Passage West

Dearest and Closest,
 
On New Years Day we finished our massive clean despite the foray to the ER two nights earlier and despite the rhetorical question muttered under the breath by at least one soldier in our party: “Why the hell is this our tradition, of all the stupid things to do together at the start of the New Year.” Our house, by 9:30 PM, when our egg rolls were finally done and our son safely breathing* and in his bed, was sparkling and neat as a pin (save for the office which had been dusted and the floor mopped but was, admittedly, a tower of chaos). I had bought Dan, who, honestly, did the largest amount of the labor, a handful of yellow tulips and we put them on our small dining room table next to a southerly facing window with a clean light blue and pale yellow striped tablecloth underneath. We drank a couple of cans of Sapporo and ate our eggs rolls, the tulips bending their common heads in genuflection.
 
The next morning, as it snowed for the fourth day in a row, I felt such a deep satisfaction with our clean house and the yellow tulips on the crisp tablecloth against the white snow falling behind the windowpane. My life felt almost organized. A shocking feeling after everything that happened in 2009: A baby and a life changing Recession, a journey across the country and a more solitary internal journey to becoming a person who is flexible with life falling apart at the edges; the acquisition of a long distance runner’s mentality when looking at my marriage during intense stress and the beauty of time with family who came to our rescue. In 2009 Dan got into grad school, I sold my book, our lives changed and our son began to walk and say, mostly (irritatingly), Dada. A big year.
 
 
Since the cleaning which, although very grumpy inducing, felt wonderfully, almost religiously satisfactory in the end, as if some penance had been done, or some marathon run in order to get to the wonderfully greasy ending of stuffing our faces with egg rolls dipped in homemade peanut sauce, I’ve been writing in a room I was lent. Let me say it better: I’ve been lent a room of my own to write in. A couple whose names I won’t mention here in case they’d rather I didn’t and who are the subjects of a documentary Dan is shooting, have a beautiful brownstone in the West End of Portland with a totally empty third floor and one room that needed only a desk to be the perfect writer’s retreat. They offered me the space anytime I want to come. For this writer, it’s like a dream come true. I had been writing feverishly during naps and when Dan was home with earplugs in, propped by pillows on our bed (where I sit now as I write you), the mess of our lives around me. And it’s not that that was impossible—writers should be able to write anywhere, I think. But, the quiet and peace this room gives me, away from the noise and clutter and knowledge that Dan is now feeding our son lunch (and I’m not included!) or he’s on the phone or paying a bill or calling Central Maine Power to ask them how in the hell our bill is as high as it is or that he’s building a wonderful block tower with M. which I will not see but, even through my earplugs, will, definitely, hear tumble. So, instead I’m alone in this room, save for Marcello the cat who knows how to open the door and comes in and bosses me around and then sidles up to me for a scratch and leaves me wanting more. The other cat, Fellini, is less interested in me, less of a ladies man. But I guess that could have been expected.
 
I was derailed for almost a full week in the writing department when I was felled by a sickness that threw me in bed for days on end where I lay prostrate, listening to Dan and M. play and eat and I couldn’t even satisfy myself that I was doing something useful. Instead I cheered myself up with some Alice Munro stories. That’s’ a joke. I made it so I couldn’t sleep with some Alice Munro stories. Well, at least she gave me something to think about as I coughed all night.
 
Although it’s early, 2010 has already produced more walking—across the room! —And more words ‘joos” and “doggie” and “mama” (with more but not quite satisfactory frequency) and “book” and “kitty”…and let’s see there are others but I’m forgetting them. Also 2010 brought sadness this week because a daughter of a family friend killed herself. She was only twenty seven years old. Now, as a mother, when I hear a story like that ,I just want to hold my son close and try to protect him from everything I know and don’t know about the world and our futures. Every night I get in bed and my mind reels back to the images it’s made about this sad story, shocking and frightening. “No,” I try to tell myself, “think about apples and snow and yellow tulips.”  To little avail. My mind wanders to Haiti and then to the last Alice Munro story I read and then, the switch gets too flipped to push down:
“Dan. Are you awake?”
Of course he isn’t, that’s why he’s breathing like the steam radiator in the corner, despite my hacking up phlegm less than a foot from his head, despite the fact that I think he should take more frequent less long breathy breaths.
“Dan?”
“What, Cait?”
“Do you think M.’s ok? In his room? I haven’t heard him yet over the monitor and it’s almost eleven.”
“I’m sure you’ll hear him in less than an hour, like every night, and like every night he’ll be in our bed by one AM.”
“Can you go check on him?”
“No. Leave him alone. He’s asleep. I’m asleep. Leave me alone.”
“But I’m worried.”
“You’re always worried. “
“But?”
And then over the monitor a mewl and Dan gets up to go and in a few moments our son is snuggled safely against my chest making little contented cheep cheep baby chicken sounds and Dan is back to pretending he’s the radiator.
 
I’m baking bread tonight and making stingy granola (more like toasty oats with cinnamon, maple syrup and nutmeg) in an effort to save more money and put my finger in the dam of the insane food costs we’re all suffering from in this country. I’ve made a pot of lentils and rice for M. (who only wants solid chunky food now, no more pureed anything) and I’ve made some black bean dip for pretzels because Dan has refused to eat another bite of hummus.
 
Our house, thanks to the sickness and a toddler is not as wonderfully tidy as it was on January second. But, it’s cozy. I feel lucky. Lucky to be alive, lucky for my son and family here within these walls and far-flung, I feel lucky for my room to write in, lucky for the work, lucky for a New Year  and a new beginning.
 
Love and white January light,
 
Caitlin.
 
* I think I may have freaked some of you out with my story about our son’s penchant for holding his breath and then playing dead while his mother ages forty years. This particular baby issue can be found in your baby book under the heading “tantrums.” Although it would be cruel to treat these episodes as some kind of bratty, spoiled behavior thereby not taking into account the actual feelings that produce them, it is possible is to treat them as if they were minor moments in the day. Which means that every so often I can be found holding my child who's turning blue and singing to him at the top of my lungs “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” and then clapping my hands as a desperate divertissement and saying “breath” a word which M. has now learned. The absurdity of the whole scene is beyond rational comprehension. But, luckily, what we’re dealing with is not life threatening, is not dangerous, and, with the proper amount of care and also lack of hysteria (for instance screaming and running to call 911 is not advised) we’ll all be fine.
 
PS: I leave you with one more scene from the bedroom:
 
Dan, asleep, he’s always annoyingly sleeping. Me, awake with an odd situation:
 
“Dan. Dan! DAN!!!”
“ What, Caitlin.”
“My left foot is picking up vibrations.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m serious, it’s picking up some kind of radio waves or something. It’s tingling. But like a cell phone vibrating.”
“Like a cell phone vibrating?”
“ Yes. Is the bed vibrating every few seconds?”
“No.”
“Are you awake enough to be sure?”
“ I’m sure. Your left brain is picking up vibrations.”
“Not my brain, Dan. God. Are you even listening? My foot. “
“Foot, brain. Same thing.”
“Dan!!!”
“What? “
“I can’t sleep. My foot.”
“Go to sleep Caitlin.”
 
And like that I was left alone with my foot transmitting Morse code and my husband sleeping in the cocoon of his deep, loud breathy breaths.

Dearest and Closest,

On New Year’s Eve every year Dan and I clean. We started this tradition the year we got together, in 2005. It was something I had begun as a single woman who hated New Year’s and he readily, (trust me, he really did) prescribed to the task. If I think back on it, I remember it was originally my mother’s idea, but, nonetheless, we cleaved to it. I love getting everything all neat and tidy so that when you start a new year, you’re really starting fresh. This is the kind of clean that really gets rid of all the grime of the past year—we wipe out cupboards and wash the floors, wash all the curtains and the rugs, change the sheets and organize our socks. No cobwebby corners left unwiped. No windows left smeared with Christmas goose. No Christmas ornamentation or gilding left to distract us from the work of January, which, one of my favorite months, I’ve always felt is the month to get serious and organize our lives. We celebrate our cleaning with an all day fry up of egg rolls on New Year’s Day and then, on Dan’s birthday, which comes every year on the second of January, no matter how exhausted or broke we are from the holidays, we celebrate again, proving that in January the year starts anew and we should rejoice not only at that but, for me, the gift I, at least, feel I was given when the world decided to grace us with his optimistic, steady presence.

This year we started early because we have a one year old and I’m writing every day for a period of time and there just don’t seem to be enough hours to get everything done. Nonetheless, it’s New Year’s Eve and all we have clean is M.’s room and the kitchen. The bathroom is still a seedy wreck. The living room and dining room still hung with dry and sprinkling wreaths, the hallway piled with boots and jackets and sand from the road.

We were slowed down not only by life with a baby and how long everything seems to take but also an odd couple of nights, last night and the one before, when M. cried with a wide open, body stiffening cry, that allowed no breath and made him turn blue and then, after a deep inhalation, he collapsed into what seemed like death. The first night I screamed and clapped and ran for the phone and he suddenly revived in Dan’s arms, crying a red faced, shocked yelp. Last night, the incident was worse and longer and we ended up for half the night in the Emergency room doing an EKG and numerous tests until we came home in the wee hours of the morning, exhausted. What we think, or they think, currently, is that he has a non-life threatening syndrome that makes him cry to the point of not breathing and it’s called “Breath Holding Syndrome.” Eventually his body will override his mind and he will breath, but he may turn blue, look dead and pass out. Just what every parent wants to go through at 8 PM. I have no idea why this has happened, except he’s teething and uncomfortable. Honestly he’s the most easygoing child who hardly ever even cries, so this, this extreme reaction is, frankly, soul shakingly terrifying. I also feel I’m somehow to blame. The first incident happened after I handed him to Dan so I could put my PJ’s on and get into bed with him, hoping that getting into our bed together would assuage his discomfort and help him sleep. This handing off, apparently, hit an abandonment nerve so deep I could not jolt him into knowing I hadn’t even gotten as far as the dresser drawer until I screamed and clapped in his face and then clasped him to me. The second night he became frustrated with nursing. Maybe it was that he wanted more milk than my body is making these days, or his mouth hurt. I don’t know. But, suddenly, lying next to me he went stiff as a board and after what seemed liked eons and another bulgy eyed collapse, finally came to. Regardless, this hits my soft place of innate mother’s guilt like a spear.

Tonight, tentatively, we will try bedtime again. Today it snowed a nice feathery cover over the ground and I went out to the stores to get our ingredients for egg rolls, came home, bundled my son and myself up, put Hopper in his halter and leash and we took off for a walk in the snow. It’s dark now, New Year’s Eve is beginning and I’m thinking of all the hopes and dreams and anxieties and anguishes in the world and saying a quiet prayer: for bedtime, for my son, for myself, for Dan and for everyone out there I know and love and also those I don’t know but still want to love. The world is opening up to, what I hope will be, a great new year: a year when war will end, peace will be brokered, families will come together and suffering will diminish. One can hope, right? 

God bless you.  Happy New Year.

Caitlin.



Dearest and Closest,

Last night, in the late afternoon winter gloaming, I was walking in a field in Yarmouth, pushing M. in his off roading stroller and Hopper was running ahead. It was unseasonably warm, but it has been everywhere, I guess. The sky striped dark and inky gray waves against palest bridal yellow before it plunged into inevitable darkness. Just before full, indisputable obscurity fell, a V of Canada Geese passed overhead, honking as they went. They were backlit by the last pink shreds of light in the dusky sky, and the white on their necks gleamed. My heart leaped and without thinking I pulled back the hood of M.’s stroller, pointed upward to show him, his face up stretched, his ears trained to the wonderful sounds of nature and then I clapped up to the geese and yelled “Bravo!” as they passed. I probably scared them. I looked around sheepishly afterwards to see if anyone other than Hopper and M. had witnessed my unbridled joy. What I wanted, in that moment, was to celebrate the amazing effort and true heroism it takes to fly across continents with only the internal memory of the body to guide you. This is the heroism of survival and life. The heroism we hear so little about in a world that’s been reduced to shopping and packaging, blackberrys and email, outrageous war and unnecessary ruin.

Lately, in my book, I’ve been writing about our collapse in LA and the difficult decision we made to come home. It’s been hard going. I feel like I’m reliving every moment and most of it hurts. I wrote today about our cat, Ellison, getting sick. Tomorrow, or Sunday, I fear, I will have to delve into her death on the day we left. I will have to tackle the emotional fallout that followed and yet the way we needed to keep going and choose life, even laughter, because we had a son and a world we still wanted to believe in. I will have to address this place inside me that will never forgive our year in LA or the Recession because it resulted in such final and insulting death. Sometimes, I hate being a writer.

I write during naps and during little windows when Dan is home or I’m lucky enough to have a babysitter. I write openly and sloppily, not changing grammar or spelling because all I need to do is get the story down. I’m trying to write like I’m sitting down and telling you this story right here, right now. I’m trying to say something meaningful. And I’m trying to tell the truth. Big tasks. But, as my friend Richard Ford once said, a writer should never complain about her work being hard. So I don’t. Instead I feel so lucky every day I could almost kiss the sky.

Lately it’s like I need not only the silence of the house when M. goes to nap, but also the hum of the monitor, my outer body umbilical cord, to write. When a baby sitter is here, I have a hard time concentrating—there’s more vibration in the house as they play and talk, even when I’m forcibly screening them out. When M. is asleep it’s predictably silent, except for his deep breathing over the tiny loudspeaker of the monitor. And there’s a deadline—so I write like the wind until I hear his cry.

Last night after I fed himself a dinner of what I call “turkey stew,” which is organic turkey and lots of vegetables simmered in a pan and then blended in the Cuisinart, after the bath, after the stories, after hanging out on my chest in the Moby baby pouch for a while, when I put M. down on his creamy white sheet that looked almost like vanilla yogurt in the pale darkness, the moon came through a slit in his curtains, white and crisp and the color of winter. I had this moment standing over his white crib, looking at my innocent son, the sheet white below his flushed cheek and pink lips and on top of him a white mohair blanket and I thought, “My god this is what angels look like!” Every mother feels this way, I bet. And especially this time of year.

It is, of course, the season of darkness and lights, tinsel and confection, innocence and experience. Standing there in the moonlight, I thought, for the first time in my life, I’m ready: I want to experience every dark moment this winter, every grace of light, every breath of holiday, every torn piece of wrapping paper and every song that heralds the pagan worship of earth and darkness, light and joy with this child whom I’m so lucky to call my own.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hopper.

November 1, 2009

Dearest and Closest,

I did. I said I wouldn’t fill up your inboxes with deathless prose and that I was done done done. And I sort of was…but then I started surreptitiously posting little bits to my blog site and then it seemed like I could, maybe, say some more…and today is such a beautiful day (at least here in Maine—the perfect leaf fluttering fall day with blue skies and warm sun and golden leaves of the sun all over the place) and you’ve got an extra hour anyways because of daylight savings, that I thought, why not tell you all these things I’m full up with and could almost not contain as I took Hopper for a run (our fourth this week) this morning.

The problem with the jogging (which if you saw Hopper and me you might consider to be more like funny looking high step power walking) despite the added emotional benefits and the fact that I might just be able to melt the last seven pounds or so of baby weight as I run, is that, these days, I wet my pants. No matter what I do. It’s embarrassing. I want to put a sign on both sides of my shirt, like one of those racing numbers people wear in marathons, that says “Post-Baby Leakage. Look away!” Because everyone is looking, or I think they are which makes me neurotic,  but what am I supposed to do? Not run? Short of putting one of M.’s diapers on I’m sort of stuck…and believe me I’m wearing black and today I tied Dan’s long sleeved t-shirt around my back, at least, but still: I had to run by a little klatch of thirty something guys who were standing around talking about girls and I felt really silly. Thank God I’m married and Dan is stuck with me, because otherwise, in an urban area, this would really be too much. Please don’t tell me about Kegels. I know. But has anyone ever tried to do a more ridiculous exercise?

Other than the trickle down effect of my running, our lives are, finally in some kind of zone that’s sort of wonderful. Don’t get wrong, I still have the Herculean task of writing an ENTIRE book in what is now four months and counting, but thanks to having an agent who forced me to write outline after outline after outline despite the fact that I kept saying “I have the blog, that’s an outline,” I sort of know what I’m doing in the sense that I’m appropriating Winston Churchill’s famous saying “When you’re going through hell, keeping going” and I’m just writing forward, typos and spelling errors bedamned. I’m on chapter eight about crazy Claire upstairs and how she thought Dan was Obama and then she started harassing me when I was alone and Dan was in Tucson and I was puking my brains out with pregnancy poisoning. So, other than the writing and the fact that I have not yet received the first installment of my advance so that we can, truly, set our lives up with some baby sitting help and pay a few more bills, we did borrow some money form some friends to close the gap here, so to speak, and Dan quit his bartending job at Caiolas. He told me he was sort of sad about it (not so sad he didn’t want to do it) because, he said, it was the most ideal bartending job he’d ever had. Can you really blame him for feeling this way? I mean many many people pay high prices to hang out and eat Abby Harmon’s food, and here he got to shoot the shit with her and eat her creations all evening long while hob nobbing with foodies about wine and food and getting paid to do so. Even so, Dan’s home much more when he’s not in school and there’s a calm that’s starting to come over our lives and our marriage as we carve out this structure of him making his work and going to school and me writing and our lives spinning around M. and Hopper who are truly the our centers of gravity.

This past Monday we went apple picking and M. picked his first apple and held it clutched in his fat little hand like it was a prize he’d won. Hopper ran around him like a mad man with the biggest Jack Nicholson grin and Dan hauled the apples. All the way home M. gummed his Prize winning Jonah Gold and twirled it like a hot potato in his hands and was apoplectic whenever it fell to the side of the car seat, invariably on Hopper’s head. We picked so many apples it was a bacchanal of the apple harvest, just us alone in the orchard an hour’s drive from here, in Turner, with the mountains surrounding us and the light golden shafts of honey. This week I made applesauce galore and canned it and then I made four apple pies, three of which went in the freezer and the fourth Dan and I polished off yesterday morning in bed as M. took his morning nap.

Apropos of cooking and canning for the long winter, I’m rereading the Little House on the Prairie books and writing about westward expansion and the American psyche. I’ve also been writing about Ellison. It’s so odd to write about her—I’m writing, my head down in my computer and I can almost touch her with my words, feel her, smell her, hear her, and then I look up and M.’s making wake up noises through the baby monitor and my heart literally breaks when I see she’s not here.

Last week I left M. alone with Dan for a night—the first time I’d been away from him for so long—and went to Connecticut for Vanessa’s fortieth birthday party. Taking the train down New England to Westport, having had my first real cup of caffeinated coffee in almost ten months, I was elated and it felt so good to be alone, on the train, reading and writing and just…well, I was hopped up on caffeine so I felt amazing, kind of like what I imagine the first hit of cocaine might be like. The night before I left, M. appeared to have said his first word, “Dada” and have connected it with the tall skinny blond guy kicking around our apartment. But, of course, I was skeptical. When I came home, “Dada” was indeed the word of the hour. Luckily, though, two days ago, M. had the sense to say his second word and he said “Mama.” So. We’re even. Sort of. He’s got two teeth, a third coming in which kept him up all night last night until he finally slept on my chest and a fourth, fifth and sixth ready to pop. It’s all or nothing in the teeth department, poor chap.

In other news, despite the fact that I wrote a teary post that our spider, Charlotte, outside our kitchen window had died that freezing weekend in the middle of October when it seemed more like late November, she seems to have been resurrected (who says fall is all about death?) and is spinning new webs daily and eating bugs. She’s our Teflon spider. More news is that my dear friend Craig Pospisil did the amazing gesture of dedicating his newest collection of plays to me (Check it out, it’s called “Choosing Sides” and many of them were commissioned, edited, staged and directed by me) which was such an honor I still get giddy every time I pat the cover, which I do often. Even bigger news in the Craig world is that he asked his partner Alix to marry him and she said yes (smart woman). Also, M. was baptized on the most beautiful fall day and we truly celebrated his birth with Aran and Margot here all the way from Mexico, Vanessa from Connecticut and Craig and Alix from Manhattan. Rob McCall, who married us, did the service out in the field where we were married with a little clutch of family and friends standing by. This year,  I’m actually looking forward to the holidays, which never ever happens, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m so glad to be home in New England on terra firma and I can’t wait to see snow or, if, and this is more likely, it’s because of my child with whom every event, every tradition, every new moment is like the best Christmas present ever, only every single day.

So, all that is what I wanted to say. Also I wanted to say to Sarah in Kansas thank you so much for writing in and staying with me on this journey—I almost feel like I know you by now!-- and I tried to write you back, but the email was returned.

Love to everyone. Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hop.

The spider out our kitchen window, whom we've been watching since we moved here in late August, is dying. We've watched her every day assiduously build her web, kill flies and suck their blood, pick out the body parts and start all over again. It's been cold the last few days, feeling more like November to me than October and she's slowed down. Today she didn't come out to rebuild her web. When Dan got up this morning to get ready to go shoot a documentary he's been working on, I handed him some coffee and said "I've got sad news, our spider is dying." "No," he said. "I just checked on her last night." We have been waiting with a screen we've wanted to put in that window until she died--not waiting with baited breath, just unwilling to disturb her with our human need for a little more circulation in our kitchen. Now, we get the screen, but a friend is gone. A sad day.

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Some of you may notice that this blog has become...much more bloggy. I just don't have the head space while writing the book to write those long essay like pieces--I hope to come back to that soon, and, in fact have mapped out a whole concept for a new blog I want to start once the book is done.  I really believe in putting real WRITING in these things. But now, instead, I'm writing my thoughts as they come, sharing the world as it hits me. Bear with me.

Love, Caitlin.