On the occasion of getting Mom for the weekend. Or, why you should move back to the Northwest.

Dear Dad,

Mom is on her way here to Portland right now, as I type this letter. She’ll be here, in fact, by dinner. Or long before dinner, actually, if I don’t get started on it soon.

I know it’s not your favorite thing when she’s away, that you get lonely bumming around the house with only Greta for company. I feel the same way when Will’s gone. Like you, I stay up far too late and get caught up in work when there’s no one there to remind me to stop and call it a night. Last week I reorganized the linen closet when Will had to pull a late night at work to keep myself busy. There may also have been some studying procrastination going in, my current read being the oh, so exciting Understanding MARC Bibliographic, but there was some keep busyness about it too. So I know.

But oh, I love it when she’s here. When either or both of you are here. It seems very strange but, the older I get, the more I want my parents near me. You know me. I did not really go through a rebellious phase, I never felt the desperate need to be far far away from my parents. Rather, I think I was independent, something you both taught me to be, and it was that which led me to roam further and further from home. I’m still independent. But at the same time, I need my mom (and dad, of course).

Perhaps, now that I really think about it, it’s less about need than about want. I want to be around my family. I want to sit on the couch and talk about things we heard on NPR or saw in the neighborhood or about that latest weird Swedish TV show you’ve got me watching. I want to drink innumerable cups of tea and eat too many cookies and stay up late talking, instead of working or studying. Because, while I’ll always be your little girl, I think we are growing toward each other, and instead of father or mother and child, we are friends. And isn’t that a lovely thought.

I wish you were here to enjoy the weekend (although not the weather since it’s typical Oregon spring rain and gloom outside right now) but since you aren’t, I know you’ll forgive me for being happy that she’s here, instead of there, if only for the weekend.






-Gillian

The Sledding Hill

So many of my childhood memories blur together in my head. Summer is one long camping trip where we fished in a river in Montana in the morning and got chased by water moccasins in a Texas lake after lunch and visited the Trail of Tears museum before dinner. I have a hard time separating out what happened when or even where. I see it in my children too. It's the reason that Briton will occasionally start a sentence with, "When we lived in Paris...." We didn't live in Paris, we visited Paris when we lived in Dublin. But to Briton, at 3, a week in a tiny apartment in Paris with his beloved Thomas trains covering the carpet was not very different from every day life in a tiny apartment in Ireland where, again, his trains took up all the available floor surface. Paris, Rome, Missouri, Dublin, Portland... it all kind of blurs together for him, the wheres and the whens.

Like summer, my childhood winters blurs together into one, long, Beverly Cleary-eque day. I don't remember feeling cold or wet from the northern Idaho snow. I don't remember my mittens growing soggy with caked ice or the exhahusting task of keeping the sidewalk of our corner lot shoveled, although now that I've lived in snow country as an adult, I can imagine it. I don't even remember feeling stir crazy with too many days indoors, waiting for spring. No. Winter was all about sledding, and did I ever sled.

My friend Molly lived at the top of the best sledding hill in town and since I spent my afternoons at her house until my parents were done with work, I had the advantage over almost every other kid at school. Apart from Molly and her many brothers and sisters and Hannah, who lived across the street and therefore also had a full time sledding wonderland just out her front door, I got the most sledding hours per day of any kid I knew. We would rush home from school, toss our homework onto the table, gulp down a bowl of ramen noodles from the steaming pot that seemed ever present on the stove at Molly's house and be back out the door before the prime spots were taken by the other kids.

We became experts in reading the iciness of the street, too fresh of snow and the runner sleds, though faster and more controllable, were abandoned for the thin plastic sheet sleds or if we could find one, a smooth bottomed toboggan. Both were alright, but the runner sleds were best. With two or three kids packed on, the pilot holding firmly to the rope with her feet wedged onto the steering bar, the rear position rider would give a good push and then jump on, arms wrapped tightly around the waist in front of them if they were lucky, or sprawled out on the snow as the sled careened downhill away from them if they were not. The road dropped sharply downhill for a block, evened out as it crossed another street and then dipped again until it leveled out finally another block down. More often than not, a run would go awry and dump you into the snowbacks somewhere along the first block. A good run would carry you across the first cross street and you'd crash somewhere in the second block. A great run, only achieved if you started dead center in the road, if your runners were sharp, your passengers well balanced and your aim true, ended in an Olympic ski run finish, slowing to a perfect stop in the flat of the second cross street, arms in the air in triumph. Those were rare and wonderful moments, but they could be achieved. And then, no matter where you ended, the long slog up the hill to start again. A lesser run made acceptable by the fact that you only had a short distance to go to be back at the top, a great run made easy by the lingering triumph of making it to the bottom without a crash. Up to the top, and down again, over and over until the afternoon light faded into darkness and the street emptied until the next day. An eternal winter's afternoon.

                                                       - Gillian

Happiness is a shelf full of color coded books

The fact that I didn’t know I wanted to be a Librarian until my mid (ok, late) thirties is a little mystifying. Aside from my lifelong obsession with books and libraries and the fact that I’ve been extraordinarily close to not one, not two, but three librarians in my life (none of whom were related to me), both of which could simply be symptoms of being a bibliophile, there were other clues. 

There was the whole, wanting to check my books out to my friends thing in Elementary school so I would know where there were, at all times, because I loved them (the books that it, I mean, I loved my friends obviously, but I didn’t need to know their every movement) – that idea, by the way, didn’t go down very well with my buddies, although I think they humored me for a while.  Also, there was that time when I got my first label maker and wanted to label and alphabetize everything in my house (Ah, all nice and organized).  There was also the naming of one of my children after a librarian in a movie - no, not the librarian from Ghostbusters, I wouldn’t do something that silly. (It was the one from the Mummy.)

And finally, there is my habit of color coding my books. Oh, I can already hear what you are going to say. “You do what?”  And you’re laughing, aren’t you? I know, it’s slightly crazy, but, BUT, it makes sense if you, like me, have the critical combination of owning shelves and shelves and shelves (and shelves) of books and having an odd form of photographic memory that allows me to remember what almost any book I own looks like (too bad that’s the only bit of photographic memory I have). So if, for example, your husband asks where the copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is, you can say, "black, with green writing. Small bookshelf upstairs." And you’d be bang on the money.

Yes I know that’s not how libraries are organized, but barring the institution of Dewey in my house – which would combine my love for organizing books and my love of labeling things, but would probably be over the top – it’s be best way to keep all my beloved books in order. Plus, and here’s the kicker, it makes me happy. Stupidly, ridiculously happy. Probably my favorite house we’ve owned was the one in Charlottesville, because it had one long wall of floor to ceiling bookshelves, all color coded. (Almost) All of my books, all in one place, all in order. Stupid happiness. And no matter where we have moved, my weird color coding of book has gone with us, along with the ridiculous sense of happiness it brings me every time I go hunt for a book, or even walk past my shelves.

Trust me, I’ve gotten a lot of crap for it over the years. Our house was once in a magazine and someone commented online on my “asinine” color coding and speculated that it was only done for the spread and that no one would actually organize their books that way. Before I could respond, I was surprised to find multiple commenters claiming they had the same method for shelving their books. So while I might be a little crazy, at least I’m crazy in a group. (a very organized group). Will poked fun of it for years until he fell prey to its usefulness and started remembering books by colors too. People chuckle when they come over for dinner and ask, eyebrow cocked, why I would bother. But, as with many things that are done simply for the pleasure of it, the answer is still just “Because I like it that way. Because it makes me happy.”  I mean hey, I don’t understand why people run, but I try not to judge.

Although really? Wouldn’t it be more fun to stay home and read?

Just kidding.

Do what you makes you happy. Even if it’s simple. Even if it’s crazy.

Huey Lewis and Whistle Pops

It’s raining buckets here in Portland. We lucked out with several unseasonably warm and dry weeks in January and now, as the weather gods are wont to do, we are being made to pay for it with that particular kinds of bone chilling rain that seems to define winter in the Northwest. And so, of course, I’ve been dreaming of summer.

It’s the rain’s fault, really. Although not in the way you might think. You see, normally, I ride my bike as much as possible. To work, to school, to the store. But after getting a thorough soaking yesterday on my way from work to the bus stop to pick up one of the kids, I decided all further transportation this rainy week would take place in the car. And in the middle of driving through this morning's onslaught, Huey Lewis and the News came tumbling out of the radio speakers and despite having to squint out the window to see, even with the wipers going full blast, it was summer.

A summer evening, to be exact.

I don’t have a lot of memories that are linked so firmly to music. Probably because I am the world's worst music identifier. The standing joke in our house is that any time I’m asked “Who sings this?” I answer “Hall and Oats.” Because, hey, it might be Hall and Oats. And if it’s not (well, even if it is) I don’t know.  But Huey, Huey Lewis I know.

I would have been about eight or nine, right about the age Evelyn is now. Old enough to come out on the boat with dad while mom stayed home with a toddling Garrett. Old enough to sit on the deck of our cabin cruiser, my skin prickling with that too much sunshine feeling that my children will probably never feel since now-a-days, parents have to be sunscreen Nazis (with good reason), and watch the wake from our boat turn from foamy waves into soft ripples as they splay out behind us on our way across the lake.

There are all sorts of associated memories that pop up in my mind when I remember those evenings. The sugar sweet strawberries and cream taste of a Whistle Pop suckers from the marina gas station. The thrill of fishing the cherry out of the Shirley Temple I would get if we made it across the lake to that bar, the one with what seemed like a zillion steps leading from the dock to the dining room. The smell of the water after a hot day, not fishy or stinky, but planty, and green. A great blue heron standing in the tall grasses along the shore, watching us, watching him. The scratchy feeling of an old beach towel, the game of watching for the "Sea Pig" to cross our path. All tied up with Huey Lewis crooning in the background.

I can’t remember what the boat looked like. I don’t recall what was inside the cabin or what color the hull was. But I remember how much I loved being there. Adding layers over my swimsuit as the sun set and the wind picked up on the water. Seeing the lights of town twinkling in the distance on our way home, starting out like a shimmery mirage and then growing larger and brighter and more familiar the closer we got. I remember Huey Lewis singing “Happy to be stuck with you” on the beat-up black radio and thinking, “Yep, me too.”

                                                                                                -Gillian

In School

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We call it “throwing a wrench in” around here. It doesn’t happen often, although often enough that we have a dedicated expression when it does. A game changer. A sudden shift in the plan. Sometimes even an about-face. It throws us into chaos for a while, and then it all settles down into a new normal. I have to remind myself of that, that soon it will be normal. Not the same normal as before, but normal. Right now, well, right now I have only just remembered that it is Thursday,  because where did the week go?

Next week I start a new job. In the midst of a full load of grad school classes, children at two different schools on two different schedules, an ever growing list of afterschool activities that require the kind of ferrying I swore I wouldn’t ever take part in and a part time graduate teaching practicum gig, I am taking over a much neglected library at  a K-8 school. It’s crazy. Utterly crazy. And yet, I can't wait to start.

Our family balance has always been centered on the fact that I am here. Here for sick days and vacation days, late starts, field trips, midday concerts, afterschool conferences. It was a decision we made long ago, and one that has worked well for the 12 plus years that we have been parents.  And while it was always the plan for me to go back to work, that was supposed to be later. After school, after the trial run of this practicum, when we had all (myself included, myself especially!) had time to adjust to the idea of mom being more than just mom.

But fate has a way of throwing that wrench in. And this chance was too perfect to pass up. A library. My library. My own library.  So it’s back to school I go. Twice over. As a student and as a librarian. I have an excellent cheering section. They all seem to think I can do this crazy thing. This full time plus half time plus another half time plus all the other things that need to get done in a day thing.  They will pick up slack, I will let things go, someone will forget and event or an activity or a paper that’s due (it will most likely be me) life will be crazy. And then, after a little while, it will be our new normal. Until the next wrench comes along, of course. 

                                                                                                                       ~Gillian

A Pause, A View

It’s not a place to stand and ponder, not in a house full of children and dogs and cats and the occasional tortoise winging up and down the stairs, always in a hurry to get somewhere else.

It’s more of a pause. A breath in and out. A moment to recharge. 

The window is at its best in early morning, when the sun is not quite up and the Portland sky has not yet decided what kind of day it will be. Sunny? Cloudy? Stormy? A little of each probably, but for this moment, it's still an unknown. The tall arborvitae that edge our yard block out the neighbors house in the sparse light, but a break between our trees and theirs allow a wedge of morning sky. Streaky clouds tumble toward the mountain, which you cannot see from our window but which my inner compass knows is just off to the right of our view. Little wisps of pink and purple drop through as the sun rises and our neighbor’s twinkle lights, always on, become fainter as the daylight expands to outshines them. It happens so fast, in the space of the few minutes that it takes me to begin the day.

Pause.

Down the stairs to put the kettle on, up again for a sweater to fight off the chill of a house not yet awake.

Pause.

Down to make the coffee, up again to get dressed.

Pause.

Down to wake the almost-teen, up to wake his sister.

Pause

Down to start breakfast and backpack checks and bus runs. 

From dark to light, night to day, punctuated by the trips up and down the stairs that it takes to get everyone up and fed and out the door for the day.

And then pause, once more, when the house has settled into the stillness of only me and the day ahead has settled into that mix of cloudy and sunny with a chance of rain that defines most of Portland’s days.

The time that John Steinbeck saved my bacon

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When people ask my why I no longer blog, I struggle to find an answer I’m willing to give. It’s a little like having someone ask how you are, when you are having a really crap time. Do you tell them that you’re on week three of a cold that won’t go away and your car window got broken in and everything that could go wrong lately has? Or do you shrug and say “oh, I’m fine, how are you?”  The second would be my answer. And so when I’m asked, I shrug and say “oh, I don’t have the time anymore.” Because that’s the easy answer. But the real answer is that I just…cant. I can’t write. I can’t even think about writing without a wave of panic rolling through my body. So I just…don’t.

But that’s not working either, for many reasons. So, if you will indulge me, I’m going to use this sad, neglected blog for a bit of a project, between my (far superior, as you’ll see) writer father and me, to try to push myself, however unwilling I may be, back into writing.

This was supposed to be an essay on writer’s block. But as I have writer’s block, I struggled to get much past the first sentence. Which was “I have writer’s block.”  After some really awful and painful drafts, I gave up and instead, I started reading, and I came across a list of advice famous authors have given on the subject. And much to my surprise, John Steinbeck saved me. I never really liked his books, which I know is sacrilege, and I doubt I ever would have looked to him for advice, but this story, about turning your writing into a letter, got me going.

And so…

Dear Dad,

I have writer’s block. Actually, I’m not sure that “block” is the right word for it. This is more along the lines of a giant wall of ice in my head, which paralyses me and takes my breath away and causes a constricting under my ribs, just to the right of my breastbone, every time I sit down and try to write anything beyond the things that I have to write. I know you understand what I mean when I tell you this affliction physically hurts. Not everyone would.

Because I can write. I’ve been writing papers for grad school and articles and letters and notes to teachers. But I can’t write. I can’t weave words together about a place or a time or a dream. I can write what I have to write, but I can’t write what I want to write. And it feels…hollow. I feel hollow. As if some very vital piece of my soul was left behind somewhere between Vermont and Oregon as we drove across the country to our new life here. As if I’ve had some traumatic injury that has caused me to forget an essential part of myself. Like the victim of a stroke who has to learn again the basics of walking.

I know very well that when I stop writing, I go a little mad. Small things that should not matter become heavy on my mind. Big things become overwhelming. And yet, I cannot make myself write. In fact, knowing that I cannot just sit down and write until my stress levels cease tossing and turning makes it worse. The stress builds on itself. The boat lists to this side and then to that. The waves come over the deck and lap at my toes. I tell myself I just need to jump in. Start again. Write…something. But by now it has become so large and looming that instead, I curl up into myself.

This began as an essay on Writer’s Block, the first in our project of a shared writing space. But even with a deadline and the knowledge that, at the other end, was you, understanding and gentle, I could not make it come. My brain seems to have atrophied, everything seemed halting and stilted.  Even this has been hard, although somehow, the form of a letter makes it slightly less intimidating. I dislike sharing the personal pieces of myself. No, not dislike, shrivel from. I suspect that most people who know me, or who have even met me, think of me as an extrovert.  I have spent my life playing the role of one. I’m the optimist, the chatty one, the non-boat rocker. But actually, I am terribly shy. I read recently about someone who described himself as an introvert disguised as an extrovert and I realized that is me. I act the part of an extrovert so that I don’t have to really, truly, share myself. And this is, perhaps, the very core of me, and therefore the hardest thing to share.

However, I’ve made it this far, through this letter and, if you are reading this, past the terror of clicking “post” and putting it out into the world. Instead of feeling frozen I feel, well, still frozen, but a bit less so. It is still a struggle. I am still unsatisfied that the words do not simply roll out. But chokingly, sputtering and wheezing and I’m sure inelegant, they did come.