlebars); that she had a twin sister in Boise (I picked her brain for twin-raising wisdom); that the following day was her birthday; and that she’d covered much of the course in the past couple of months, with her boyfriend Ben, as well as Jay and many others – during the Thursday night rides that I’d so completely failed to attend.  On Thursday nights, I either stayed home with the kids, or attended meetings of my writers’ group while Jay did the childcare.  Neither activity did much to improve my mountain biking skills.

The margarine-saturated charred white bread and the cold, congealed cheese were like ambrosia.  I washed the sandwich down with a lemon-lime-mud-flavored swig from one of my water bottles.  Someone immediately rushed to refill it for me. 

Last year, I was that bottle-filling someone.  Last year, the kids and I spent seven hours at this checkpoint – and there wasn’t even a race going on.  The event was merely the test-ride (and test-run) of the course.  Even though the day was bone-chilling, torrential, and involved neck-deep mud, Jay’s excitement was ebullient.  Contagious.  Jealousy-inducing.  

Was that why I’d signed up?  Was I competing with my husband?  No, that was preposterous.  Jay actually knew how to mountain bike, and had done a lot of it in recent weeks, months, and years.  I figured he was probably hours ahead of me.  Almost done.  I thought slightly wistfully of my coworker Amy and her husband Cody, somewhere slightly ahead of me, biking this thing together. 

Meanwhile, I’d already flubbed the first of my goals: don’t embarrass myself.  A mere dozen miles into the race, Andrea and I had gotten lost at the Ester Dome single-track.  The single-track, for heaven’s sake!  One of the few trails I actually had done before – because on our tenth anniversary, Jay and I hired a twelve-year-old to watch the twins.  Nevertheless, Andrea and I clocked an extra thirty or forty minutes, and several unnecessary miles on our quads. There was no reasonable excuse for my idiocy, I thought -- because, yes, my own husband had flagged that part of the course and loaded the GPS for me.

I glanced at Andrea again.  Ben – whose own relay team had fallen through at the last minute – was seeing her off.   Time to get moving. Despite everything, I couldn’t help feeling a surge of optimism.  Ester Dome and Murphy Dome were behind me.  I hadn’t yet developed any bog-related foot ailments, even though my first drop bag – the dry-shoes one – had failed to show up at the far side of the Sheep Creek Slosh-and-Slog.  I was not yet begging anyone for Vaseline, despite the disapproval that Heike (cheerer extraordinaire of Checkpoint 2) had expressed about my unpadded posterior.  I wasn’t yet nauseous, either, notwithstanding my iffy culinary choices.  Thirty-five more miles. How bad could it be?

That is inevitably the sort of question not to ask oneself before spending eternity hauling a bicycle uphill through a mosquito-infested swamp.  How can a swamp also be a mountain?  In Fairbanks, it just can.

Moss and mud sucked at my ankles.  I was a picture of inelegance shoving my bike over logs… over tussocks… across O’Connor Creek… and then across the same creek again. Or was it a different one?  What was this trail, if not fickle, a chameleon?  You come and go… you come and go… You string along… you string along… Despite repeatedly sacrificing speed for sanity by stopping to douse myself – and Andrea – with bug spray, the whining little creatures persisted in feasting on my ankles, my neck, and my shoulders.  Perhaps this was because I sweated off the Picaridin in about ten minutes.  Wasn’t the weather supposed to cool down in the evening? 

What time was it, anyhow?  I looked at my watch.  Two hours had gone by.  It was with something akin to despair that Andrea and I finally made it to the next unmanned water station.  A small sign mutely rebuked us: Mile 72.  We’d covered only seven miles since the Ken Kunkel aid station.

“Is the next section easier?” I asked my savvy guide, trying not to sound as if I were pleading.

Andrea hesitated.  “Well… we ride along the pipeline…”

That sounded promising.  A gravel trail! 

“But…” Andrea hesitated, then broke it to me gently.

Down I went.  Over-using those brakes again.  And then, after staring at the impending Wall of Doom throughout my descent, I met an oh-so-helpful little sign: “Steep grade – use low gear.”  My bike doesn’t have a gear that low.  But, up I went.  Trudging. And sweating.

It didn’t help that through this entire section, we were being followed by a stray dog.  Miles from civilization, she trotted along happily, round little torso swaying, short legs pumping, ears perked.  She looked less athletic than the average guinea pig – but she beat me up the pipeline trail without losing the spring in her step.  I swear she was smiling at me condescendingly at the top.

Either that, or I was just getting a little loopy.  Several miles later, when the gloriously ridable trail that we were enjoying took a sudden left turn into the woods and tilted upwards like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, I found myself more amused than depressed.  “Well, no one rode this,” I said.  Not Jay.  Not even Heather, or Tyson, or Kevin.  So, Pedro Dome was sort of an equalizer, right?  An equalizer with more sweat pouring off my shoulders, and more mosquitoes flocking to my sticky, damp, carbon-dioxide-panting self.  Too bad the other side of the dome was a sadistic rumble-o-rama.  This is not even a trail I told myself.  It’s not!  But Andrea was still refraining from using even a single expletive, so I wobbled onward.

When we finally made it to Skiland, just ten miles from the finish line, it was after eleven and the sky was rosy.  Nothing seemed unexpected any more. When my family doctor plied me with brownies, I said, “Hi Corrine!” and took one, before remembering to ask how her husband Eric was faring. 

He was better now that he’d gotten some extra salt into him, she reported.  Then she sighed, and lamented not having signed up for the event herself.  I nodded.  I knew that feeling – and I’d seen the same look on Ben’s face, at every checkpoint.  “Next year,” I told them both.

Onwards.  Midnight sun.  It was gorgeous, in a losing-all-depth-perception kind of way.  Actually, given my monocularity, I never really have any depth perception -- but things get even more squirrelly in dim, flat light.  Nevertheless, I could still read my watch, and it said twelve.  Thus, I immediately started singing.

No, I didn’t sing Karma Chameleon.  I sang happy birthday to Andrea, of course.  It seemed perfectly normal at the time.

I lost ten minutes in the very last stretch of the race when my rear rack began slamming around like a demented percussionist.  It took me a while to figure out that I’d somehow blown a bolt.  It took me longer to find a single precious zip-tie in my little bag of gear, to thread it through the bolt-holes, and get everything ship-shape again.  But after more than 17 hours, what’s an extra few minutes?  I still managed to finish before one o’clock, with most --  if not all – of my original goals intact.  I was unhurt (assuming bruises and scratches don’t count), I was having fun, and I got pizza and camaraderie at the finish line.  It felt like a party.  It was a party.  Ben was congratulating Andrea.  Corrine was congratulating Eric.  Cody and Amy were congratulating each other. 

Jay had gone home hours ago, of course, to relieve the baby-sitter.  I figured he was already snoring.  I checked his finish time.  He’d done well. 

I gratefully accepted a ride home from Corrine and Eric.  Corrine expected, quite reasonably, that the racers would sack out during the drive.  But instead, we relived every rut and hummock, every joy and misery of this chameleon of a race.  We were much too jazzed for sleep. 

So, it seemed, was Jay.  When I finally got home, much to my surprise I found him still wide awake.  It seemed that he wanted to share all the details with me just as much as I wanted to share them with him.  He didn’t even torment me about my detour on the single-track. 

Every day is like survival…I’m your lover, not your rival…

“I told Jeff that you were doing amazingly well for someone with maybe 30 miles of mountain biking experience,” my husband enthused.  Jeff, a super-human biker himself, was out there supporting his super-human wife Heather.

“What did Jeff say?” I asked, feeling a little foolish, but at the same time silly-happy at the back-handed compliment.

Jay grinned.  “He kind of shrugged, and said, ‘Well, she has more experience now.’”

How to sell a contradiction… Karma karma karma chameleon.

I laughed.  Partly because I was so tired that everything was funny -- but also because I was just plain happy.  Jay was proud of me.  I was proud of him.  We hadn’t raced the same kind of race, but so what?  We were still a team.  Rivalry and solidarity, I realized, are not polar opposites.  In fact, they can be a heady blend.  I finally understood that although I’m never competing against Jay, and rarely competing alongside Jay, I’m definitely competing with Jay.  And if that’s what helps draw me into insane events like the Sluicebox – well, that’s not a bad thing.  Not a bad thing at all.

Next year, I’ll be out there again. I’ll still be hours behind the “real” competitors, including my husband.  I’ll still be riding the brakes.  But – maybe I won’t be riding them quite so hard.