a persistence of memory

we took an afternoon walk through our neighborhood last week, as we often do. while waiting on one corner for traffic to pass, i looked across the street and saw a late 1970’s toyota corona. i hadn’t seen one of these cars for years and years, and i was struck by how very tiny it seemed. it was definitely showing it’s age – rusted, no bumper, peeling paint, possibly a broken drivers side window. i thought “that is the same car sherry used to have! except hers was white. her name was pearl”. and then, without warning, a long laundry list of names began popping into my head – scrolling by almost like the end titles of a film:

pete. trudy. jeff. elaine. carmelita. betsy. jim. emmett. roscoe. chubby. blue wood. matilda. lester. josh. judy. wrigley. gus. anita. phaedra. mamie. tamika. dante. the names of cars belonging to my friends, my family and me for the past 40 years. these names were accompanied by a vivid picture of each car, lit up, shiny and perfect like photos you’d see in an automotive dealership calendar.

and i thought “why is it i can remember the name, make, model and color of every car ever owned by me and everyone i know, but i can go to the grocery store for 3 things and leave with only 1, because i forgot what the other 2 were?”

i’ve always been a little bit famous among my friends for my powerful memory. i wouldn’t call it photographic, more like ‘detail oriented’. i can remember places we went, what we wore, what we ate, where we parked, the time we arrived and departed, and even some esoteric details – if there can be anything more esoteric than what i just mentioned. i can walk through manhattan and point out places i’ve eaten (even if it’s no longer the same restaurant) and what i ordered when i was there. in fact my new york friend cara and i have always joked that we want to collaborate on a book called ‘new york and what we ate’. so yes, i remember a lot. my father was the same way, so i’ve always figured its a family trait.

when i owned my store i was in charge of 1000 things – and always in high gear. the business depended on it, or so i thought. and after that, when i worked for whole foods, my job was all about details, numbers, inventories – also in high gear. but now that i have a very cushy part-time job that operates in a totally different way than anything i’ve done before, i seem to have become…forgetful. steve tells me it’s because i no longer have to be so ‘vigilant’ – reasoning that i absolutely love, because it doesn’t mean my memory is fading, it just means i don’t need to use it as much. you know, kind of like giving it a vacation. a vacation that seems to be getting longer and longer.

i’m familiar with short-term memory loss – many of my older family members and parents of friends have dealt with it. the thing is, i don’t really want to be personally familiar with it. i’ve always been a list maker, which helps – providing i don’t forget to take the list with me. i hear this sort of thing from a lot of people – it’s kind of a running joke in general – but it never really applied to me before. so the joke has kind of stopped being funny. i’m not that old, am i? i guess i need to get in touch with my memory and let it know vacation is over. i only hope it hasn’t jetted off to a far-flung country and lost the return ticket.

the little toyota that started me thinking about all this has disappeared. haven’t seen it since that first time. of course, it may still be sitting right where it was that fateful afternoon, if i could only remember where it was parked.

everyday i write the book

when i was 16, i decided i wanted to start keeping a journal. this is when i first heard it referred to as a ‘journal’ rather than a ‘diary’. and i definitely wanted to keep a journal. it sounded much more literary and sophisticated than a ‘diary’ – which conjured up images of a little leatherette book with a gold-stamped cover and tarnishing brass clasp, filled with teenage-girlish romantic notions, hopeless crushes, broken hearts and abandoned dreams. come to think of it, not unlike the way some of my journals turned out.

i was a misfit, a fish out of water in junior high and high school, and i’d chosen to deal with it by gritting my teeth and enduring the school year while impatiently waiting for summer vacation. then, i could retreat into my own world and be exactly who i wanted to be. so at some point it seemed sensible to keep a record of it all. i wanted a touchstone to those precious summer days (‘beautiful’, ‘green’, ‘free’ and ‘open’ are some of the poetic words i chose to describe them). i would begin on the first day of summer, and write every day, religiously, until the night before school started again. then i would pen an emotional farewell to all that had been (‘beautiful’, ‘green’, ‘free’, ‘open’) and the volume would be finished. the following summer, i would start a new one.

looking back on them now, i regret i didn’t add a bit more detail about…anything. i always mentioned whatever new albums i’d gotten (most were ‘beautiful’) and i talked about seeing movies in a voice embarrassingly similar to some admired friends of my parents. most of the rest verges on sketchy babble. i suppose there’s no way of knowing what will be important to you 40 years down the road – i clearly didn’t.

my last year in high school, i started my journal early – a few days before graduation. granted, i used the word ‘beautiful’ so often that just thinking about it makes me want to gag, but i had friends, and activities, and loved that last year of school so much i didn’t want it to end. a total turnaround that i had completely forgotten. this was also the time when i had my first public performances of songs i’d written – okay, it was during the high school jazz band concert, and again at my graduation ceremony, but if you’d seen where i grew up and how shy i’d been, you’d understand it was only slightly less impressive than a gig at carnegie hall. sadly, my post-graduation journal ends prematurely – only a couple weeks into the summer – when my closest friend (‘beautiful’, as was our relationship, or so i thought) led me on and then jilted me. i was so crushed i couldn’t bear to pick up a pen and write.

in my sophomore year of college, i began again. this time i was hoping to process and understand my unhappiness with school, my ongoing homesickness and loneliness. thankfully, i had discovered a lot of new descriptors (none of which were ‘beautiful’, ‘free’, ‘green’, etc). i wasn’t obsessed with writing daily, but i was compulsive about catching up when i did write, so these books are full of details and impressions and feelings – almost 4 years worth. interestingly enough, right after i graduated, my closest friend (definitely ‘beautiful’) led me on and jilted me, and the volume slams shut a couple of weeks into the summer. even at the time, the irony and coincidence wasn’t lost on me.

i wrote sporadically over the next couple of years, and at some point started up again and stopped stopping. there are a few gaps, but for the most part, the last 30 years are all on paper. periodically i look back through them, which can be fun (or mortifying, depending on the era). as i get older, i start thinking: is it time to get rid of them? i’m not sure i can bear to do that quite yet. or do i (finally) gather them all in one box with a large note saying “if something happens to me, please destroy these without reading”? my fear of someone finding them is usually tempered by the realization that after a page or two, whoever was reading would be more than happy to toss them out, if they aren’t too immobilized by boredom. and so i’ve taken to thinking “somewhere there’s a landfill that’s going to be really excited to read these someday”.

for the past year, i’ve found myself with monday evenings free, so i’ve started going to dinner and taking my journal along to do ‘catch-up writing’. i picked a restaurant where i feel comfortable and not geeky. mostly. i almost always get a comment from the server, ranging from “you have beautiful handwriting” to “did you get a lot of good writing done?” (i find this flattering, because…if only they knew). i had one long conversation with a guy who wondered why i keep a journal, and when i told him it helped me process things, and later it was fun to look back on big moments in my life to see how i felt at the time, he looked at me like i was speaking another language. his confusion made me think that if some ascribe to the saying “the unexamined life isn’t worth living”, his motto must be “the unexamined life…what’s that?”.

a couple of months ago i was digging through a box, and found a journal from 1984 – after college. i had totally forgotten i was writing during this time. i was astounded by my attitude and grasp of what was going on. i always looked back on those years as a tangle of mass confusion, heartbreak and disappointment. true, there was an element of that, but my written attitude – i was shocked that i sounded so together, because i don’t remember it that way at all. and for possibly the first time ever, i saw the purpose and reason for all this ink i’ve spilled over the years: i actually felt lighter and calmer being able to put that part of my past to rest – no longer looking at it as tumultuous and miserable, but as a wild ride full of things that helped shape me for the rest of my life. who says i’ve been wasting time with all this scrawling of words? who says the unexamined life is the way to go? for sure it isn’t me. maybe my waiter, but definitely not me.

 

oh well

oh well, i said out loud, as i started my car and pulled away from the curb. oh well. i refused to look in my rearview mirror – afraid i’d see you standing in the street, forlorn and sad as i drove away, or worse, walking back to the house as if my leaving was no big deal. oh well. turned on my blinker and rounded the corner, knowing i would never be back in this neighborhood again. oh well, as i merged onto the street leading to the freeway out of town. oh well.

oh well. i found myself repeating it more and more frequently, like some meditative mantra that would keep me from thinking about what was really happening. oh well, oh well. i tried to sound flippant, unconcerned, and if i said it loudly enough and often enough, maybe that would be true. but underneath i could feel the bitter sadness, the knowing what was to come: an emptiness, the sting of a broken heart, the road ahead that i would once again be walking alone. oh well.

the words kept tumbling out of my mouth even as my brain tried to shout over them: you knew this was coming. there were warning signs, over and over. you fought against them. it was true – i hadn’t expected to fall in love with you. but your charm, your charisma, the laughs, the intimacy, the pure joy – it had taken me over and blinded me. i conveniently forgot all the lessons i’d learned from the past: you can’t make someone feel. you can’t force someone to love you. you can’t change a person. but i had tried. and tried. and the instant it fell apart, i knew it had been a mistake all along, a waste of energy. oh well.

when i got home, i stumbled into my apartment, numb. you would never set foot in it again. oh well. i tried optimistic reasoning: maybe now i could be calm, stop working so hard for something that simply could not, and would never, happen. maybe i would finally stop feeling like i had my finger shoved into an electric socket at all times. after more than two years, my head constantly swirling with confusion as to whether i could call you, should call you, would i seem too forward, too attached? and why aren’t you calling me? when we finally did talk, you seemed so available, so excited, so interested, which confused me even more. and i could never really shake the feeling that i just didn’t matter that much to you, which turned out to be true. oh well.

it had been a very long time since i’d had a breakup like this, but i knew what i was in for. a long period of waiting for the sadness to pass, waiting to forget what i could and reconcile the rest. there was constant theorizing over what i should or could have done differently. but for the first time in my life, i vowed to follow my intuition – which, after all, had been right all along – and not contact you. yet there was always that desperate hope that one day when my phone rang, it would be you. oh well. time passed, but it seemed the urge, the need, the wondering about you would never cease.

after a year – a year – went by, i had gone through denial and anger, the fury over you not bothering to contact me in all that time to see if i was dead or alive. to see if i had survived one of the bleakest periods of my life – unemployed, broke, deeply in debt, selling my beloved apartment. how you could be so cold to disappear completely is still the cruelest mystery. but once the turmoil in my head was calm, i began to realize: nothing had changed. you haven’t changed. your life, your ability to attach to another person – unchanged. you had behaved the same way for 50 years, and my presence hadn’t changed a thing, so why did i assume you would change in the year we’d been apart?

another year went by. i worked hard to get over you, to find peace and strength by learning what i wanted, and what i could or couldn’t accept if i ever met someone new. and somewhere, you are living the same life you always have – unencumbered, unattached. who am i to decide if it’s wrong for you? but my intuition – which i have never doubted since the day you told me goodbye, always told me you wanted more than you dared admit. and i don’t think you know how to find it, or accept it, or see it, even when it stares you right in the face. like i always say: oh well.

silence is golden

we are driving up 19th avenue, with the jazz station playing softly on the radio. we’re in the middle of our friday night ritual – dinner somewhere downtown and then, usually, a trip to the grocery store for something we need for the weekend.

several blocks go by, red lights, green lights. i’m lost in random thought, staring out the car window at nothing and everything when i realize neither of us has said a word for a very long time. a voice in my head pops up, wondering if there’s something wrong. did i say something at dinner that upset him? what were we talking about on the way to the car? maybe i accidentally offended him and now we’re driving along, him angry and not speaking? i feel a little bit of confusion and some panic, unsure if i should say something or wait until he does.

this is all rolling around in my head and i start feeling more and more uneasy. it isn’t like him to not be commenting on something. then i realize: nothing is wrong, we’re just comfortable. and how long have i waited for this kind of calm? this peaceful, secure, quiet that can simply be, without worry? we’re both in our own worlds, together, not anxiously trying to fill the space around us with idle chatter for the sake of avoiding the empty air.

we pull into the mostly empty parking lot at the grocery store. “not very busy here tonight” i say. “nope, hardly any cars at all” he responds. and we walk towards the door in blissful silence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(it’s only) words

i was shopping in one of those card and paper stores a few days ago, the kind of place i usually love (though i loved them a lot more when i had my own store and shopped in them as ‘research’). there was a table full of blank journals, most of them that trendy kind with a meaningful or inspiring quote on the front cover. my cynical side would say these were trendy 15 years ago, and even then i wondered when people would get tired of them, or the good quotes would run out, and that would be the end of it. apparently neither has happened, because i still see them everywhere. the one on the table that stood out had a henry david thoreau quote that read “live the life you imagine”.

for a moment, i thought “that’s what you need to be doing. visualize what you really want, and…” then a much louder voice in my head screamed “you lived the life you imagined…that’s what the problem is. duh”.

i must admit, i’d never quite looked at it exactly this way. i mean, the facts are there: i owned my own business, which swung between moderately and highly successful (until it stopped swinging entirely) and a lot of people thought it was fabulous (so did i, in my rare objective moments). i made a decent amount of money (nothing outrageous, but enough that i felt comfortable and got to do some fun stuff). i went to new york 5 or 6 times a year (whether i needed it or not). i got to buy and wear stylish clothes (at least, i hoped they were) and expensive shoes (which i don’t recommend doing if it turns out things are going to go to hell and you have to stop doing so). i owned 2 homes, each wonderful in a different way (this sounds WAY more glamorous than it was, but still, it was pretty great). it was exactly the sort of life i had envisioned for myself – pursuing and enjoying my passions. then, it all came apart and fell to pieces, and there was nothing i could do about it.

and i’ve been crushed by it and scrambling for something ever since – an embarrassingly long time, if you look at the calendar. but as that calendar marches on, it becomes more and more clear exactly how devastating, and frustrating, and life-altering, it was – and why it has taken so long to recover from the collapse. the rest of the facts are: the economy had gone south, i struggled and looked and searched and tried (and yes, imagined) the next place i could be that would make me happy. there were a lot of disappointing false starts, smashed hopes, bad fits, and i’m left wondering why the right thing still hasn’t appeared. maybe because the ghost of what was, and how good it was, is still floating around, and i never realized how badly it has been getting in the way. and how exhausting it is trying to keep up with my former self.

i walked out of the card store and down the block. the words on the cover of the journal were blazing in my brain like a bad neon sign. yes, i lived the life i imagined. yes, it was amazing and wonderful, but nope, none of it is going to come back. so does that mean it’s hopeless? the rest of my life is destined to be a complete dud? there’s no reason why something just as wonderful can’t come along to equal, or even top what i used to have. and whatever happens next will likely be something totally different than i can possibly imagine (regardless of what the journal tells me to do), so what’s the point in imagining? that’s when i realized the best thing to do right now is let the journal stay blank. don’t fill it with memories, don’t fill it with hope for the future. just let it sit empty, and open, and waiting, without all the baggage weighing it down. all those years of visualizing the future and lamenting the past ended up giving me headaches, anyway.

after pondering all this for a few days, i remembered a line from one of my favorite songwriters, neil finn.
“all i ask, is to live each moment…free from the last”

now that’s a quote that needs to be on a blank journal.

music

the world seems so much brighter now that i’ve found frank o’hara
how could i not know about him? especially after all those poetry classes in college
i am amazed at his simplicity and his complexity both at the same time
and find myself baffled or touched or overwhelmed by what he says
and the way he says it
and however i feel about it i’m usually weeping by the time i get to the end

then i get up to poke at the fire i built tonight
i think just to prove to myself that i could do it
i used the kindling you cut from the cedar bushes in front of the house

in the bottom of the woodbox was the thick white string you had wrapped and tied
around the branch that split, trying to graft it.
at the time you said
“we just need to remember in a year to pull this off”
but a year never came and the graft didn’t work anyway
and i resist the urge to use that as an analogy

i left the string in the box
and watched the kindling go up in smoke
and again i resist the urge to use that as an analogy.

the rose of texas

i was a lucky kid. i had parents i really liked, and save for a few instances when i was a typical crappy teenager, we got along well and i enjoyed being around them. better yet, they had a hilarious and great group of friends they spent a lot of time with. when they all got together i loved hanging around listening to them telling stories and jokes and laughing and drinking. it was incredibly entertaining, and they were warm, wonderful people who didn’t seem to mind a gawky teenager looking on.

jean was one of my moms many ‘best friends’. she was a real steel magnolia, before that term was invented. she and her husband hailed from some remote part of texas – i’m not sure how they ended up part of the circle – maybe because they were sweet and thoughtful and bigger than life. jean had a variety of bouffant hairstyles, never out of place, hairsprayed into architectural wonders. she was always impeccably dressed and her makeup was heavy and precise and no one, not even her closest girlfriends, ever saw her without. i remember one summer when our families went on a group camping trip (which even then, imagining jean in a campground, was unthinkable). my mother speculated for weeks on the possibility we would finally see jean without makeup. the first morning she crawled out of their tent fully made up and dressed to the teeth. no one was sure how she accomplished it, but clearly nothing was going to stand in the way of her sartorial goals. that was the trip we stopped at a favorite public swimming pool and ‘the guys’ decided to grab jean and throw her in the water. it was the only time i saw her lose her cool – she fought like a wild animal, and of course they never intended to actually throw her in – she would have crawled out of that pool and killed them all, and they knew it.

as time passes, i realize more and more just how much i learned about friendship from this group of people. they knew how to have fun, to support each other without question, and they stuck together through thick and thin with incredible loyalty. when everyone got older and people started getting sick or dying, you could count on jean being one of the first at the door to help, or cook, or offer a shoulder. after my mother died, she and her husband were one of my fathers strongest support systems. when he got ill, they literally carried him into the hospital. they were among a very select group at the cemetary when we buried my dad, and at the dinner after i will always remember jean, standing with one hand on her cocked hip, talking to me about his girlfriend-after-my-mom in ways i can only politely describe as ‘ripping her to shreds’. she was dead on, of course, and through all the scathingly blunt commentary, i could see how much she loved my father and how scary strong her protective instinct had been. i also saw how long she had held her opinion inside so not to hurt him. a few years later i sang at jeans granddaughters wedding. this was the sort of thing i could ordinarily do in my sleep. what i hadn’t planned on was looking at the first few rows of the congregation and seeing what was left of my parents gang of friends, staring up at me. i felt supported and admired, but mostly i felt a huge emptiness for who was missing. afterwards, i walked up to jean. she grabbed me and kissed me and her first words were “your momma and daddy loved you so much”. it was beautiful and touching and i was blindsided by her unexpected tenderness. all of my mothers friends had made it their duty to mother me in their own ways, and her way was to be sure i knew my parents were there that day, too.

when i got the news last week that jean had died, i wasn’t that surprised. she was well into her 80’s and had been seriously ill for almost a year. yet as the day wore on, i began to realize how many of my most precious childhood memories have her floating around in them. the weekly ritual of the bowling league, the county fair where the gang ran the concession booth. for several years she worked with my mother in a small office, and i can see them there, the air heavy with their perfume and cigarette smoke. the barbeques in the backyard with jeans amazing southern food. how she had a formal family portrait taken every year so their faces were always smiling down from our bookshelf. how losing her is one more empty chair, one more touchstone to an era now past. how losing her is losing one more direct tie to my parents. the stories i have – i could go on and on and on. and i have to smile, and sometimes laugh out loud when i think back on those times. i was a lucky kid.

dude looks like a lady

i guess transgender is a fairly new word. the dictionary indicates it was coined sometime in the early 90’s. when i was a kid you referred to a transgendered person as a ‘transvestite’ (which i think has a wierd, evil sound, sort of vampiric – not to mention it is an incorrect use of the word) or as someone ‘wanting a sex change’. i think it was my mother who mentioned christine jorgenson, the first really famous transgendered person. are you still considered transgendered if you have the full surgery and change sexes entirely? at that point, aren’t you just…a woman? i don’t really know, but i was fascinated by christine jorgenson and the whole situation. not fascinated because i felt like i was in the same boat, but because i couldn’t comprehend feeling that way at all – i still can’t. i’m sure i was also fascinated because it involved the word sex, though i now know it has less to do with having sex than with sexual identity. what can i say, i was in 7th grade.

i was thinking of this after my trip to new york a few weeks ago. a friend and i spent a rainy sunday morning inside the 26th street flea market. we were in a booth looking at some very cool vintage clothes when i peered over the top of the rack and saw her. actually, not quite her, but…a person. maybe 6 feet tall, skinny as a rail, age somewhat indeterminate but probably early 60’s. bald on top of the head but the sides had been grown into a long, greying ponytail that trailed down the back – an attempt at femininity, but as ineffective as a combover. a skin-tight pink tank top, extremely tight nylon shorts with a zany, neon-bright print, and white high-top leather adidas tennis shoes. very large and loud floral clip earrings and those bright red heart-shaped sunglasses that were so popular in the 80’s – though the dark lenses had been replaced with clear glass. the overall effect was like some kind of refugee from a jane fonda workout class, circa 1983.

i was shocked – not because of the outfit, but because of the bizarre fact i had seen this person not once, but twice when i was in the city last april. i looked across the platform in the 57th street train station to see someone in hot pink spandex tights, electric yellow windbreaker and a neon tank top sporting a print i can only call psychedelic lightning. a couple of days later i spied him walking past union square in an equally vivid outfit. at that time i figured he was an eccentric older man, maybe a theatre person, definitely a real character. its not unusual to see these types in manhattan. however, during our up close encounter at the flea market, i could see the intent was definitely “female”. what i loved most – aside from the fact not one single person in the crowd seemed to notice – was that all the outfits had been clearly thought out and planned. completely over-the-top in a neon-drenched 80’s aerobics class way – clinging to the body of a very, very skinny but clearly fit man with a bald head and long ponytail.

what confuses me is this: if you feel like a woman trapped desperately in the body of a man, don’t you try harder to look like a woman? i mean, these outfits were clearly planned and nowhere near anything you’d call subtle. so does that mean it’s all about deciding what clothes satisfy your need to feel womanly and it doesn’t matter how it appears to the rest of the world? is going the full glamour route just too much work? is there no way you’re going to succeed at looking feminine, so don’t bother trying? i was dying to strike up a conversation to try to get more information right from the source, but lets face it, you don’t walk up to a total stranger and start asking those kind of questions. well, you can, it’s just a really, really bad idea. i do know that when i am going somewhere, i almost always plan every detail of what i’m going to wear – at some point i realized i’ve done this pretty much my whole life – and when i do, i always feel more together, a little more upbeat, and hopefully a tiny bit stylish. but who knows? maybe to the rest of the world i look like a plain ole regular guy who got dressed in the dark. the point is, i pick out clothes that i feel good in, and if other people notice me, i hope they’ll appreciate it on some level. i guess mr/ms neon is no different – choosing an outfit that makes him/her feel the way he/she wants to feel, and if everyone else gets it, well…great. if not…so what.

when i left the flea market, i kept thinking how i sometimes stand at the mirror and debate over the tiniest details: should i unbutton my shirt an extra button or is that too much? do my shoes make my feet look ridiculously big? should i roll my sleeves up an extra couple inches or will that make my arms look out of proportion? meanwhile, halfway across the country, ms. neon has pulled on the hot pink spandex, the electric yellow windbreaker, tied back her pony tail and bounced down 14th street without a care in the world. maybe i should have been brave and asked her all those questions. i might have learned something.

my little town

i grew up surrounded by my relatives on a big family ranch south of denver. we were situated between 2 towns, small and smaller. one was the home of my elementary school, the general store where we loved to buy candy, and a very cool art deco truckstop where we occasionally had dinner. the larger town was more cosmopolitan (never has the meaning of that word been stretched further), with 2 drugstores, a couple of grocery stores, gas stations, a liquor store owned and operated – apparently without irony – by my drivers ed teacher. there were several restaurants, the high school, and the county courthouse, populated largely with officials i was related to. my parents had grown up friends with most of the business owners. i’m not sure what year it appeared, but by the time i was in junior high there was a single stoplight, and it may have been 15 years before there was a 2nd. in many ways it was the quintessential small town, and the usual things happened there: the county fair, school plays and pageants, bowling tournaments, church events. there was the time our neighbor brutally murdered his wife, the time my grade school friend derailed a train, the time a teenage girl threw a firebomb into the courthouse and burned it to the ground. you know, typical small town stuff. kind of.

i moved away for college and then settled back in denver. in the mid-90’s i watched my hometown start growing at an alarming rate. the new town fathers loved the increased tax revenue, and it seemed to become a sprawling, unplanned suburb before anyone realized what was happening. the small-town vibe wavered and was quickly disappearing until the 2000’s, when downtown and main street were made over as ‘charming, quaint and historic’. ironic that people destroyed the original and then attempted to recreate it as a marketing tool.

after my parents died and i inherited the house where i grew up, i began spending more time around my old town. i was annoyed by the growth, the traffic, the ugly mish-mash of cheap townhomes and developments, but have to admit it was nice to have some of the modern conveniences close to home. i was no longer stuck if i forgot something in denver – everything i needed was 10 minutes away. still, i missed the simplicity, the quiet streets, knowing almost everyone you saw. i even missed the days when we would have given anything to have a mcdonalds – there are two now. modern conveniences, yes. bland, cookie-cutter big box stores that make it seem like anywhere, u.s.a., not so much. sadly it seems one does not exist without the other.

then, a series of circumstances and i found myself moving back, permanently. i’m in denver almost daily, but unexpectedly find myself taking more and more advantage of things close by. yet i sometimes feel melancholy for the way it once was. then a surprising event – or rather, a series of events – happened shortly after i moved. i went to the courthouse to change my drivers license and car registration –  the entire process took less than 20 minutes. in denver it would have taken longer to find a parking spot. i went to the bank and realized i was in line next to my junior high biology teacher (who also happens to be my cousin). one evening, driving through the supermarket parking lot, i came around a row of cars to see the lane blocked by 2 guys in their late teens, in full cowboy regalia, spinning their lasso’s in the air trying to rope a small sawhorse dolled up to look like a calf. i’d seen this sort of thing many times as a kid, on the ranches of friends. most of the ranches are gone now, so here they were, obliviously blocking an entire traffic line to practice their skills. oddly enough, no one seemed to mind. we just slowed down, carefully drove around the scene, and waved at the cowpokes as they waited for a break in traffic so they could spin their lassos again. in that moment i could feel the spirit that was there when i grew up, the comforting innocence and slow simplicity that i remember, and i realized: the little town hasn’t really come so far after all.

the lonely goatherd

a friend invited me to lunch today – she’s a great hostess and cook, so the food was wonderful and the table settings perfect. another friend joined us, and we had lively conversation that bounced randomly from subject to subject, like it always does with the three of us. as things were winding down and it was time to leave, i thought about the errands i had to run. and then i thought “oh, on my way out of the neighborhood, i can stop on 29th street and get an iced tea!”. this realization filled me with an unnatural joy. after i left nans, walking proudly out of the cafe with my iced-tea-to-go, it occurred to me: i pretty much base every journey in my entire life, no matter how small, around when and where i will get an iced tea to accompany me.

a few years ago, my father was seriously ill. he was in and out of the hospital many times over a period of months, and i frequently picked him up and drove him home when he was discharged. the 4th or 5th time i did this, i pulled up at the hospital, flung open the door, and as the nurses helped him into the car, i reached over to get my to-go cup off the passenger seat. as we pulled away, my father said to me “can you even drive a car without an iced tea between your legs?” i laughed, and wasn’t sure how to respond. this is one of my favorite memories of my dad: sarcastic, funny, slyly observant. and as time has passed, i realize the answer: no.

i’m far too stubborn to admit this happens simply because i have a caffeine addiction. i prefer to think of it as a comforting ritual that i have practiced most of my life. as a teenager, in the summer, when my cousins and i got together, the first thing that happened: we poured glasses of iced tea. so, i have a distinct and early link between iced tea and some of the most sublimely happy times in my life. the minute i got back to my apartment after college classes? iced tea. when i moved into my first apartment? finding the right iced tea container for the refrigerator. maybe the presence of iced tea is all about reassurance. all i know is, when i’m going somewhere, before i leave the house i am plotting when and where i will stop for iced tea. i have tried keeping to-go cups at home and filling them with tea before i head out. i sheepishly admit i often fill the glass half-full, so that i can stop to get more during my journey. true, i am a model consumer, and often the act of stopping to buy something, even as minor as an iced tea, is satisfying. not that buying an iced tea is ever ‘minor’.

so, yes.  addiction, ritual, habit – all of those things. when friends complain to me about trying to break their caffeine addiction and how tough it is, i think “why bother?”. i mean, unless there is some dire medical reason, is it that big a deal? its not like drinking coffee (okay…or iced tea) is going to send me down a path of rampant self-destruction and disaster. in fact, the more i think of it, it’s just the opposite. yes, there is the whole “my head is going to cave in and i will kill someone if i don’t get some iced tea NOW” thing, but there is also the fun, challenging, lovely and economy-stimulating act of seeking out and purchasing a delicious, fresh iced tea. i simply refuse to argue with habit, nostalgia and ritual. i just refuse.