Ordinary Canary

My big Irishman and meself have been talking about how to get more exercise, since neither of us are doing much of it lately. So last Sunday, after he got back from Dublin, we went to the local indoor/outdoor pool complex.

Let it be known: I am no Michael Phelps.

In fact, I can barely swim at all beyond the backstroke and don’t expect me to get there too fast, either. But, I live in an ocean town and spend a lot of time at the beach and on a boat, so it seems to me like this is something I should probably remedy. My big Irishman is a great swimmer, so he set about giving me a lesson in all swimming methods ever created by humans.

I stopped him and tried to focus on the breaststroke, given that it doesn’t make me address my phobia of having my head under water. I still get water up my nose a rather embarrassing amount of the time (i.e, 96%). After some pointers, I swam a few laps. By which I mean I swam until I thought I was going to drown, which was most of the length of the pool, stood up, rested and then swam again.

My future as a lifeguard heavily in doubt.

Still, even though two days later I am more sore in the arms than I’ve been in years, we have a date to go back on Monday and try it again. And maybe this time I’ll manage to swim more than four laps without totally killing my body.

Last night, my big Irishman called me from Dublin, where he has been for the last week.

me: What were you up to today?

him: Well, I went to the store and bought some maggots so I…

me: Stop right there. You bought maggots?

him: Well, it’s for the trout, see, I was going to the river…

me: Honey, I could make you some maggots. You don’t have to buy them. Really. All it takes is some trash and some flies…

him: Oh, well! So I was going down to the river…

me: You can stop right there. Nothing you could possibly say after that is as interesting as “I went to the store and bought some maggots.”

Last night’s dinner:

1 bag frozen raspberries
1 cup milk
buncha ice
1 blender

Mix, stir, enjoy.

Seeing Ani DiFranco was probably one of the best nights of my life. And who opened? Kimya Dawson. Awesomeness.

We had the absolute worst seats in the house, so some wonderful woman from a radio show came up to use and gave us front row tickets.

Yes, that’s right. I was about 15′ from Ani DiFranco. Given the fact that she’s just about the only role model and hero that I have in this world, it was a pretty incredible experience. I cried with happiness halfway through the set and continued to wipe my eyes after the show for quite some time.

I don’t even have words to express the awesome power (and I do mean that in the awe-some sense) that that performance had on me. Some people go to church or out into nature to feel this way - for me there was a profoundly spiritual element. There are so few strong women role models out there - and I just love Ani for her humanism, her feminism and her refusal to separate herself from the world, even though she is deeply critical of it. She speaks out and doesn’t let anything stop her, which is something that we should really all do more of. I wish I were more like her. I find that I’m becoming more like her as I age, less willing to play along and keep quiet when things are very screwed up. I’ve been listening to a lot of her music that I haven’t played in a long time and I find it has new meanings with my more brazen personality. There’s not a line in her oevre that doesn’t resonate strongly with me in some way or some memory.

And I just love that she came out in boots, jeans and a sleeveless shirt. No make-up. How many female performers do that?

To the strong women role models — thank you for sharing your power with me.

Dad: I’m just older, sneakier and more experienced.

Me: that translates into “jerk” somehow, doesn’t it?

Dad: Nope.

Me: your turn, fink

I watched Devil With a Blue Dress On last night, having determined that the purpose of cable TV and a DVR is recording movies that I never got to see. The movie begins with the narrator discussing how important owning his own home is, especially with the context of his being an African-American man in the 1950s. It’s such a rare thing for a black man to own his home that it comes up again and again in the movie as to what it means to him.

I so hear you, brother. Being a single woman house-owner in 2008 has some distinct similarities in rarity.

I got to thinking about what owning my own home means to me, about why it’s so important. I’ve been sleeping underneath my own roof for about two months now. It’s such a change from the renting mentality - there’s a sense of permanence that I’ve never had before in my life. No matter what problems come up, I’m going to have to deal with them, because this is my house. That’s my siding, my doorknob, my window. My problems, but also my freedom.

But I think the part that I appreciate the most is that I’m so much more in touch with nature than I ever have been. I spend part of every day puttering around the backyard or the front garden, watching my cats nibble on grass and chase moths. When it rains, it affects my dinner plans, since I grill almost every night. I pay attention to when to plant things now and have filled my front and back stoops with plants on each step. It’s a rare week where I don’t at least get sand on my feet and feel the ocean around me. And the end result is that I’m so much calmer than ever before. That connection with nature was very much missing.

I love it. And the mortgage might be frightening sometimes, but at least it’s mine - and every payment makes it a little bit more so.

Energy has been a bit of a struggle lately. Unfortunately, it’s mid-July, which means it’s high sinus season. Fighting off sinus headaches and praying for rain to come and alleviate the problem takes an awful lot of energy.

This morning I was woken up by the pain in my head, which my sleep groggy self initially thought was a really mean punishment for having only had one beer the night before. Then I realized what was really going on, shoved clothes on my dirty body and stumbled to the 24 hour CVS across the street to find medication to do something before it turned into a migraine. Naturally, naturally, I was right in line behind the fellow who had to raise a stink over his receipt, how he was treated and absolutely everything else that’s wrong in the universe, which nearly led to the end of his suffering. Fortunately for him, my head hurt too much to move fast.

Twenty minutes and a Tylenol sinus later, I could face the world, which was good, as my cable company was set to come out to replace my cable box. It hasn’t been working, but I hadn’t hooked it up in two months or so, so have no idea when it actually broke. I tried to watch a little bit of TV, but realized that my cable company doesn’t carry BBC America, so may end up cancelling it after all. So much of what I did see available was completely uninteresting to me, though I do like having something to knit to.

Frustrated with the world, I wandered over to my local garden center, which was having a 40% off sale. I spent the rest of the day arm deep in dirt, but am very satisfied to have planted oregano, sage, cherry tomatoes, mint, chamomile, basil, rosemary and a bunch of flowers. I now have plants set up on each step of my front and back stoop and the effect is lovely.

Grilled myself some salmon on the grill in the backyard tonight with just a bit of “poultry seasoning’ rubbed into it and was very pleased with how it came out. I tried not to mope too much about the fact that I grilled two and my big Irishman is in Dublin for the next two weeks, so the other one goes to leftovers. He did give me a ring, but the international rates are pretty expensive, so we couldn’t talk long. My hands still smell like fish.

Some days it feels like I live in Disneyland. Last weekend was a non-stop party - first, an actual party that I threw for my friend Maya’s birthday. I spent the better part of the day cooking ridiculous amounts of food, which reminded me how much better my cooking is than the lunches I buy at the restaurants near work. I made tilapia pockets, which absolutely stole the show from the deviled eggs, chicken and shrimp skewers, roasted pork, mango/avocado/raspberry salad and cake. We’ll be repeating them soon, since they were really easy to make. It’s just amazing how much easier it is to cook on a grill.

So when we woke up the next day, since I finally have enough space to sleep everyone at the house, we went and grabbed brunch at a cafe near here where I’m afraid to admit, I was just hung over enough that I could even manage to enjoy the New York version of home fries. They seem to think home fries are actually scalloped potatoes, which you then fry to the point of burning. We Suthuners know better, of course. We were going to head to the beach, but my big Irishman called me just then to see if we wanted to go out on his boat. We met him on the marina and he sped us around the channel, much to the delight of my friends.

And then he threw bait on the lovely Maya to make her scream, which didn’t work, and put a sea robin in my face and called my name to make me turn around, which did result in a scream. Also, in a quick hop that could have put me overboard and an attempt to actually strangle him.

This can only be a good sign for the future of our relationship. Who knew sea robins could sing?

Next weekend is the pride parade, which we will be going to. I cannot wait!

My mother died six months and two days ago. She’s been on my mind a lot, obviously, because round numbers are the sort of thing that stick out.

Whenever the 9th rolls around, I find myself thinking back to those awful days in the hospital. Watching her breathe through the respirator, the colonoscopy bag, her swollen limbs blistering and changing color as I listened to the awful suck-in/suck-out of the machines that were keeping her alive. Almost fainting when I spoke to the first doctor, when I realized that I would not be going home in a day or two, because she was sicker than anyone I’d ever known before. Feeling the responsibility settle in because I was the only one around to make decisions.

The room had a smell to it, half Lysol and half sweetness from her illness, the kind of smell that lingers in your nostrils long after you’ve left the room. I remember staring at the toilet in the room when I first got there and sat on the chair waiting for the nurse. “Your awesome daughter is here,” I wrote on the white board in a red Dry Erase marker, “and I love you.”

Not that I spent a lot of time in the room, because seeing her bloated form was very difficult. She didn’t look at all like my mom, who was a vivacious and often frustratingly silly woman. My mom was petite and curvy. The sick body on the bed was all of the opposite. Her body in the coffin looked nothing like her at all, because her body was so beat up by the illness. I never got to talk to her, never got to find out how she felt about what was happening to her. I didn’t hold her hand when she died, because I was scared to touch her, but I was there. I witnessed it, although I didn’t think that I could. I watched her turn blue, the thin lips that I’ve inherited changing color in a matter of seconds.

I really don’t know how I would have gotten through those days without the kindness of the people around me. Old family friends, her church, my “family” of friend in Virginia all flocked around me and provided support when I needed it. It was an awful time, but also an incredible time, and I have walked away knowing that I’m very loved, which is something that I’m not sure I really understood before she got sick.

I am such a different person now from who I was then - so much in my life has changed. I find myself longing for her, even though we were never as close as I wanted to be, and as time passes, her death just becomes more unreal. I know she’s dead, it’s deep in my consciousness, yet sometimes I nearly pick up my phone to call her. We had gotten into the habit of it in the months before she died, because I finally got over the grudge I had against her for never keeping my contact information. She was so organized in some ways and I had resented her for not loving me enough to keep my phone number around.

But as one gets older, the small hurts just go away - what matters is grabbing the people you care about and loving them unconditionally. No one is perfect, but one of the things that unites us all is that our time together is very short.

Yesterday I had some friends over for an all day long barbeque, which was the first time they’d seen the house. We sat in the backyard with one of my mom’s plastic tables and a new grill that I’d picked up from Home Depot on Friday. It’s not a big fancy deal, since I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the back yard, but it grilled up shrimp kabobs and buffalo burgers nicely. Also, it’s portable. And I didn’t burn the house down, despite this being my first time playing with fire.

My neighbor pointed out that there was mint growing in my front yard, so naturally we had to spend all day making mojitos.

This morning, aside from uttering, “why is the (1.75 L bottle of) rum gone?” a dozen times, I woke up in slightly less than my best form. I wasn’t too badly hung over, which is a miracle, but my big Irishman and I went off to breakfast at a diner, since the kitchen still had day-after syndrome. After a breakfast of greasy omelette and the New York version of home fries (which are somewhere between gawdawful and poisonous), I was feeling myself again.

So my big Irishman decided that the next logical step for his hungover girlfriend was to go for a spin on his boat, which is in a marina a few miles from my new house. He sat me up in the front of the boat for maximum “fun” and pushed the engine up to full throttle. Not being a very good swimmer, I had an initial terror as the (rather small) boat skipped over the waves, but once I made myself relax a bit, I realized that it was incredible fun. The boat rocked with every wave and we flew through the air, but it was a lovely sense of freedom. I was seeing the world in a way that not many people get to, on a very lovely spring morning. And, begrudgingly, the fresh air did make my head feel better.

I could really get used to the good life.