finding cash

carolyn says that if you chant out loud, that you are actually affecting the universe, creating the change that you are wishing to see. something buddhisty she decided to share the other day, and I'll take anything right now. very hungry for words that heal.

for the past few days, I've been chanting: it is over. what's next? this to rid myself of this nagging feeling that this thing that i've recently lost could be found again and brushed off and put back together and life would go on all blissful-like again. as if what i had was so perfect that finding it again and repairing it was my only hope. it was not perfect. and repair is not going to happen, and my sister finally made this so crystal clear to me (thank you sweet sister), but my heart continues to hurt in a strangely physical way as i try to accept this change. this loss. i do wonder how a chest can squeeze so tightly from sadness when it is all in ones head isn't it?

today on my way to work, I changed up the chant: something amazing is going to happen today something amazing is going to happen today something amazing is going to happen today

i had decided that instead on focusing on the "over" part today, that just for a little while, i'd turn a little attention toward the "next"... not necessarily in a "who" kind of way. more of a "what."

--

so because over the weekend i bought a washer and dryer, the plan today was to meet the delivery guys AND my cableman between 3 & 5. (three men. why not?). anyway, washer/dryer called to say they'd be early, and could i come at 12:15? i could. then phone rang again, and cable man called to say in thick brazilian accent: i do come early today, you can meet about 12:15?

something amazing is going to happen today

so i left my office at 11:45 but decided to do a quick errand, stopping by my old bank, back in the safe, clean, storybook neighborhood i just moved from. i have spent a few weeks now, regretting my return to the grittier shaw, where i was certain i'd eventually encounter dangerous criminals and roving gangs because the neighborhood is so different than the pristine lines of houses and perfect lawns neighborhood we'd just spent a year in (and because i'd been burglarized a few times in shaw, but my point is perception here, not past experience). anyway, i ran into the bank in the shiny part of town, to change my address and name on file and before we got started, the bank man said: "you just missed all the excitement. the cops just left; they were everywhere. we had someone trying to get cash from a teller--first trying to pass a bad check, then demanding it. it was pretty intense."

and i thought, wow. this really is amazing. my paradigm just shifted. the shiny part of town has bad guys too? and i just missed a bank hold up? here in pleasantville? maybe shaw is not so gritty afterall.

something amazing may have just happened today?

and i continued home. and when i got there, the brazilian cable guy was on the front porch all tall and dark haired and mysterious looking. or stoned. and i said: i need to put my dog in a room so he doesn't bother you, and i opened the door and called for cash. then i made a joke about him being a terrifying guard dog, so stand back cableman, and then called for him again. then i hollered for him, and then i screamed for him as the realization hit me that he was not in the house. that after i'd let him step out back this morning, and casually reminded my daughters to keep an eye on him (our fence is not yet installed)...that each of us must have looked away just long enough for him to disappear, and nobody noticed this as we locked up and pulled away for school and work.

i don't know my neighbors yet
i will have to tell my kids that their dog is gone
i did not have a collar on him or a chip in him or a fence for godssake

and i ran down the alley a ways calling his name and starting to cry and dialing carolyn. she just always knows what to do. and maybe there was a buddhist chant for getting your cash back? and she said, as she always does: i'll be right there. and i ran out the front door as the cableman looked at me like i was crazy and i said: go ahead, install some more tv, 1,000 channels just isn't enough, and the washer dryer truck pulled up to me running down the sidewalk shouting to a random man on a ladder: have you seen a loose dog? white? no collar? and he said no, and i turned around and about eight houses in the other direction i saw this older woman getting into a car so i ran towards her.

and her eyes went wide and she assumed i was going to rob her, because this is shaw.

but i said please, have you seen a dog running around loose today? i've lost my dog! and she said: what kind of dog is it? and i said a yellow lab. a big yellow lab. and she looked thoughtfully around the inside of her head for a minute and she finally said: does it have white hair? a really big guy? kind and sweet? and i said YES!! THATS HIM!! and she said (way too slowly): there is a man in that house over there and he took him inside after the dog was following a friend of mine who had her dog on a leash (ouch). and the man was going to call lab rescue, oh, i hope he didn't already call them! come on over this way, he's right in here... and she said what is his name? and i said CASH! and suddenly, a lattice gate crackled into bits and my dog came jumping through it and straight into my arms like Lassie returning to Timmy, or Benji rescuing those two rope-tied, gagged children in that sweet little movie from my youth (there's a whole 'nother story there. hog tied, kidnapped children, knives, guns? age-appropriate entertainment anyone?) or Free Willy jumping out to sea. Well not like Free Willy. But was all in slow motion like a movie stunt, and it was amazing.

the man was not home to thank, but i'll go back later today. the woman, her name was millie. when i was little i had a cherished, handmade doll named millie, who disappeared when i went off to college. i've missed her ever since. but now i live across from millie, who helped me find Cash when i was really down and out.

something amazing is going to happen today. wait for it....wait for it.....

bye bye blackbird

tonight at about 6, after we’d gotten home from crazy busy days and girls were doing homework and I was back on-line with emails and spreadsheets, kate asked me if she could light a duraflame log in our fireplace. I said she could and watched (with one eye) as she place the log just right in the fireplace and struck a long fireplace match to light it up. and then she stood back a few feet and blew out the match as the flames in the fireplace started to get strong and warm and bright.

and then? she screamed at the top of her lungs as if she’d seen, well, a blackbird fly directly out of the fireplace and straight towards her head. and then she started running around in circles and screaming OMIGOD THERE’S A BIRD THERE’S A BIRD IN HERE!! and then abby screamed ohmygodthere’sabirdinhere!!! and then I screamed OMYGODTHERE’SABIRDINHERE?!!!! and then cash screamed, and i’m pretty sure I heard “holyshitIdobelievethere’sabirdinhere!”

a small bit of chaos ensued. a blackbird took total control of my home. it had flown right down the chimney through the fire and into my house (luckily, it was not on fire itself, as that may have created a slightly larger problem for me).

so there was the screaming and the running around and the flapping of wings and dogs and kids and then there were three girls huddled together in a bathroom screeching til one of them realized she was the only grown up in the vicinity and must get a hold of herself. so she (ok, I) creeped out ducking the divebomber once, twice, and then returning to bang on the locked bathroom door (seriously, kate and abby? a bird is going to BREAK IN TO THE BATHROOM IF YOU NEGLECT TO SLIDE THE LOCK ACROSS THE DOOR??)

eventually i reached the kitchen phone to call carolyn (because the cell phone was too close to the rabid and raging phoenix) to say what do I do if there is a bird flying around and around my house and every time I look at it it flies toward my eyes? and she said, very calmly and confidently, as apparently this happens all the time at HER house in the COUNTRY: have the dog and the girls go in another room (check!) so it’s all calm out there with just you in charge (ha!) and then you just get a towel and walk nonchalantly toward it and throw the towel over it, gather it up and take it outside and let it go. um, ok.

so I grabbed a towel and tiptoed toward it, but then it flew directly toward me so I threw the towel over my OWN head and laid on the floor like I was dead.

and after a few minutes I came back to life, and crawled back toward a basket of laundry in the tv room to grab a larger bird trap (carolyn said if you are too scared to get really close, get a sheet). so I crept toward the front door underneath a KING SIZED brown sheet (disguising myself as the floor, obviously) and I managed to get my front door open with the bird doing angry circles overhead, and then I crawled toward the back door under the sheet and got the back door open and suddenly, overhead (above the sheet) I heard...swoooosh...

bye bye blackbird.

this is not a youtube video of our adventure, though abby did manage to record a few harrowing moments on her flip camera as she ran for the bathroom. this is simply background music to fade out this story and my day...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdbWUPhjniE

---

ps. I am now a hero in my house, a supermom extraordinaire, and I shall have that brown sheet embroidered with an S and I shall wear it to work tomorrow. of course the girls didn’t actually witness my playing dead, as they were locked in the bathroom screaming at that time. they just think I calmly shoo’d the little guy out the back door with a little to-go bag of birdie treats for the road.

could I have summoned up this black bird with my little tattoo? with my new favorite song “birds” by kate nash? by saying to myself over and over and over “bird by bird. just take it bird by bird...”? with this crazy creepy sad and nervous week that needed a bit of hilarity to lighten the mood? whatever. I totally forgot about not having a place to live in a few weeks, AND that stupid stupid boy who broke my heart—for just long enough to sleep well tonight.

man life is funny and unexpected and rather surprisingly joyful underneath all this crump some days.

No. Not dead. Burnt badly. --Dr. Evil

so i'm ready to write again. i have a story to tell. it's about a lost year, and it's a true story and it doesn't end well. it begins on january 1, conveniently, and it ends rather sadly--on january 1st. but there's this epilogue that takes us two weeks into a new year, where the drama drags on, full of run on sentences and unnecessary plot twists that make it a tragedy of shakespearean proportions, where everybody dies and the main character (wait, she's still breathing) cannot get her eyes to stop burning. maybe she froze them during her 5 degree training run this morning, and she's not really this sad after all.

sometimes color counts

Sometimes I just want what I want. And when I'm willing to pay for it, I want what I want with a heartfelt thank you for shopping and have a nice day.

Like yesterday. I'll set this up with a thorough yet succinct history. (Upon re-read, not so succinct)

I've needed new running shoes for a few months now. My old orange ones from the marathon are literally cracking. And the white and green pair i bought last year are now gray and snow/winter-worn down to will-work-for-food, but I've been forcing them through the last few weeks of unpredictable St. Louis weather, knowing their time had passed a while ago.

As a side note, at Christmas, my husband decided he too needed running shoes for some training he was beginning for his new adventures in 9 to 5dom and i decided to buy them as my Christmas present to him. It was about then, Decemberish, that I a: decided to go shopping for both of us and b: discovered the Great River Running Store (the name has been been changed here. it is actually the Big River Running Company) had just opened up near this coffee shop I love called Murdoch Perk (really) in a small neighborhood i that I like, in the city I try and shop within.

Now the Great River Running Store is tiny. And mostly empty any time I passed by. But I love little-businesses-that-could, and I try so hard to support any new start ups in our city that aren't pawn shops or check cashing places or dollar stores. So I decided to buy my next pair of shoes there. And my husband's Christmas present at the same time.

At Christmas I went inside and found out they "didn't carry Asics yet but would in a month or two, so please come back." So I purchased my husband's shoes at The Running Center on Manchester (always, always good service). And decided to wait for a hole to form in my own, or at the very least, for another month or so to check back at GRRS.

So on Saturday, I stopped into Great (Big) River. They now carried Asics. Woooohoooo. But they only had one style of Cumuluses. Orange ones that looked a little like my crackalack pair I have from 2007. I tried them on, knowing that barring a misplaced staple or string there wouldn't be a thing wrong with my favorite brand and make of shoe. Except for the dang cheap looking orange stripes on the side. I stood there feeling my feet all at home inside this ugly pair of shoes. And my brain kept saying: don't do it, you hate these orange shoes, but my feet kept saying ooooh these feel yummy so my feet let him ring me up and I took them home.

By Monday morning I realized i was never going to wear those orange shoes. They were still snug as orange bugs in a rug in the box on my dresser. I'd rather wear my OLD orange crack n peels than put these cheap looking orange painty new models on (the orange swooshes aren't even dyed plastic, they are paint on white plastic). So I bagged them back up and searched for my receipt. Unfortunately, for someone who never never loses a receipt, I've suddenly become one of those people who let the receipts fly around my car with the windows down just moments after purchasing something. how did i become my husband?

So no receipt, but I was certain it wouldn't matter since Ben (also not a made up name. a very real running boy named Ben works there) would certainly remember me by all the personal info he gathered when he made the sale. So I went in with my bag of shoes and with my research done (they come in black/limeade/steel stripes and would've cost $85 with free shipping, no attitude, and arrived on my doorstep by wednesday, if I'd've just bought em on Amazon instead of paying the upcharge for the pleasure of shopping locally and supporting other entrepreneurs like me.

Here's what Ben said, seriously: you know we're not supposed to just let anyone come in here and get whatever color they want. i mean if we just did this for everyone we'd never sell the colors we order ourselves, you know. i really shouldn't do this, because now how am i going to sell the orange and white ones if you are now buying the green ones? you are really lucky you got me today, because nobody else would do this. and he said it all with a really sincere smile, in between making the phone call to asics, like he was doing me a really big favor by selling me something I'd driven to his store (three times now) to pay him a profit for.

i promise I only mentioned once that maybe I should just return them instead. (but without the receipt I knew I should only mention this in a whisper while he was lecturing me, because I could not likely not get very far on that front anyway.( i'm reminded of this time i heard someone say: you should not write checks yo ass cain't cash.

but he made the call and let me thank him profusely and he ordered the green ones and sent me away to await a phone call in a week or so when i could drive back a fourth time to get the shoes i wanted.

and i left feeling, i don't know, disappointed? in myself for letting this bad customer service leak out into the world on my watch. silly for wanting "what i wanted" and was willing to pay a hundred dollars plus tax for. annoyed for having gone out of my way to support the little guy (the store, not Ben, though he IS runner-skinny). I felt like i had bad hair and was obviously such an amateur because a REAL runner wouldn't care what color her shoes were.

sadly i'll never shop at the overpriced, cute, empty running store again. and I'll only ever see Ben again at the 11th mile mark of the half marathon I'll run in April. He'll be walking in the opposite direction, eating a bagel and wearing that tin foil blanket, having finished his FULL marathon in the time it'll take me to ALMOST finish the half. but i'll be wearing some fine looking limeade & steel colored asics and smiling from my head to my happy green feet.

bad waffle mornings and all

I need to write more often. I need to write more often. I need to write more often.

Or maybe i'm just not a writer after all.

But I have to be. Because my master plan is to save myself from all this stuckness by selling something wonderful to the world so i can go ahead and move into my own fairy cottage with my own clean floors and my own clean bathroom and a guest room or two for my kids.

Here is something that moved me recently: my youngest daughter was having a meltdown over some waffle-without-enough-syrup tragedy that had taken place in my kitchen before she ran upstairs to where I was trying to force myself into grown-up work clothes which generally repel me. This began about ten minutes before her bus was to arrive, and included a sobbing girl with wet hair from the shower we had finally insisted she take (she prefers crusty skin and crumply hair even under her princess crown) which was soaking her shirt down the shoulders toward her sleeves. She was sobbing and insisting nobody listens to her and that daddy promised he'd get her more syrup but then he ANSWERED THE DOOR AND IS STILL TALKING TO THE AIR CONDITIONER GUY AND HE DOESN"T EVEN CARE ABOUT ME ANYMORE AND NOBODY LISTENS TO ME. And I had to start brushing and blowdrying her hair and her shirt over the commotion, risking the bus pulling up before the waffles were inserted into her sobbing cheeks with or without syrup and realizing this was one tragedy i just didn't have the energy or the time to make all better. She was having a bad morning. It was more than the naked waffles, but i had no time to dig deeper. These happen more days than not, and in my next life i will fix mornings. I will be a morning repairman. The world needs morning repairpeople more than airconditioning guys anyway. But I digress.

Abby was bawling and I was blowdrying and telling her she needed to pull it together and I watched her secretly try this thing I had mentioned to her a few weeks ago in passing: I'd told her that I learned if you force a smile onto your mouth even if you're really really mad then some endorphins get released in your body and you actually accidently start to feel a little better. And I caught her trying this out (which she NEVER would have admitted). Tears were shooting out of her eyeballs at an alarming speed, while she covered her mouth and nose with her hands. She didn't know I could see the indentations of her dimples on either side of her hands. She was force-smiling behind her hands and trying not to let me know she was doing it. it was a strange sight: tears from angry eyes and dimples at the same time. kind of like when it rains while the sun is shining. which sort of explains abby in a nutshell now that i think of it.

I don't know why this made me so heartachingly happy and sad at the same time, but it did. To see my daughter trying out something that I had told her might make a person feel better. she must have believed me, she tested my hypothesis and it worked for her. i'm one notch farther away from totally annoying mom with the blah blah blah. she got on the bus, syrupless waffle in hand, and smiling in her dry clean hair.

It was like I had gotten some sort of sign that things were going to be ok out there in the world with me and this one with all the drama. she listened. she actually put my words of wisdom to use--of course without ever admitting it, and I'll never never let her know I saw it go down--but i got some sort of sense that everything's going to be fine, bad waffle mornings and all.

maybe i'm not doing such a bad job pretending to be the grown up in this family afterall.

because i swore i'd write SOMETHING tonight

to the tune of "if you're happy and you know it"

oh I take out my frustration on my skin
by my face you'll see what kind of shape i'm in
if i'm happy then you'll know it
and my face will surely show it
but for now i need a mask to hide the sin

seriously, i totally beat the hell out of my face just now obsessing in front of the mirror just to delay getting into bed because my head is so spinning with this day and my work and the bank and the buildings and my husband and. why do i do this? it looks very bad afterwards and takes three days to heal. and then i remember the wolfman children i just saw on the discovery channel, or was it tlc, but anyway it was the most disturbing and sad thing that i've seen in a long time. these children have a chromosomal disorder which makes hair, thick furry long hair, grow on their faces and bodies like the wolfman. and they are so painfully beautiful and sad and will live such a different and difficult life than me and my children without the wolfman disorder and i am so lucky that nothing should ever drive me to pick at my skin or even bother looking twice in the mirror, right? its good skin, mostly. and i am lucky. i will treat it nicely tomorrow.

walking on water

I do miss God.

It's like i have to remind myself sometimes that I don't believe in him anymore. like he died or something. that makes me sad, actually. i'll be in the middle of asking for something or thanking for something or just plain admiring the work--and i'll remember: wait, you don't believe anymore. and then i'll feel nostalgic, like how i miss my grandpa and wish i could visit him again.

i was thinking about the soccer team my daughter plays for. it's the neighborhood church, st margarets. and i was just chatting wiht a few moms about the best place to get gently used soccer shoes since we have to buy them like every six months with as fast as the feet are growing. and i realized, all these people, all these believing people: where did they get these notions? where did all of these people get these father, son & holy ghosts?

we were watching that magician chris angel the other night. he was walking on water. seriously. walking on a lake with people all swimming around him and feeling his feet and gasping in amazement. and the only thing we could come up with to explain the strange sight was maybe some sort of clear "high wire" type thing that was rigged just below the surface of the water?? what the?? and then craig said: maybe THATs how jesus did it.

and i had to agree. he may have been a very talented magician, and what, with the whole pass-it-on thing as a substitute for the media, we may have just gotten the story wrong--you remember the game where you pass a story around the slumber party circle, and the story starts out about bobby playing ball but ends up with barbie spending a day at the mall with her lottery ticket winnings and buying all those people lunch in the food court? maybe THATs how jesus did it.