I Gotta Tell You: Florida Thanksgiving Trip

Last month, for Thanksgiving, I returned "home" to Florida.

My use of quotes is quite deliberate. These days, I don't know where home is. It's been a point of confusion in my head and heart since 2009 or so, and in the past year--since the passing of my mother--it's become a subject that is downright fraught with misery.

(Yup, I said it. Misery.)

I'd love to say my trip to Florida was wonderful. I'd like to say it was productive, filled with laughter and reminiscing and closure, that I connected with old friends, that I showed Mr. Melissa the delights of Florida. That I spent a good portion of it talking with my 93-and 96-year-old grandmother and grandfather.

I'd like to say all of this, but I cannot. I try not to lie when I can avoid it.

It was a necessary trip. It was the first time I had seen my sisters and grandparents since last Christmas.

It was, at times, a fun trip. No one can can make me laugh--or cry--like my sisters do.

It was an eye-opening trip. I watched Mr. Melissa interact with my family.

It was a sorrowful trip. The most poignant part came on Thanksgiving Day, when we looked at the oyster stuffing that Eldest had made (that my mother used to make) and saw how little of it was eaten. 

But ultimately, it was a heart-wrenching, harrowing, excruciatingly sad trip. I don't like to use the word trauma, because it feels like it might be more than somewhat trivializing to those who endure actual trauma. My initial description holds: It was rough. I can only say this: I spent a good part of the last two days of it crying my eyes out, not wanting to leave my sisters. Even now, I am starting to get teary-eyed. Only one thing really stands out to me: an hour or so before I said goodbye to them,  I said to my sisters, like it was some sort of fucking genius epiphany, "I'm miserable six months out of the year in California. I may as well be miserable six months of the year in Florida, with a chance for thunderstorms and being closer to my sisters."

Yet, if I don't live in California, why should I move back to Florida when there are cities in Indiana and Ohio and Illinois and Michigan and Missouri that could offer more of what I want? I'd have the seasons and balance that I crave, and at least be closer to Eldest and Middle.

Yet, I am in California. My wonderful job, my husband, my obligations are here. How can I leave?

Perhaps, it was a game-changing trip.

Or perhaps nothing changes.

Or perhaps I don't have the courage (or the money) to change.

At least yet.

Feeling Fabulous: New Clothes

A new blouse from Ross: $8

The feeling of awesomeness and energy that comes from wearing a new article of clothing:

PRICELESS.

Seriously, I KNOW I am not the only one that feels downright fabulous and even, like, sparkly when I wear something new and pretty. Even a new bra or pair of shoes can do it for me. So I was able to waltz into work this morning with a ginormous to-do list and a fun new blouse and my make-up all done, and was able to feel like I was gonna have a kickin' day. And for the most part, I did. Lots of projects and irons in the fire, but I was able to get a good start on a lot of them. 

At one point today, I was able to make a pretty darned mature--but difficult--decision. The Cap'n pointed out to me today that we'll soon have a new reference librarian to train, and wanted to know if I wanted to do it. I struggled with this, because hells yeah, I want to. I enjoy it, and I feel like it's a way for me to develop leadership/mentoring chops. But the last time I trained librarians, the results were mixed, and anyway, I have to do the event brochure, and I'm going on vacation in three weeks. So, after a brief struggle, I pointed all of this out to her, and then decided, "Let Papa Bear train them," I told the Cap'n. "He's more laid-back than I am--it'll be better for them. And he's on the desk more than I am anyway."

Sometimes leadership means making the decisions that are best for the team as a whole, even if it's not what you yourself want.

If wearing new clothes helps me make things kinds of decisions, bring on the Ross Shopping Spree, thank you very much!

Week in Review

What I Read: I tore through Sarah Addison Allen's latest, The Lost Lake, in a few hours, but it was The Grapes of Wrath that took most of my attention and time over the last seven days, and rightly so. I wouldn't call it THE Great American Novel, but it is certainly a Great American Novel. Reading it was less of an action and more of an experience--almost as though I witnessed the Great Depression myself. Every American needs to read this book; it is part of our history and heritage, and reading it left me feeling humbled and yet, oddly, honored.

What I Watched: Sharknado was the feature film of Awful Movie Night. This was also the first Awful Movie Night that I managed to be sober for. And do you know, I still have a hard time remembering the godawful jokes we made. All I can say is this: Tara Reid and Ian Ziering, I'm so happy to see that you've kept your acting skills so fresh. No other actors could have pulled off the performance that you guys gave when the hurricane of hammerheads tore through downtown Los Angeles.

What I Thought About: Friends, and how goddamned hard it is for me to make them. Seems like every time I befriend someone in my age range, they turn around and leave the Desert. And because I spend so much time at work, I just seem to want to focus on and enrich my relationships there. Is that normal?

The Good: At long last, I resurrected The Book Maven on Facebook. She went quiet during the whole holidays-my-mom-is-dead-I-sold-my-soul-to-work whirlwind of November, December, and January, but truly, if there is something I like more than books and reading, it's talking about books and reading.

The Sad: One of our presenters died, suddenly, in January. It was an exceptional loss; this man was funny and friendly and entertaining and undemanding and just a delight to work with. So on Monday I attended the memorial for him. The last remembrance came from the youngest person in the room--an art student from his classes, who gave a raw and almost incoherently tearful speech about him. It was the most unpolished remembrance--and the most affecting, not just because of the man we were remembering, but for the honest emotions of youth that, for better or for worse, we smother as we age.

The Ugly: Realizing that things like Awful Movie Night and ABCF Club are, in fact, more enjoyable with a few gallons of wine flowing. Two weeks left of Dry Month!

The Pretty: Seeing the Happy Birthday wish on the monument sign, glowing in the deepening desert twilight on the night before our Director's birthday; listening to the wind blowing through the windchimes on the back patio; and burrowing deeper under the blankets on a chilly Sunday morning. Doesn't matter if I live in Florida or Indiana or California; when a morning is cold enough, your bed is always the coziest place to be.

Saturday, January 18, 2014, about 1 PM. The last attendees had finally trickled out, and after they did, I trailed behind them and locked the Library doors. Turning my back to the outside, to the Star Wagons, to the parking lot, I surveyed the empty lobby--empty save for my friend and colleague, Jo. She, like me, had waited until the Library was empty before breathing a sigh of relief and accepting that this Writers Festival was, in fact, a pretty darn good success.

We shared a triumphant smile and a weak fist-bump before wearily making our way back into the bullpen. The building was, for the most part, silent--the first time I'd ever seen it so lifeless on a Saturday. While there were several staff members around, we were all of us exhausted and preoccupied on our own individual tasks--that was actually how it had been for the entire Festival, and it was because of our preoccupation to our own tasks that the whole was able to come off so well.

9 months of preparation, culminating in three days of hard work, occasional dull moments of waiting, and a feeling of satisfaction at the end--yes, our First Writers Summit felt a lot to me like labor. One of my colleagues told me that he wanted to award our new accountant the award for "acting the most like Melissa"--but seeing as how this same accountant was everywhere, doing everything, I'll take it as a compliment. At one point, our colleagues referred to Jo and I collectively as "Jolissa", and I ended up giving Jo her permanent superhero nickname: GI Jo.

In the hours after the end of the Summit, I found myself thinking, This feels like the day after Christmas. The library felt quiet and empty...and so did I. It was a bit of hell in the weeks leading up to it, but damn, now that it's all said and done, I am so ready for the next Writers Summit. With only one exception, the authors were great people--friendly and smart and funny and often humble and just about always appreciative of being there. I must always remember what a powerful bargaining chip a trip to Southern California is when convincing authors to visit in January.

Now, I can go back to being a librarian for about two weeks...and then we start planning for next year.

All Moms Go to Heaven...?

Sometimes--usually when I am listening to Middle or reading something that Eldest wrote--I stop for a moment and think that I'm simply not mourning my mother enough. I didn't shed that many tears to begin with, and since I've been back home in California I've shed basically none. And not only that, but I find  myself thinking of her very little. It's like, "Hmmm, my mother has died...oh dear, I forgot to get such-and-such done at work the other day, and I need to call so-and-so, and what part of my monthly goal list do I want to try to tackle today? And hmmm...that's right, how about that, it's almost been a month since Mom passed away."

I assure myself that I'm not a sociopath, because I feel bad, I feel ashamed for not feeling more than I do.

But this is what does happen. Some evenings--usually right around twilight--I start to feel a little blue. A little unmotivated, a little nostalgic, a little lost. I feel compelled to listen to sad music that reminds me of my mother. I start thinking about my sisters, my grandparents, my past. I begin to think of random things that I never cared about before, but now will never be able to ask--Did you catch fireflies? Tell me what Ohio was like when we were little. What was it like growing up in the 50s and 60s? The mopey-blues pass quietly (their passage smoothed by a half-bottle of wine, some unabashed moping, and a night of sleep), but they're still lingering.

Yesterday, I was getting my nails done and making idle chit-chat with the technician, a friendly-faced Vietnamese woman named Yvonne. I happened to mention that my mother had passed away over Christmas, and Yvonne kindly and earnestly said, "I will pray that she go to heaven."

I thanked her. And then, fleetingly (but not for the first time) I wondered if she had.

And then tonight, I found myself thinking, I don't know that she went to heaven, but I hope wherever she is, she's surrounded by cats and books and garlic cheddar biscuits and music she loves.

Whose woods these are...

"The country lay bare and entirely leafless around him, and he thought he had never seen so far and so intimately into the insides of things as on that winter day when Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries, and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and their secrets pathetically...he was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple."
-Excerpt from The Wind and the Willows

When Mole ventures out into the Wild Woods on a winter's day, the woods is presumably set in England. Yet today, when I read the description of the winter-blighted forest, I thought, that could be Indiana. 

The southern part of the state especially is a very wooded place--not the vast, flat fields one might imagine, but rather densely forested hills occasionally broken up by an obliging field or encroaching farm. In spring and even more in summer, these forests seem impenetrable--but when I drove along the highways and backroads in the late fall and in the depths of winter, I was always captivated by how starkly different these scenes were. Previously imposing clusters of trees and bushes now seemed so much more sparse; forests seemed to reveal themselves for miles--stretches of snow with patches of brown, soggy earth poking through; feeble shrubs picked bare; grey and greatly diminished trees, all of it stretching on and on and on for miles and seeming to be so open and honest about its contents and life.

Sometimes I feel like my spirit is like an Indiana forest in midwinter.

The Darkest Hour...Is Just Before You Leave for the Airport

But coming in a close second is the hour (or two, or three) before the point just before you leave for the airport. That’s the time that I am experiencing right now. It’s a little after midnight, and I have a few hours left before my brother-in-law drives me to the airport and deposits me into a post-holiday melee, loaded down with an unhappy cat and a bagful of a few of my mom’s possessions, most of which she acquired during the last year.

My sister wrote something beautiful to describe her initial processing of the death of our mother. It was a piece filled with raw honesty, insignificant details that stood out, and all the pathos that you’d expect from a piece of prose describing the death of a parent.

What the hell could I write—can I write? How can I explain how my initial reaction was not heartbreak but rather startlement? There were no ruminations about the coffee my mother would never drink. There was only a few moments of dizziness, a gritting of teeth, a hasty decision to limit who I told the news to for a while. Later, there was my good friend NavaJo swooping in to see how I was doing, my husband picking me up so I wouldn’t have to drive home, three ill-advised martinis at Acqua Piazza (NavaJo joining me again). And then, a few more days of work before I could catch my already-scheduled flight home.

For all her flaws, my mother deserved more than how I was and am able to mourn her. And that will be a shame that I must own and shoulder.

We do the best we can with what we have. We play the hand we’re dealt.

With this in mind, I wrote the Remembrance that my sisters will read at her service tomorrow. It’s the one thing, other than sorting through her paperwork, I felt like I could do. For all I know, it might be the only closure I can get. So I slapped it together tonight while Mary sorted through Mom’s paperwork and found her bucket list and cried and Sarah looked on and kept watch over us. And then Mary went to bed, and I listened to the sound of her broken sobbing, and occasionally glanced over at Mom’s checkbook, which seems like the saddest reminder of what has happened—the only thing sadder was eating the prime rib that she had bought for us for Christmas dinner.

And underneath it all is the greatest shame of all—I love my mother, but I am terrified, fucking out of my mind terrified, of becoming like her.