I've got to keep on keepin' on/You know the big wheel keeps on spinnin' around

Nick and I flew to Michigan last weekend for my Peace Corps reunion.

I have many loving things to stay about that. Many oh my gosh so many many.

I returned with my heart so full.

But first I'd like to talk about my own self-inflicted travel predicaments.

The thing is that when I fly, particularly if it's a long and difficult distance, I wind up buying something that will make my air travel experience more complicated. Slightly fraught. Physically uncomfortable.

Twenty-ish years ago, I had three flights on three different brands of airplanes when I went to South Africa, because I booked budget and last minute. This was way before I met Nick, and not that many years after 9/11.

Three airlines and three airports meant going through security thrice.

One of my last days in Cape Town, I saw this large and charming basket, with half-cowries decorating the wide rim.

It was big. It was delicate. I would have to carry it, and it would fill up my arms walking through each airport, and I'd worry about it in the overhead bin on every flight.

I still have it.

Then there was a large wooden turtle in Mexico. The turtle part would've been fine, had it not had long legs with feet sticking down and out, and a long neck sticking up in the air, with the carved head of a woman atop it.

This also had to be carried in my arms, and unwrapped for security because there were nails inside and the X-ray didn't like them.

Then last year, in Bali, I fell in love with a carved wooden king dragon mask. It's really cool. The whole shop had incredible carvings.

Fiona and I returned on our last full day, when I'd decided to go ahead and buy it. And then I was like, oh, who knows if I'll ever make it back to Bali, and maybe I should get two masks? Because Jordan will love this one. And I always find tons of stuff for India, and nothing for my boy.

So I bought two. One for him and one for me, for the living room.

They were much larger than they seemed on the shop wall. And solid wood, quite heavy. I realized this when I was trying to return to the hotel on the back of a hired scooter.

The next morning, Fiona helped me completely rearrange my suitcase and carry-on so I could fit them both separately and surrounded by cushioning clothing.

Fortunately, I've turned into my dad for travel, and now bring my own pillow. That helped.

They arrived in DC unscathed.

And then! Jordan did not love king dragon.

But I still do.

So post-reunion, on the Sunday, Nick and I went into Ann Arbor. The rental car place had given us this bright orange Jeep, which was cute, but had no trunk.

And as such, being from DC where we lock the car door before we leave the garage, and do not leave anything visible in the car, lest the windows get smashed, we were nervous to go into Detroit and be tourists, what with our bags just hanging out in the back.

So we went into Ann Arbor, which Nick hadn't been able to see when the group went Friday, because he'd had to stay back and work.

We had lunch and then wandered a bit, and came across a little market.

Where, almost immediately, we spotted a table with crocheted items, including and most spectacularly, this crocheted triceratops! 

We asked the lovely young woman behind the table about it.

She gave us a price and said it was expensive, because it had taken an entire week to make. Plus the cost of the yarn. Plus a local woman had made the eyes.

I gushed over it a big and then we thanked her and kept walking through the market. I kept talking about the triceratops, and how charming it was.

And finally Nick was like, "Do you love it?"

I said I did.

So we walked straight back to her table and said we'd like to purchase the triceratops.

The young woman's cheeks turned pink and her eyes teared up. She said, "Really?"

Really.

I asked if I could take her photo, and then Nick suggested I get in the photo, and then her younger brother, who was helping her with her stall, got dragged into the picture as well.

It was adorable.

So my triceratops, her name is Ann. Her last name is Arbor.

I got caught in an exit door leaving the airport in DC, because one arm was full of her and the other was dragging my suitcase.

Actually, that's not why I got caught.

There's a big sign over the door saying you can only go out. Exit only. No entry. 

I was all, fine, we're leaving. And then the doors clamped down and I was stuck and I was all what the fuck?

But it was my fault, because with these exit doors, there's a door you go through, and then a corridor, and another door. And there was already a woman in there who was at the exit door.

Apparently you're supposed to wait until the person ahead of you is through.

They don't want both doors open at once so that someone could bypass security and dash in through the out door (out door...)

So the woman in front was struggling with that door, because of me. And Ann, my luggage, and I were squashed in the other set of doors that were trying their hardest to close.

Finally the woman in front got through and then my doors opened and we got through.

And then Nick was all judgy at the other end. 

Because he is a man who reads instruction manuals and knows how things work and also is not the kind of person who is scared of revolving doors because he likely in younger years never tried to squeeze in with someone.

Cathy's partner Tim is an engineer, and while we were talking about his work, it came out that he has written numerous user manuals for cars, and he said, "You've probably never read any." 

And I was all, "NICK READS THE MANUALS!"

And then Nick confirmed this. He reads the manuals so he knows how things work. He knows how our appliances function. He knows what the myriad options are on the car.

So he reads the manuals and I don't, and I live my life limited to the bits of technology that I understand.

And then when there is something extraordinary, then I call him and am like, what does the dashboard light mean that looks like a lotus? Or maybe more like an exclamation point with angry lines coming out each side?

He actually got this one very quickly. I think by now he's used to these questions, having at first been very WTF about the yellow submarine light.

Apparently this light means I'm too close to the person in front of me. Which couldn't be helped in fucking Connecticut or on most of 95, for that matter. 

In searching for a flying song for the title, I was reminded of my difficulty with these song lyrics.

And being with Nick is like being with Big Ol' Chedo Lino, in the best possible way. It means that I always feel safe, which is a feeling that's very important to me. But it also means there is often not enough room for him.

We were on a relatively little plane to Detroit—a Bombardier—which I pronounced bombard + ee-ay, but Nick contends is pronounced bomb-a-deer.

Anyway, they're not all that big, so they took our carry-on luggage before we got on the plane. We only had our personal item. I was a little worried about Ann, since she's not small, but they didn't care that I was carrying a stuffed animal. 

I was going to hold her but then I realized I wouldn't be able to have a drink or eat a snack or read without some difficulty. Nick put our items in the overhead.

And then when he was getting it all out, there was this big long narrow thing in a bag, and the couple behind us said, "Oh, be careful with that."

So Nick handed it to them gently, and then asked what it was.

They said, "It's a monopod."

We were all, huh?

So the guy said, "It's for a camera. A tripod had three legs. This has one. It's a monopod."

And then we disembarked and that was that.

Later, when we were getting ready for bed, I was like, "Isn't that just a stick?"

Mad dogs and Englishmen (and me)

When the kids were quite young, we took them to southern Spain in the hottest hotness ever recorded in the history of heat in Spain.

It was all anyone talked about. It was literally the only topic of conversation, no matter where you went.

It is exactly like this in DC right now.

Except the thing is, I live here.

And apparently every single human to whom I have ever spoken in my neighborhood or in the course of my daily life knows my proclivity for the heat.

Which is all well and good except for the fact that it's as hot as the surface of the sun in DC.

The Capital Weather Gang—whose profession is WEATHER—actually described DC as hell. Read the first line of the photo below.

And while the current heat is in fact Stygian, and I don't prefer it, I still take it over cold. Yes, my ideal is probably 95 degrees and dry. 

In the 90s to 100s and humid is not pleasant.

I do a lot of coming home and immediately swooning onto the sofa like a consumptive Victorian.

And still, I do not complain, because I fervently believe that you get to complain about one season. This is what I tell my kids, who completely ignore me and whine about both excessive heat and cold.

But since I complain bitterly all winter, longing for summer, I just suck it up in summer.

Yesterday I needed to pick up a prescription in the afternoon, so I biked to K Street and back, which is a little over three miles roundtrip, with the return trip almost completely uphill.

By the time I got home I just wanted to drink cool water and lie on the floor. Wanda and I have been hanging out like this a lot.

But the point of my story is this: everyone knows that I prefer heat. And when I run into them, almost to a person, the conversation goes as follows:

Me: Hi! How are you?
Them: It's so hot. It's too much.
Me: Yeah, it's really hot.
Them: I know you like this heat.

They have a tone. As if I'd willed this upon us with my love of summer heat.

I've had to stifle the urge to apologize.  

The first couple times it happened, I actually felt guilty, as if by loving the heat I'd somehow invited this discomfort on others.

So now I am all, "Gosh, even for me, this is too much!"

Reader, it is not too much for me. I would like it to cool down. I'm hoping for a thunderstorm that breaks the heat.

But I would not trade it for cold.

And then I started thinking that it wouldn't be my chosen superpower—I think I'd pick flying or breathing underwater—but lacking a superpower, I wouldn't turn it down.

Like, if I could direct a heatwave, and concentrate it on one person, that would be kind of amazing.

Basically, I could be like, here, have a big wallop of perimenopause. This hot flash, however, is going to last three days straight. Maybe a week.

Depends on how I'm feeling towards you.

That I might find immensely satisfying. What I'm saying is, if someone offered me this superpower, I would not turn it down.

But let's be clear. I don't control the weather. I can barely get my kids to clean their rooms.

In the immortal words of Power Station, “Some like it hot and some sweat when the heat is on.”

Indeed.

Every rose has its thorn/Just like every night has its dawn

I don't claim to be any kind of flower expert, but I can recognize more than one or two.

My mom was an incredible gardener, and in my childhood she always grew zinnias, marigolds (and mariyellows, as I called the yellow ones), snapdragons, cox comb, sweet peas.

And as I mentioned in a previous post, so much of the foliage in Bali was that of my childhood. I used to pronounce frangipani "frangy-pangy"—and it wasn't that long ago that I realized that frangipani is plumeria, and we have it in the US.

It's one of my favorite flower fragrances. (Ooh, the alliteration!)

And a year ago in Bali, I spent a lot of my free time journaling and drinking tea on my porch, luxuriating in the view.

I mean, really. What a blessing!

As Bali is near the equator, darkness comes early. And every evening on my way in, I'd see the Buddha statue out of the corner of my eye, and I'd always think it was a person, and startle before I remembered.

You'd think this wouldn't happen day after day. However. 

Anyway, Fiona would often join me on my porch, and at some point we noticed these particular white flowers.

How could we not have noticed them before? We'd never seen anything like them.

They were in the middle of a bunch of foliage and some water, so not easily accessible. We didn't see them anywhere else on the extensive grounds of the hotel. None on the way to the yoga shala.

I felt lucky to have such unusual water flowers in my garden. They looked like they grew on very thin stalks. Maybe they were some kind of flowering reed?

In any case, clearly rare and tropical.

Even if we learned what they were, we couldn't take them home, as you cannot bring agricultural products into either of our countries.

But we were dying to know. We kept forgetting to ask the hotel staff about them.

We talked about these flowers so much. 

I'd seen a couple of snakes on paths near my room, so I was cautious about stepping into the foliage. But I was dying to know.

So finally, during the day, I decided I was going to tiptoe over, minding my footing and carefully stepping on rocks, to get a close-up and figure out what these were.

Thankfully, I was able to snap these photos. Because the next day, they were gone! Plucked from the garden!

Yes.

So while Indonesian bottle brushes may somehow be more exotic than American ones, I bet they're all made in China, and you can buy them at Home Depot.

John, I'm only dancing

I don't know if you've ever thought of someone from your past and googled their name to find that they are no longer with us.

This happened yesterday.

I googled my friend Debbie, neighbor of Alyssa who had chicken for dinner, to find that she died in 2007.

Her parents are still alive. And so many years ago, they had to say goodbye to their daughter, who would never turn 40.

Her mom had been an actress in Poland before they came to the US. She had a strong accent. This was the era when we learned about ibuprofen as a pain reliever, and she called it "eeboopreen" and so that's what my mom thought it was called for the longest time. 

"Do you need an eeboopreen?" Now I find it cute, but back then it drove me crazy.

The truth is, I hadn't seen Debbie in decades. Something would remind me of her every once in a while, because for about three years, we had a very intense friendship.

I guess all my friendships have always been intense.

At some point her dad came into money, and bought a huge house in a fancier neighborhood, which was in a different school district, and they moved out of our modest neighborhood.

And she hated it. She hated the new school.

One night, she ran away. She walked miles over to the parkland behind our house. She was going to live down by the creek. 

Since this was the early 80s, the "It's 10:00. Do you know where your children are?" era, we'd spent entire days down by the creek, exploring the parkland. We played kick the can with neighborhood kids in the dark.

Our parents weren't actually looking for us until it was clear we weren't home for dinner or bedtime.

Basically, she was going to live down there and I was going to supply her with food.

The plan was not sophisticated. She just wanted out of the painful situation into which she'd been thrust.

We'd read books like My Side of the Mountain and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Running away for a time and living in nature or the Metropolitan Museum of Art seemed like an actual option.

In books like that, where the kids are very self-sufficient, you don't have the view of the parents freaking the fuck out wondering if their child has been kidnapped or killed.

In any case, I think it was my brother who spotted her down by the creek and told my parents.

I mean, the police were out looking for her. It was a crisis.

And in retrospect, I see us as kids, tweens, living in traumatic situations and not having the words. Not having been told that we could ask for help. Not trusting that someone would help us, except our friends.

We couldn't trust our parents to fix the situations when our parents were the cause of them.

Anyway, then her parents got divorced and her mom and the kids moved back to our neighborhood and her dad became a Zionist.

And then my family moved to India, and all we had was letter communication. Which I only succeeded at in starts and fits.

I'd see her in the summer, and they had cable, which meant we'd spent hours in her living room watching MTV. 

She was funny and smart and artistic. She was a year ahead of me, and at some point she was studying ancient Egyptians, and for a project she decided to make jewelry, like in a museum exhibit. So we rolled out clay into snake necklaces and such.

It was a really cool project. I was jealous.

At her house, we had Kraft macaroni and cheese, which we never had at my house. It was magical.

One summer after we moved to India, we came home and stayed with the neighbor next door to our house, which we rented out to another Foreign Service family. I met the son, who had coincidentally been in high school in Kenya with one of my New Delhi besties.

And he was so cute. We met, and then in the way of the teenager, all we wanted to do was make out to Tears for Fears.

We did a lot of that in a very short span of time. His mom wanted him to get a summer job and we wanted to sneak off and make out.

In a horrible coincidence, he was also the boy Debbie had had a crush on the entire previous year of high school. He had no idea.

I never told him, of course, because she'd have killed me. And I never told her about the making out. Why hurt her feelings? I'd be gone in a week.

Debbie is the one who introduced me to David Bowie. She bought the albums and made me tapes. 

We loved David Bowie. We loved him so much. We even loved his weird songs like "The Laughing Gnome," and "Come and Buy My Toys"—which, I learned as a mom reading Mother Goose, is a nursery rhyme. "Please Mr. Gravedigger," on the other hand, is probably not.

At one point, she gave me a special edition album of Diamond Dogs, and I wish I'd kept it, but it got let go somewhere in one of our many moves.

In any case, I hadn't seen her since the late 1980s.  

And I know that when we grieve, the pain we feel is for ourselves. 

I know that with each loss of someone dear from my past, it's a reminder that I don't have my mom to tell. Because I would definitely tell her about Debbie. 

But probably she already knows.

She wasn't mine to lose, and I think, who am I to be sad, when I hadn't tried to contact her for over 25 years?

But I also think, gosh, now I never can.

The quicksand but not a metaphor

On Monday, I returned from dropping my progeny off at camp. This entailed driving almost 1,200 miles to Maine and back. 

I did not go to the beach.

Wendy pointed out that mileage-wise, I drove almost halfway across our country.

So then I started thinking about it and if my geography were better, I might know how many European countries that would equal.

But what I really want to talk about is quicksand.

If you are a person from the 1900s, and particularly if you're from the slice of the 1900s that includes a youth in the 1970s, then we may have shared common fears.

We didn't have a TV when I was a kid, but in any case, this was before the age of cable, and the bulk of programming in India and Bangladesh would've been local.

When we lived in Dhaka, each week we would go to the house of our dear friends who had a small black and white TV to watch Flipper the Dolphin and Little House on the Prairie.

Little House was a huge part of my childhood. My mom and I read the books together. And Mrs. Medley, my delightful second grade teacher, was reading them to us as well.

One day we had a substitute teacher, and she pronounced Almanzo's name wrong, and I was outraged.

Also, when we'd go spend time with my grandmother in North Dakota, we got to watch a whole lot of TV and always watched Little House. We were in Minot, which was the big city, but after all, not so far from the prairie.

Like, when my mom was a kid, they'd walk on the prairie and find arrowheads.

On a side bar, we also watched a nature show sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, though I've forgotten the name of it. And of course we watched Lawrence Whelk.

We ate dinner, which we called supper, at 5:00 pm, and sometimes we got to use TV trays and watch television while we ate.

It was all very decadent. Unimaginable in real life. And really, probably only possible because my dad was not with us.

We were so fascinated by television that we watched any and everything we could. I watched soap operas—their stories, my grandma and aunt called them—in the afternoon. 

Each summer, I would become, over the span of two weeks, deeply invested in The Young and the Restless and One Life to Live.

In any case, I desperately wanted a bonnet, and in retrospect, I find it surprising that my mom didn't make one for me, since she sewed so well and made us so many cute things.

But what I'm saying is, we got our American pop culture in bursts.

And we got enough that I genuinely believed that quicksand was an ever-present danger. 

In case you aren't from this particular era and don't know how to save yourself: If you try to walk or run out of it, you're a goner. You have to spread your body weight and use a swimming motion to safely get to solid ground.

Also, back then the Bermuda Triangle could swallow you at any moment, never to be seen again. It didn't matter that Bermuda was on the other side of the world from us, and we'd never flown, as far as I knew, even remotely close to it. 

The Triangle was there, and waiting.

As if those weren't enough, you could always be knocked on the head and suffer from amnesia. That wasn't terrifying, the way quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle were, but it was still a regular possibility. 

So throughout the 1970s, you had to be emotionally prepared to die of quicksand, disappear from the air, or suddenly have no idea who you were.

Were there other fear list items? Surely there were, but those were my big ones.

So imagine my tremendous joy when a couple weeks ago I learned that a woman fell into quicksand on a beach in Maine!

Her husband immediately pulled her out. So she's fine. I wouldn't be rejoicing her demise or anything.

But quicksand!

It felt like when I know I'm right, and my husband insists on doing something his way, and then it goes badly and at some point it becomes clear that if he'd just done it my way in the first place, things would've been so much easier.

That kind of satisfaction.

I told my friend Pam, who I was staying with in Portland, and she was all delighted as well.

Quicksand! Ha!

I will admit that I kind of wanted to go to the beach and see if we could find any, but it was 62 degrees and raining and I didn't want to investigate my childhood terrors that bad.

On our trip up to Maine, we spent two nights in Boston with friends. The drive to Boston should've taken eight hours, but because Waze told us to go through Connecticut, it took 10 hours and approximately five years off my life.

I was like, what the fuck with Connecticut, which I've always considered an inconveniently-located state in the first place.

A friend who does the drive regularly then offered me a better route that avoids Connecticut completely. But on the return trip I was visiting my beloved college roommate Lesley in Hartford, so there was no way around it.

I feel like this is kind of turning into a chicken for dinner kind of diary entry.

And I am not kidding you, my childhood friend Debbie peeked at her neighbor Alyssa's diary one time, and the entirety of one entry was "we had chicken for dinner".

It drives me crazy that I can't list more than maybe 10 US presidents, I retain almost no historical facts, and my geography is appalling, but I know what Alyssa—who I barely knew and found kind of irritating—wrote in her diary in like 1982.

One might wonder if I had amnesia, but I think it's just the quicksand.