A Perfect Day

Every now and then, there comes along a Perfect Day Off.

Lucky for me, today was that day.

I had a proper lie-in and awoke around 9, and lazily journaled for a bit. Arising from my bed, I made the bed and mopped the bedroom floor and handwashed my baby blanket. (Poor old Blue Blanket has really seen better days--it's rather mind-boggling that she's over 30 years old.)  I wrote letters to my grandparents and to my great-aunt, and I called my uncle. I watched Miss Representation and colored, and then showered and then colored some more and listened to Welcome to Night Vale.  I finished Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary, which was a novella so brief I couldn't help but to tear through it too quickly to really savor it. And then I headed down to Palm Springs to pick up Angie; she and I had both decided, independently, that we are simply too antisocial for our own good. So we bopped around Village Fest and craned our necks and looked up at the muticolored lights marching their way up the mountain, and I visited my empath Patrick (he says that the Momster is very happy that she became Catholic, and that she's in Paradise now. Then Angie and I ate moussaka at the Greek Islands Restaurant and talked about everything and nothing. At one point I paused and listened to the stone fountain burbling away nearby, and then looked upward at the fairy lights, and things felt Just Right.

And now I am home, and it's back to work tomorrow--but as Patrick (rightly) said, whatever changes that will come to my work might simply be changes that I manifest within myself to put me in the proper frame of mind for my work.

So with a proper frame of mind, I retire for the evening.

Come the morning light...

One of my 2014 Not-Resolutions is to have a "Dry Month." Given the workout my liver has gotten since the Momster passed away, I figured I'd start my dry-stretch after the Writers Festival ended. Which is how, three days into this crackpot adventure, I find myself searching for alternative means of decompression after my First Official Shitty Work Day of 2014.

Fortunately, I'm a resourceful girl:

A snuggly blanket, some LED candles, a book, a jigsaw puzzle, and some chamomile tea. Also, some mopey music. And not pictured: my persistent, dogged belief that things can and will be better tomorrow.

Also, I'll be one day closer to the end of Dry Month.

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.

The Week Ahead...

For almost a year, we've been gearing up for this...the Sunnydale Writers Summit. 20+  authors/special people gathering together to party with the published text. Only, this is not the actual title of the event, nor the subtitle, but you get the drift. (The drift being my that my--truly--wonderful leaders envisioned something that could be great, huge, etc. but only too late realized the amount of manpower it would take.)

A few weeks ago, I realized that it was very much like a baby--we've spent 9 months pregnant with this motherfucker, putting sweat and worry and tears and anticipation into this, culminating in 2.5 days of labor. As Frog put it, "this baby's coming, whether or not we're ready for it."

My work schedule for the week is as follows: Monday 7 AM-12 PM; Tuesday 8 AM-12 PM; Wednesday 7 AM-7 PM; Thursday  7 AM-7 PM; Friday 7 AM-7 PM; Saturday 8 AM- 5 PM. Given these shenanigans, my goals for the week are fairly modest:

Health/Beauty: Gym twice, Bike once, Walk once, Nasal flush 3X , Pills daily, Dry 3 X, NO CHIPS OR SODA, Drink more water, Drink a glass of  V-8 1X daily, wear contacts 4X; wear makeup 4X, schedule labwork  for blood

Work: Kick ass with Writers Orgy!, do two more press releases; clean desk; Schedule party @ Las Casuelas, Revamp Comment Card, register for PLA Author Lunches, Get benefits sorted; write up books

Home: Remove Christmas tree, Pull 5 items from trunk, handwash blue blanket, sort a notebook

Creative: Work on blog, work on IU memories

Social: Locate Jen Tonsing, Message JoAnn, Wilma, Nancy; Send letter to grandparents; Schedule Paint Night, Awful Movie Night, and Time with Yvonne

Entertainment: Watch Agents of Shield, Sleepy Hollow; 1 episode of XFiles, 1 episode of Supernatural, Work on jigsaw puzzle; Finish Into Thin Air, Read Testament of Mary; read The Fault in Our Stars

Miscellaneous: Drop off dress; Deposit check, Do personal budget ($25 AAA; $200 credit card; $200 savings; $25 House; $25 Christmas; $25 Indiana Trip)

Self Help Shit: Read Cheryl Richardson, attend Spiritual Living thing

The sad thing is? This is a light week.

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.

Breaking the Circle

"And the seasons they go 'round and 'round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game..."

My sister introduced me to this song last week, while we were going through the initial days after our mother passed away. This song, by Joni Mitchell, is one that reminds my sister of the Momster. I guess she remembers it as one of the songs that the Momster played on the record player during our childhood. But I don't remember it.

I guess it's one of the many memories I don't have of our mother.

Shortly after I came home to Florida, I was lamenting to Eldest about how I couldn't seem to mourn properly. How I didn't have the same memories that she and Middle did, how I didn't remember the same mother.

"Well,"  Eldest said sagely, "Maybe we had different mothers."

And goddamned if that wasn't what made the most sense during this whole pitiful experience. Not that her mother was the mail lady and my mother was the milkmaid, but that the one mother that we both had was two (three, actually) different people. Factor in the addiction issues and the mental health problems, and there's really no more to say. The mother I knew was not the one my sisters knew--our experiences were vastly different. And so are our memories. 

The one same thing that resonates with all three of her daughters--the one common denominator--the one experience that we share in common, was and is something evident not in specific memories, but rather overall and long-lasting impressions. All three of us--Eldest, Middle, and myself--have all made the conscious decision to not have children. We have our reasons, and while I am quite pleased with my decision, I cannot help but to wonder--was it because, in part, that we can't be good mothers because we never had the example of what a good mother could be? 

"We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came,
And go round and round and round
In the circle game..."

Looks like the circle is broken with us.