Last Solstice in Seattle/Overheard in Fremont

It's time to stop beating around the bush.

Tonight Z said something about our "last 6 weeks in Seattle". "We have WAY more than 6 weeks." I said in the same tone of voice that I tell the children to "put that stick down" or "do not push me" or the voice I used to tell crack addicts to "please take a ten minute walk". "Alright 9 weeks" he said.

Anyway, I've been staying away from "Last Blah blah blah" but I'm ready now, friends... it's time for lasts. Then I'll get firsts. The other day, it randomly occurred to me that I'll be back east in time to spend my brother's birthday with him for the first time... probably in ten years. Probably. Maybe nine. This is good news. (P.s. I hope that brother stays put for his birthday, but it's ok if he doesn't because I've got lots more New England Septembers in store.)

I already had my last mothers' day and fathers' day that I didn't call because I woke up late and did a thing, then another thing, then I ate some dinner and it was way late back east, too late for calling. No more of that, which is cool. (Hey, I didn't miss them EVERY year, most years I totally made it... it just sucks when I didn't so I remembered it more.)

Anyway, last Saturday was my last Fremont Solstice parade. When we first moved here, Z and I lived in Fremont... an arty neighborhood which (suprise!) has gotten less cool and more commercial over the last 10-20 years. This neighborhood hosts a big fair and Solstice parade every summer and even in my 7 years here it's gotten WAY bigger. I've always gone alone, though in the past I've met up with good friends. This week I went alone (Z considered going, just because it was his last chance. On the other hand, he hates crowds and there was a Eurocup game going on, so he was much happier at home.) and was happy about that. I am so often on the verge of tears in big crowds.... (esp. since I stopped smoking, I'm kind of an emotional wreck... in a good, clean, celebratory way).

The hippie pagan selling prayer flags in English, the kids watching the bubble man, the guy who built a huge chair so that he could sit 15 feet above the crowd at the parade, one of my favorite coffee shacks all dolled up like a cabaret, everything made me cry a little bit.

As the naked cyclists swirled around (there was an awesome naked guy painted silver on a skateboard as silver surfer which was awesome) I was still looking for a spot. I passed a grown man talking to an older man (his father I think) saying "Some people never learned the value of wearing clothes, I guess". I found this fascinating on so many levels. Then I saw a big vinyl sign held aloft that said "GOD HAS GIVEN YOU OVER TO YOUR DEGRADING PASSIONS." I misread this as celebratory, and got all teary. Later, I saw that the guy had a megaphone and was trying to save people from themselves, and realized I'd had it wrong. I heard part of his rant "Like this little woman here. What do you call yourself young lady?"

Woman in wings: A fairy.
Man Trying to Save Us: A fairy. What fairies like this don't know is...
Nearbye man with a pink fedora and a lisp: There's nothing wrong being a fairy.
Random strangers in the crowd: Chuckle.
Woman in wings: Fairies Rule!
Two women in wings: FAIRIES RULE!
Man in pink fedora and women in wings and passersbye: FAIRIES RULE! FAIRIES RULE! FAIRIES RULE!

I have to say I can't quite imagine tinkerbell pumping her fist in the air the way they were, but it was lovely in its own way.I sat down for a second to write this stuff down, and the guy from the local paper took my picture.



Unfortunately, the guy asked me what I was writing, and I said "Something I overheard that I want to remember" and he captioned the picture "Kendra PeloJoaquis pauses to makes some notes on what she's heard people say as they walked by her." That Ms. PeloJoaquis sounds like a creepy character. Yuck! Fortunately, it's a picture of my lap, so I think I'm safe. Next big last... my last day working with my mentor.

Are you lookin at me?

Finally saw Taxi Driver.

YES I've made it to almost 30 years old without watching it. I DIDN'T watch it when I should have when I was a teenager, and desensitized to blood and guts and then I just never got around to it. Then tonight I was babysitting, and therefore knitting in front of the tv and checking out the list of "free" on-demand movies (which is a like a tiny, crummy, depressing video store. I can't remember most of the 100 or so movies there were, but The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Evil Dead 2, Leonard Cohen (A biography?) stuck in my mind. I stopped when I got to Taxi Driver, because, I thought, "When else will I sit down and watch Taxi Driver?" It was, of course, brilliant and awful, but I felt a little ashamed with all that cussing and assorted nastiness on the screen with a sweet little girl asleep upstairs.

I was babysitting for someone who lives in the Navy housing in the middle of a huge park near here. I felt a little creeped out driving through the unlit park at midnight, then once I got out, got lost in the suburb that surrounds the park. (Comically I got lost because I was behind someone. I thought I was going the right way, but the streets were little and quiet and I became unsure. As soon as I did, it occurred to me that if I were not on the arterial, then I was just following this car around a quiet neighborhood at night and probably making them nervous. This convinced me to NOT pull over to make them possibly feel better, which if FUCKED UP I know. As I pulled onto 15th at Dravus, there was a guy face down in the road who had obviously just fallen out of his wheel chair. I pulled over and helped him into his chair... and helped him cross the street. He was very drunk, and kept trying to tell me this over and over again but failing. I got him underway and went and sat in my car in an empty parking lot for a minute. I'd offered to call 911, but he'd told me not to(because he was drunk) but I was pretty worried for him since he was in a really busy place with people whipping around corners and very hight curbs... right before I saw him, I saw a dude totally blow through a red light.

In my head, Travis, the taxi driver was pissing and moaning about all the scum and trash and garbage in the street and scowling at the poor guy (Did I mention he was wearing only one shoe) and my favorite meditation teacher was telling me that nothing was wrong, that I just needed to see what is without judging it, and my yoga teachers were all telling me to do no harm. (?!) The bitter, scarred coworkers I had in the shelters told me I knew better than that guy about how to keep him safe, and the better ones told me that he deserves to make his own choices and I had no right to intervene and betray his privacy. Finally, exhausted and confused I stopped thinking and called. I took the easy way out. It's interesting to think about the things that are automatic for a person. Because of one job that I had, calling 911 is just as comfortable and mindless as moving a child's glass of juice away from the table's edge, blessing someone when they sneeze. Just automatic, easy. (The meditation teacher's got a lot to say about that, I bet.)

After I talked with the dispatcher I made a small loop, but I didn't see the guy. I felt dumb, because so many of the people I knew who wandered around this city at night in all kinds of vulnerable, loaded, disabled states were usually, stunningly fine. I felt a little better that he was gone, that he was right to tell me not to call, and my call only made me feel better and didn't do anything for him.

Then I came home and turned on some bright lights and drank some orange juice to cheer me up. It's almost working now.

My Story of Stuff

I have been looking around my house with a new lens. We're getting closer and closer to the move and I'm astounded by how many objects there are, and how dominated I feel by them.

Growing up we moved quite a few times, and I remember stuff getting "lost in the move" or broken by movers. I also remember how comforting it was to see the same stuff in a new place. I was the oldest, so I mostly got new stuff, but I got some hand-me-downs from older cousins. One set of grandparents was always trying to give us stuff... I think that grandma bought most of my clothes until I was old enough to know that Healthtex clothes are not hip... and to wonder why the word "Health" was in the brand name. In fact, I have two parcheesi sets from the 50's that that grandfather gave to me (and that I carried on a plane!) in my closet right now. When I visited them I took pictures of some of their stuff, the fruit bowl, and the weird statuettes that had been in the same places for my entire life. I heard often from my family that my other grandparents had gotten rid of so much of their good stuff. They didn't save anything for their children, like furniture, cars, trucks, a beach house. In fact that grandfather gave away my mother's chickens by accident... somebody asked about them, and he had no idea that his teenage daughter even HAD chickens, so he gave them away without asking. On the other hand, that grandmother was a knitter. Her gifts were afghans, pajamas, sweaters and scarves and slippers. I still have a sweater that she made for my mother. Different people, different times, different stuff.

When Z and I moved here, we had a huge truck and we drove a LOT of stuff here. I feel like I spend some time every day commenting on my stuff without actually picking any of it up and DOING anything about it. (Except books. Z and I have a box for keeping books and a box for getting rid of books. Every so often, one of us will pick up a book and ask the other one "Keep this one?" or "You don't want this one do you?" This is fun, and we've agreed completely so far.)

I've got clothes of course. I buy almost all of my clothes at the Goodwill, which is great; it's reusing, it's cheaper, it's around the corner, I'm not supporting sweatshops, or box stores. I feel really good about it. On the other hand, they tend to fall apart a little more quickly (because they're older) and I think I'm more likely to "settle" for clothes that don't quite fit or aren't just right, so they cycle back to the goodwill, and I tend to be discontent. I'm not crazy about boxing up tons of "Not-quite-right" clothes and paying to ship them across the country. In any case, I've had an annual clothing swap that's coming up in a couple of weeks, so that's one solution to that stuff.

I've got wedding gifts. Most of the beautiful special stuff that Zak and I will carry across the country again are wedding gifts. After our wedding, in Rhode Island, we drove a borrowed Eurovan across the country. We carefully packed our gifts into its small trunk. At one point we accidentally killed the battery by leaving the DVD player on (it was a SWEET Eurovan... thank you Mag) and had to jump it. We thought that the battery was in the back (it actually had two) so, while I fetched someone to help us, Z carefully removed our treasures and set them on a picnic table in an RV park. It felt really wonderful, looking at them all laid out completely out of context like that. The only gifts we won't cart back will be some of our beautiful dishes that have broken over the years. (I admit, we've been saving the pieces in a box, because Peter's Pots, where our dishes were made has a butter fingers day. If you bring in the pieces of a broken piece, you can replace it at a discount! I have no idea if the box of pottery shards will make it to Boston.)

I've got technology... I've got yarn... and books... and old papers and STUFF. I'm actually frozen when I think about how to move or sell or pack all this crap that's hemming me in. (As soon as I'm done with this blog, I've got to spend 15 minutes in the office trying to get a handle on the mountain of papers and yarn on and around my desk that has exiled me and the laptop to the living room.) Occasionally, I look beside my bed, or in the office and I think of a film I watched called Possessed by Martin Hampton. It's a documentary about four hoarders, and it's very startling and sharp and disturbing. The whole video is available if you follow that link, and it's excellent... like any mental illness, it's easy to see the same, if less dire, habits of thought and fear in anyone that are displayed in the film.

Once I met a guy and visited him on his boat where he lived and I was startled by how free and happy I imagined I could be on a boat. "Check it out." I thought. "This guy has only a little bit of crap. He basically could NAME every object that he owns. That's awesome." I imagined how fantastic I would feel if I got rid of all my stuff. Zak was away and I came home and looked around our house and found myself only attached to SOME of our stuff. I met a woman on retreat who lived on a boat. We talked about how free she felt with fewer possessions. I told her that I imagined that it would be hard to get rid of books. She blushed and told me about when her husband built them each a bookshelf, and announced that this was all they got. She asked for a second shelf, which he fit in someplace else, and then still ended up storing some books with her sister.

Recently I helped some dear friends pack up their apartment and in lifting all of their stuff, felt miraculously less and LESS attached to all the things I have with every trip up and down the steps. On the other hand, I've been thinking hard about buying another bike (my old one doesn't really fit me) and it's been very tempting to buy one that's brand new.

Sitting in the sun on our deck w/ Z, I looked lovingly at the prayer flags that I hung the first day we lived here, five years ago. They are so beautifully faded and destroyed, worn to transparent colorful bits with gossamer strings hanging from them. I asked Z... what should we do? Should we leave them (probably to be taken down and discarded by the landlord or the next tenants?) Should we take them down and bring them with us? That does'nt feel right at all. Maybe take them down and bury them in the yard, or do some other kind of ritual? We put off deciding. We are very accomplished at putting off deciding.

Yesterday, our training at work began by watching a video called The Story of Stuff. It's a brilliant 20 minute film describing how stuff is made, sold and then discarded. It discusses planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence in depth and where they entered our design world and how it's changed our relationship to stuff. Please take some time to watch it, it's really fantastic and compelling. It's a little hard, in that An Inconvenient Truth way, but that's because it asks us to look at a bigger picture, which I'm trying to do a little every day anyway. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where The Story of Stuff has pushed me. (At work, a friend and I are going to gather a Zero-Waste Lunch discussion group of teachers and parents. This makes me feel a little like a super hero.) I'll have to keep mulling to discover exactly how I'll shift my own personal life from this film.

I'm sure that it'll definitely impact me as I consider how much stuff to keep, what to fix, what to get rid of, etc. Now I'll wash some stuff, and recycle some stuff, organize some stuff and try to change my relationship to other stuff. What do you think about your stuff?

My New Favorite Salad

various Greens.
a precious Tomato
mushrooms
brussel sprouts
raw pumpkin seeds
raw walnuts raw cashews
Sprouts
Lemon Tahini dressing

(Roast the brussels and the cashews until they're brown. Put them on the salad.)

Holy Spring Salad.