A World of Orphans

A few years ago the TV show "That 70's Show" ended and the LA Times ran an article about it, they asked each of the actors how their lives had changed since the show began. On of the lead actresses on the show was someone I knew pretty well Debra Jo Rupp.  I read through the whole thing and it was now famous stars like Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis talked about their careers and money and fame.  Then I got to Debra Jo's reply.  She said that in the eight years since the show began she had become an orphan.

It was the first time I'd ever heard a grown up use that word to describe themselves.  And it struck me.  I'd known her mother had died but that was just part of the natural cycle of life, she wasn't young, burying your parents is just something you do.  Yet this show had been the break Debra Jo had waited a lifetime to get, a regular part on a regular show guaranteeing her an income for life, she wasn't some young kid who had just struck it rich she was a professional who had worked hard in her industry her whole life and now she was financially secure.  But that wasn't what she marked as the biggest change in her life.  The biggest change was becoming an orphan.

My parents are in their 70s and the last couple of years have been filled with some major health scares.  My mom's 6 month check for her cancer came back yesterday and it was clean. So it looks like cancer (the one she had had only a 15% 5 year survival rate) will not be what kills her.  Still she's 71 years old, in 5 years she'll be 76 how much longer than that will she realistically live?  I've had to face the very real possibility of losing not only her but also my dad in the last year or two.   It's been terrifying.

I was having this conversation with a friend of mine.  She lost her dad without warning two years ago when he was only 61.  She told me that she missed him everyday but the strangest thing for her was that the dynamics between her and her mother had changed since his death, that she felt she was also letting her mother go too.  She said to me "We are all orphans in the end, and we all go through the process of becoming one."

It was the second time I'd heard it put that way and again it struck me.  Because that is how it feels.  Not that it should, I am not Oliver Twist, my parents have done their job and I am strong and independent. But still the idea of losing them makes me feel vulnerable and alone.  And in the end I know I'll just be another orphan left behind by time.

Ghosts

It is a little known and completely unpublicized fact that I own a haunted hotel. Not haunted in the big creepy Shining way instead it is quietly haunted. And I have asked everyone who knows to keep it quiet.

The only evidence for the haunting was the people who saw it and the security cameras that showed it. Nothing major really, just the spoons on the wall swinging back and forth in different directions. It scared my office boy William. For myself I knew long before this that the place was haunted.

William thinks the hotel is haunted by the last owner, a German man who died before his time in Germany of cancer. I don't agree.

I don't know that we have a ghost. A single individual living in the walls, I believe that these exist but it's not how it feels to me. I think more that the hotel has the residual energy of many many people. That energy and matter are, as Einstein proved interchangeable. I think that long after people leave somewhere some of the energy they left there remains behind.

The hotel has been there a long time, many people have come and gone. I think that some of their energy lives on, stuck perhaps in time or space. Some of this energy is good, happy people on vacation, some is not. Somewhere stuck in cement is ever tear I cried there, somewhere in the walls is all the frustrated rage I felt when I moved here. Nestled in the mortar is the loneliness of knowing you are with someone who doesn't love you.

I never felt comfortable in the kitchen of the restaurant. Not when I lived there. I would enter it to cook and always feel that I wasn't alone, that it wasn't a welcoming space. When the hotel is empty it scares me. When it is full it is a fun place but when it is empty the ghosts fill the holes left by the guests. I feel this way about any place that normally has a lot of people, schools after hours terrify me, public buildings on public holidays are places I walk past uneasily.

When I was a child there were two “ghost houses” on our street. They were old houses that had been abandoned and closed up and kids weren't supposed to enter. The first one was knocked down before I was old enough to be dared into doing something so stupid as enter an abandoned house. The second one I only went in once.

In it's day it had been a nice house, a white Victorian similar to the cold unwelcoming house my mother had grown up in. Pretty lattice work on the front, a small porch. My brother and I climbed over the fence through the hole in the wood past the “No Trespassing” sign with his friends. I must have been 10 and Michael 8, old enough to be bullied into doing something you knew was wrong but not old enough to understand the consequences of doing it.

We didn't have to break in the door, it hung on an angle not quite closed and we walked in. As soon as we entered I knew why the house had been abandoned. The floor was wrong. It sloped away from us and down towards the back of the house. We followed it down, through the kitchen, downward to the back door, and through the door we could see the hole the house was slowly falling into, the embankment that was eroding away taking the house with it.

I walked back slowly into the living room I didn't want to go any further. I peeked in the bedrooms to say I had done it but all I wanted to do was leave that house. It felt like the house was screaming around me, like it was a living entity in despair, or perhaps it was just my imagination. Michaels' friends dared us to enter the house with them at night. But there was no amount of peer pressure that would ever make me enter that house again. I exited as rapidly as possible pulling Michael with me and telling myself that the reason I was scared was because the house was unsafe.

I never went into that house again, and neither did Michael. I would see it every day when I walked past it and I would walk faster until I was past the house. When they finally tore it down I was happy but the air of sadness seemed to linger even over the empty lot.

The last house I lived in in LA was like that. I bought the house not because it was beautiful, or nice but because it was cheap and close to my work. It was never a happy house. I thought it was just that I was not happy there but when we moved out and moved next door none of us wanted to go back into the house. It scared us all too much. We had moved out and only the ghosts remained.My daughter whose home it had been her whole life would not re-enter it even though we were only living across the driveway. And when the house was torn down I was glad. But to this day 4 years later the lot is still empty, unbuilt, cursed. There is something living there still, some energy, something that didn't leave when the timbers of the house were crushed and taken away.

I like my house in Costa Rica not because it is a beautiful house but because it feels good. Every time I enter it I feel a warm sense of welcoming. When I am alone in the house I am alone, no-one follows me around and everything is peaceful. My daughter complains about the house all the time about how she wants to leave, how she wants to move to a new house, a nice house like her friends. She bitches that our house is too old, too broken. She wants a new house with a pool and I can't get it for her. I would like to. She underestimates what our house has. She says it is boring. I can only respond that it is a happy house even when she is not happy in it. I wonder if her continuing dislike and my continuing loneliness will wreck our house, fill it with a sense of lonely abandonment and destroy the sense of home I feel within it.

The wet season is coming and again the hotel will be empty. Filled with only the sounds of absence. With the economy the way it is it may be a quiet time. The restaurant as much as they annoy me create noise and the ghosts in the kitchen are quiet in comparison.

Maybe I'm crazy. Perhaps there is no such thing as ghosts. Perhaps there is no residue energy anywhere in the world and it is only me who thinks she can feel such things. However don't tell William there are no ghosts, he may have to show you the video of the dancing spoons and then you may have to believe too.

Why it doesn't always pay to get your car fixed.

About 2 weeks ago I got four new tires for the car.  We'd been on our way to San Jose, hit a pothole at 1am and blown out two tires in the middle of nowhere.  The police had circled for an hour while a helpful Samaritan and my kid's boyfriend drove off looking for somewhere to get a tire fixed at 1am in the morning.  Finally the police knocked on the door of a local repair man and told him to get our tire fixed because it was too dangerous for us to be where we were much longer.  Tire actually wasn't fixable but miracle of miracles the guy could sell us a second hand tire.  You have to realize that my tires are special extra wide sport tires and even most of the tire stores don't carry them so to say we got lucky is an understatement.

The month before I'd gotten work done on the front, putting in new steering rods and some other big metal thing and finally the clanking sound had stopped.  Of course they'd done it wrong the first time and put in the wrong steering rod so you couldn't actually turn a sharp turn but the second time they'd put in one that didn't rub, but the people who had done the work had left the wheel alignment so bad that the steering wheel was at a 90 degree angle when we were driving in a straight line. So getting four new tires didn't seem like a bad idea, and they could fix the wheel alignment while they were at it.

Four night ago after my father telling me that his friend had done a screenwriting course and sold three screenplays I drove out into the night angry.  Pissed off, angry, driving fast while rain fell.  Yet when I went around that last corner I wasn't going that fast, the sensation was different than I'd ever felt.  I've skidded but this was unique.  The car didn't start to leave the road when I touched the brakes, the car was leaving the road, I slammed on the brakes and then I was off the road, in a concrete ditch slammed into a concrete wall. 

The first thing I thought was "why didn't the airbags go off?" And then "Christ my head hurts." I sat there for a bit shaking, then I got out of the car to look. I was sure I'd destroyed the headlights, possibly the radiator.  I looked and everything looked ok.  There was a hissing.  I figured it was probably the radiator or the tire.  I was in the middle of nowhere and I decided to drive home.  There was nothing else for it. If the tire blow out on the road had taught me anything it was that I was not strong enough to change the tire.  So I drove with my eye on the thermostat.  No change.

The car kept swerving all over the road, I guessed it was the tire. What I didn't know was that it was the steering rod.  The new steering rod which has a ball joint in it had separated, the ball had come out of the joint. That's what sent me off the road. 

When I finally surveyed the damage the aluminum wheel had cracked on impact.  The shock absorber had exploded, the new bushings had popped but the new steering rod had not one scratch on it, it had just turned into two parts, and it looks like it did that before I hit the wall.

So we put the old parts back on and the car is running.  Still needs a shock absorber.  And in reality working air bags.  Now I have to wonder if it's worth getting it fixed.

Getting up in my grill

There's something to be said about a good fight. A decent clean fight where you scream and they scream and you get up in each other's grill.... there's something to be said for both parties knowing what the hell getting up in your grill means.  There is something to be said about understanding exactly what the fuck the person yelling at you is saying and there is something to be said about having the ability to talk back to scream words that make sense in the way that fuck you bitch makes sense but have sex you female dog does not.

The problem with living your life in a foreign language is that the comebacks of your youth just don't work. You have to fight not just fair but clean.  And while you are screamed at all you can do is slowly assemble words to reply with, words that are too slow to stop the next barrage, words that are too clumsy to stop the assult.

You actually don't swear at all, you are super polite and in the end are left shaking with frustration.

Then when the person who has been screaming at you tells the police that you are just a gringo and don't have any rights you don't even have a comeback. And when the police officer says that everyone has the same rights under the law you know it's a lie because you have no rights, not even the right to yell FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING BITCH, GO SCREW YOURSELF, ROT IN FUCKING HELL.

Once upon a time

Mary's mother could not live by a budget.  It was not her largest failing but it was one she tried not to let stop her.  She could not live within her means or save but she could work.  She could work very very hard.  So when Mary said "Mom can I have....." Mary's mother always said yes.  She wanted to give her child everything, and in order to do so she just worked harder.

For this reason Mary spent a lot of time alone.

Mary was a magical child, one who could live for days within her own mind.  She knew how hard her mother worked and she didn't ask to be played with or looked after.  She would look after herself, get her own food, entertain herself with her selection of electronics and by drawing.

Mary did not like school, she had no friends.  She did not complain, she just spent her recess and lunchtime in the library reading a book.  Mary's magic made her different from all the other children.  She didn't need them and they knew it, avoiding her the way that sheep will avoid the sheepdog, with a little fear and suspicion.  The other children spoke about Mary more often than they spoke to her.  Mary who had little use for them thought of the other children as an annoyance in her life and school merely as an inconvenience.

One day Mary's mother couldn't work hard enough to send Mary to the school she hated.  There was no other school she could attend, so her mother sent her away to live with her grandparents.  Mary's mother missed her every day.

Why I hate Neil Gaiman, or want to

I had never heard of Neil Gaiman until about 4 years ago. I didn't read comics (I mean I'm not a boy) and although I like SciFi/Fantasy as a genre I'd missed his imput to it. I was surprised when all my friends talked about him as one of their favorite writers, after all I thought I'd never heard of him.

But I had.  I'd grown up listening to stories of my parent lives before my arrival, of their years in England, in the States.  I'd heard all about their good friends David and Shelia Gaymen, David and Shelia had a son older than me, and a daughter who was married to a friend of my dad's. A few years ago David and Shelia were visiting their daughter (who lives 3 minutes walk from my parents house) and they had lunch. I found this out later.  About the same time that I found out that they Gaymens were really the Gaimans and their son was the writer everyone had been talking to me about for years.

So I went online and read his blog.  He was talking about how his house was cracked at the foundation and he would have to tear down part of it and rebuild.  The thing was that very day I'd had an engineer over to my house, my house was cracked at the foundation and I would have to tear it down and rebuild it.  Only difference I didn't have a penny to do it.  So while Neil went to work on fixing up his old historic house I kept living in my rapidly decaying non-historic badly built piece of shit.

Another couple of years went past till I actually picked up a Neil Gaiman book in the guest room of a friends'.  I wanted it to be one of those books, one of those that grabbed me and kept me up reading as fast as I could forgetting that dawn was going to come. I wanted it to be one of those books that dragged me to the end then left me regretting I had finished it. I wanted it to be great. I wanted him to be one of the best writers I'd read, I wanted him to live up to everyone's acclaim.  I read a couple of chapters and put it down, it was another year or so before I finished the book, because I just didn't care.  I tried again, I read another of his books.  Nothing. I felt nothing. I read another. Nothing.  I looked for something to love but it was all pretty ordinary.  Nothing about the plots grabbed me, I didn't care about the male characters, the female characters were thinner than tissue.  I wanted to like his books and I didn't.

I wanted his books to be great.  I wanted to say, well he's so much better than me as a writer. He's fantastic that's why he's famous and I'm not. But I didn't feel it.

Then his commencement speech was all over the internet and I watched it.  And I heard him talk about his life and how he got to be a famous writer. He started as a journalist.  That had been my plan. He'd gone after it despite everything.  And I hated him.  Because I didn't do that. I didn't go on to be a journalist despite that being the plan, because it didn't make enough money and my family needed money. I didn't go after writing despite everything because there was always something more important than myself, my parents, my husband, my kids there was always someone else to put my attention on, always something else more important that my needs, always something else more important than my desires or dreams.

And in the end it was no-one's fault but my own.  And now I'm 42 years old.  I've never cared enough to be truly successful at anything. 

I was sitting watching IronMan 3 with my kids.  It was an ok movie, not the best IronMan but one of the better action films anyway. I'd just sent off another screenplay to a screenplay competition and was waiting to hear back.  Anyway I am sitting in the middle of a movie theatre and all of a sudden while explosion noises are going off all around me I realize.  I realize that I'm not good enough.  I realize that I've never written a script anywhere as good as this third knockoff of an old comic idea.

Three weeks later I get my notification from the screenwriting competition. I am not good enough. I didn't even make it through the first round.  I didn't even make it to the last 1000 entries. I had in the past but not this time. It wasn't that I didn't win, I didn't even get in the top third.

I know that to break in you don't just have to be as good, you have to be great. And I wish I was. I feel like Neil Gaiman and I started on the same life and somewhere I just didn't try hard enough.  I wish I loved his books, I wish I thought he was great, but since I don't I just feel robbed and mad.  I feel like by virtue of being a woman and trying to be everything to everyone I've never put enough energy into being me into becoming great. I feel like somewhere inside there is greatness but I've never reached it, never tried hard enough to get to it.

Brad Pitt and me

Now that Brad Pitt has said he has it everyone will hear of it.  Everyone will know all about it. He'll explain exactly how hard it is to be a millionaire or is it billionaire with everything he could possibly ever want except that he doesn't recognize people. He'll say that people hate him because of it.  Poor baby. No one will really be sorry for him.  But they will hear about it.

My dad called me about a year ago because he'd just watched 60 minutes and he knew what had been wrong his entire life. He knew what his problem was. He knew I had the problem too and he told me to watch it.  I did.  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57399118/face-blindness-when-everyone-is-a-stranger/

He said, "This explains everything even how I am furious when your mother gets a haircut.  Go take the test, I did I got 3%.  Go take it."  I did, I got 15%.

The thing is my dad had been visiting and I'd been working at the office and he asked me if I remembered my customers, which rooms they were in etc. To explain I own and work in a small hotel in Costa Rica, 18 rooms when we are full, I should know which people are my guests. I told him no. I told him I had no idea who was at the hotel they were all just faceless bodies.  My daughter could give people their keys when they asked for them but I thought it was just my bad memory, I couldn't remember who they were.

Later after I saw the 20/20 show I realized it's not really my memory. I have faceblindness.  I don't see people's faces, I don't recognize them, I don't remember them. I've had clients pay me for the room, go back to their room change, come back to my desk to give me the key and I've asked them if they've paid. They look at me as if I'm some kind of psychotic junkie... of course they've paid, they just paid me 20 minutes before, why do I not know this?  If I've failed to write this down I am screwed because I can't remember them. 

I have clients come back to the hotel with a huge smile, "Hi, we're back!" I can't really tell you if they stayed the week before or three years before or if I showed them the room in the morning and they finally decided to take it. I don't know if I'm supposed to remember them perfectly or at all, I just smile and nod.

People think I'm cold and distant.  I've been accused of being unfriendly. I am considered terribly rude. But in reality any time someone smiles at me I smile back because I probably know them, I am probably supposed to know them, it's not their fault I don't recognize them.  I dread running into people anywhere.  It's worse now that I live in a small town.  Everyone is supposed to know everyone.  I just can't remember any of them.

I thought that I just had a terrible memory for names.  But now I realize I don't remember names because I have no picture to hang the name to. I recognize people's voices, their bodies, their flaws. I look for their large hawk nose because that is something to grab onto.  The people I like least are the flawless ones.  The generic blonds with pretty faces, white straight teeth, better than average bodies, they are completely invisible to me.  And what did I do to make this easier for myself? I moved to a country where everyone is short, brown, with brown hair and brown eyes.  Distinguishing characteristics are fewer, chances of me remembering anyone - less.

A friend was visiting and I told her about this. She didn't really understand, couldn't really understand. How this could be true, how this could affect your life? We went out dancing.  A woman came up to me and said hi to me by name. Lots of people know my name, I don't know any of theirs.  I hate people knowing my name.  She looked as if she knew me well, I went in for the friend greeting in Costa Rica (the one arm hug and cheek-kiss) and she pulled back and I knew that she didn't know me well enough to be a friend, she had not expected that.  We started to talk. It was 2 minutes into the conversation "How are you, good, how are you etc" when she told me that she told me the new job she'd gone too hadn't gone the way she expected and she was looking for work again.  At that point I knew who she was, she had worked for me for a month and a half before going to work for a competitor. I walked away from the exchange and my friend followed me.  She turned to me and said, "You didn't know who she was!"  I said, "No, that's normal, I told you that."  She replied "I didn't understand, but you had no idea who she was.  Who was she?"  I explained.  As if one can explain to someone who can see everything what it is to go through life stumbling along blind.

When another friend came to visit I explained it to her.  She understood it more, she understood me more.  She said, "Well that's probably related to the problems you have dating if you can't pick up on facial clues."  I'm not sure that I can't see facial clues, I think I look for them all the time because I need to know if you think I know you.  I told her, "I want to be anonymous, I want to be as invisible to everyone else as they are to me, then I won't have to worry."

When I was little I always said I wanted to live in either a huge city or in the middle of the wilderness because those were the only two places you could be alone.  Perhaps I knew then that I didn't want to be alone, I just didn't want to be so socially inadequate.

My loving Godmother

My godmother was visiting me in my little tropical paradise... playing cards with my kids while I worked my usual 80 hours a week in my beautiful ocean front office.

She came into my little office, my little fish bowl of an office where I work day and night where I live my life or pretend to be living while everyone watches me and where I have to jump up and down every time a client talks to me.

It's not much of a life. 

In the words of him, you don't have a life, outside of your kids and your work you have nothing.  And with this recognition I let him in, I let him in because I wanted a life. I wanted a life outside of work, outside of the kids.  I made space for him in my life, I made a small life outside of work and kids, but he didn't want to be in my life, he didn't want to fill up the space. Instead I filled a small section of my life, a small piece of my life that didn't belong to work or my children and I filled it with tears.

My godmother came to visit just after it was over, over again, over for good. She asked me if I would be interested in a guy she knew in LA. I had to say no, I wasn't interested.  She said she didn't want me to be alone, that I should have someone in my life. Then she looked at me sideways."Has there been someone down here?"

"Yes." I responded.

"I'm glad you haven't been alone."

And in that moment I felt more alone than I have ever felt, in that moment I realized how very alone I was.  Looking at her I knew she loved me and that I could tell her everything that had happened, and I also knew I wouldn't because it was better that she thought I had someone, it would be better that she didn't know how little I had settled for and how alone I really was.

Sunset

Most people watch the sun set then get up and leave. These people miss the beauty the follows the sunset when the light of the sun is gone but the glow from it's passage fills the entire sky in a prism of colors finally fading to orange and red while the sea answers by reflecting the coming night in shades of indigo and violet.

Life is also like this. Children yearn to be grown up, want to celebrate every birthday, every advance towards adulthood but then don't realize the beauty of being an adult comes much much later.  Not at 18, not then, not even at 21 it's not about hitting a defining moment it's about letting that moment pass and seeing what unexpected consequences it brings. 

I see a lot of children around me who doubt the wisdom of time, who contemplate never seeing adulthood because they are not enjoying the passing of the daylight.  They don't see how quickly it is passing or how much beauty lies ahead, they only feel the pressure and the pain of the moment.  The stress from school, the conflict with family, the lack of true friends and in the moments of their pain they forget they are waiting for the sunset, waiting for the light to fade and the night to embrace them and comfort them.

My daughter went to a school event and ended up in the middle of a conversation about suicide attempts.  This is one of the reasons my daughter no long goes to school, not because she's ever expressed a desire to die but simply because the stress from school was making her life nothing but a nightmare.  The kids she left behind in class are rapidly failing, the smartass boy who now cuts himself just to feel, the transfer kid who made friends and was popular who now talks of death  or doesn't talk he writes poetry and cries, the queen bee who has eaten herself up three sizes and lives for the next party and oblivion, the jock who hurts himself and almost drove his bike off a cliff rather than face another day at school.

It's not that being a teenager is not hard enough, I know it is, I've been there. But 80 plus percent of the class should not be looking to die before they live.  We need to nurture our children and guide them, we need to take the pressure to succeed away.  They need to know that there is life after math class, that whether they pass or they fail life continues regardless.  I've had too many friends die unwilling to wait for the beauty and wonder that lies ahead after all light seems to have been lost.  Life does not end when the sun goes down for tomorrow is another day and we must be ready to enjoy the dawn.

Good news

All you write is sad crap, why would anyone want to read it?

It was a genuine enough question and I had to ask myself why I bother at all. I know mostly I write these things for myself and sometimes that is enough.  Sometimes it isn't, sometimes I yearn for approval, acceptance, fame, recognition.  And why don't you write something happy?  Also a genuine enough question and one I don't often have an answer to.  I find my life in general more dramatic than happy, more stressed than serene. I often find myself lacking in good news.  And perhaps I don't find the good news interesting.

But here goes:

I have some good news.

My house is getting fixed.  I started painting today, we'll move back in in a few weeks.  The insurance company finally paid up enough to get it up and going again and I am so damn happy to be moving home again after 8 months.

Also my youngest is coming home after 4 weeks with daddy and she didn't want to stay there. She's missed me and wants to come home.  I miss her so damn much and I was dreading she wouldn't want to come back.

And we got a puppy, and it is a small ball of joy and I find myself smiling every time I see her.

Also the tumor was removed cleanly from my mom, it was cancer and enormous but there is a 50% chance it won't regrow and she will be fine. Also she seems happier than in recent years, and seems to be cherishing her life more.

In addition I finally found the courage today to take control of my business. My manager is looking for a new job and will stay on only part time until she gets one.  So it's time for me to take over the reins of my business for the first time since I bought it 8 years ago.

So all is good things are going well, no disasters to report... but I'll probably find something to whine about anyway.

Letters I can never send

This week I wanted to write two letters, and for reasons that will soon become obvious I couldn't write either.  Yet the things I wanted to say keep bouncing around in my head so here they are, letters that will never be sent.

1.

Dear Auntie,

I can't believe you are going for chemo for the fourth time.  Dear god, how do you stand it?  I mean really? You've always been an active person and here they are filling you with poison again, destroying your energy again. I know you must want to quit sometimes and I think maybe you should.  This is going to sound callous, but I've come to think that cancer is a gift.  As you throw your guts up and lose your hair yet again I'm sure you wont agree but I think it is.

I used to think the best way to die would be suddenly with no pain at all just not wake up one morning, a massive heart attack or stroke in the night.  You know the way grandad did it, although I always felt sorry for Nana having to wake up next to a corpse.  Now that I'm a little older I think I was wrong.  There is something to be said for knowing that your time is coming, knowing that your days are numbered, knowing that you are mortal, and that you will not live forever.

I am not wishing that this round of chemo doesn't work, I'm not saying I want you to die. But I think there is something good about knowing that your time is limited. I think we are all dying but cancer gives us the gift of time to live. Time to tell people how we feel about them, time to settle our grievances, time to say goodbye and time to love.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be easier perhaps to be hit by a bus but cancer also gives those we love time to prepare, time to grieve, time to love.  And now that I'm older I think Nana would have prefered Grandad to die slowly and painfully with time to say goodbye than to have him taken from her without warning.

And so Auntie, I love you and I'm sorry for your suffering but I'd like to take this chance to say I love you, and goodbye.

TO My friend who moved away.

Hey, I hope you're doing well. I know you don't need any more bad news. I know you've been screwed by your ex and abandoned by your children but I heard something and I don't know how to deal with the information.  Your son, your 19 year old baby is now a drug dealer. You told me he was working with his father, and you were right.  He is working with his father.  Your ex is a dealer.  Is this news to you? I don't know if it is or not. I think it is, I think you had your head in the sand. Or maybe you knew, maybe you've always known.  Maybe this is why you weren't living together. Maybe you knew this is how he was paying your bills.  Actually I know nothing.  Maybe you are a druggie too and just happy to have a supplier for a husband.  Maybe you knew this was the family business your son was getting into.

Maybe you are ok with all this and I am just the naive idiot.

Tourist

It's different when you're a tourist. When you're a tourist the place welcomes you with open arms. "Hola, bienviendos chica, ah linda". When you are a tourist the young men beckon with abandon, there are no consequences or responsibilities. The warm wind blowing off the land leads you to the ocean, to the swaying of the palms, planted just for your pleasure. The tourists gather at the beach stripped of their clothing and inhibitions covered in sun-block and sand. The sea promises to hold them in it's gentle embrace to wash away their worries. The touristas are beautiful, admired, happy. Sun burns away their worries, browns their skins and covers the ashes of their former lives with it's brown stain, behind their sunglasses they are superstars.

Or so it should be. Or so it appears. And for many it is true. They've left their former selves behind, they are going to have fun damn it, they paid for it, and if the sun and sand can't create joy there is always alcohol or drugs. But when they go home they will have had a good time. And whatever they did it doesn't matter because they did it on vacation, it was separate from their real lives, no one will know if they fucked the short but cute bartender on the beach in front of the hotel, or took some free coke from the taxi driver on the way to the hotel and can't remember the details of the next day or so.

Perhaps Costa Rican think that all gringos are essentially sex maniac drug fiends because they only judge from the tourists and from the surfers who moved here because they can stay stoned between catching waves.

It's different when you live here. It's different when you have kids here, when everywhere you go you see someone you know. Any action you do can and will be known by everyone minutes after it happens, and your kids will hear. And maybe if you really admitted it, if I really admitted it, it's different for me because I just can't let go. I don't want to lose control, the idea of being out of control scares me - consequences if only those I inflict upon myself haunt me.

My ex is outside my office singing in the restaurant. Dock of the Bay "Sittin' here resting my bones And this loneliness won't leave me alone, It's two thousand miles I roamed Just to make this dock my home" I understand. The loneliness of being so far from my friends and so close to so many other people I don't care about doesn't leave me. Ah he's finally stopped singing that one. Now it's Margaritaville "some people claim that there's a woman to blame, but I think perhaps it's my own damn fault." It could have been, it should have been better than this. I have the perfect temperament for fidelity and loyalty. I would have stayed with him no matter what. I didn't realise that the crashing of the waves doesn't just seduce the tourists. It seduced him too, he went into vacation mode, he was going to do better than me, one of the beautiful bikinis would be his. And they were.

In the lush green light I don't feel more beautiful. I feel inadequate and unworthy. And in the practised compliments of the young men I feel only the shallow emptiness of my own longing.

My ex made me cry again. Shit I swore he would never make me do that again. I walked to the bar. I wanted a drink. I wanted to drink until I was smiling like an idiot. I don't have to drive home, my mom is going to pick me up. I stand at the bar. Donald says "Quiere tomar?" Do you want a drink? I want to drink. I want to be drunk. I want to be alone in a room crying. I want to laugh, smile. I want to block out the sound of my ex singing sad songs in a sad voice. I had some tequila 2 weeks ago, two shots at the hotel. The first free by the owner who wanted to see me drunk, everyone wants to see me drunk as if I will become some other person a happy tourist instead of the sad frustrated owner of a business which I care about less than I've ever cared about a business I've owned. A business that is run not by me but by my manager who won't quit, even when I fired her. She just pretended I'd said nothing. And thus I had.

I start to order, start to point at a drink and then I stop. I stop because I know. Because tomorrow my kids will be told their mom is drinking at work now,because I'm not a tourist, because I'm me. Because when it comes down to it I want my privacy more than I want fun. I want to maintain my dignity more than I want to make a fool out of myself.

I want to go somewhere else, somewhere as a tourist. I want to be serenaded by the sound of the waves, I want to listen to a lounge singer I wasn't married to sing songs about love and longing. I want to order a drink from the bar without starting a reputation as an alcoholic.

 

Silent tears

She said she'd only seen me cry 3 times.  Then she counted and it was 4.  Four times.  She'd only seen me cry four times.

That's what she told me, she told me she'd only seen me cry 4 times and I needed to stop.  That I needed to stop because I was scaring her and she was going to start crying too.  My daughter needed me to stop crying but I couldn't.  I just couldn't.

It was a mere 3 months after the earthquake, the 7.6 earthquake that had changed our lives and moved us out of our home of seven years.  I'd packed up everything, talked to builders, gotten quotes.  "I'll give you a quote for the insurance $110,000 for repairs but I think I could do it for about half that", I'd gotten other quotes "Don't fix the house lady, tear it down, you need a new house."  And I'd had engineers from the insurance company out twice.

See the thing is I'd expected more. I thought I'd gotten lucky.  Six weeks before the quake I bought earthquake insurance.  $150,000 if my house was totally destroyed.

It sure seemed totally destroyed to me.  $150,000 would get us a new house. I felt like I'd finally caught a break, I'd get $150,000 build a new house for $100,000, a tiny new house and spend the other $50,000 to start pulling me out of debt.

$50,000 would get the kid's school paid, would get the money I'd put on my dad's credit cards paid off, I'd get ahead for the first time since the recession hit.

I called, I waited, I walked the engineers through the house. 

When the earthquake hit I'd run, stood outside waiting for the house to fall down but it didn't. It just broke into different sections, each part of the house pulling away from the other parts, each part moving away from it's point of origin. And then I was pulled from my point of origin, forced to move until the house was repaired or replaced. Now here I was waiting for the news, how much would the insurance pay me?

$8000

They told me they would give me $8000.

I started to cry.  I couldn't stop.  My daughter kept pulling on my sleve.  "Stop crying mommy, stop crying, please stop crying."  The man in front of me looked embarrased for me, I was in a room full of people and I couldn't stop.

All the silent tears I'd been holding since the earthquake all needed to come out at the same time.  My home was destroyed, it's spine broken and they were offering me almost enough money to give it a manicure.

A Day in the Life

I sit at my desk most days and look over the ocean.  From my desk I can see my Quicken spreadsheets and schools of fish breaking through the waves while pelicans dive for their dinner.

 

“You got room? Tonight you got room?”

“Yes” I say jumping up. “Yes, we got room.” I break out in broken English or broken Spanish while Italians, Francophones or Germans ask for lodging.

 

“Your English good”, they say “where you learn it?” I didn’t learn it, it’s my language I want to yell – I just can’t speak it anymore I spend my days talking in gibberish, hand signals and Engspanglish.  I understand most conversations I overhear in Spanish, Italian, French and German yet at the same time I feel like most everything I say in English or Spanish I say only for myself.  My employees and children just pretending they didn’t hear if it’s not something they want to hear.

 

Of course sometimes I have to pretend I don’t hear.  On day a couple watched the sunset into the ocean and came to my desk asking what time the sunrise was.  “The sunrise?”  “Yeah, what time do we have to get up to watch the sunrise over the ocean.” Well obviously the sun will rise, go to the center of the sky, change its mind and set in the same spot.  So I answered “Well if you start driving now you’ll be able to see it rise on the Caribbean Coast.”

But the thing I hear the most is, “You must love it here.” Every American tourist says the same thing.  The other nationalities don’t.  It’s only the Americans who only have 7 days vacation who dream about living in the tropics forever. It will be perfect.

 

“I love it most of the time” I say because I’m horribly honest.

 

“What do you mean?  Most of the time?”   Only a tourist wouldn’t understand, can’t understand. 

 

So I answer, “Things are different when you live here, but it’s a great place for a vacation.”

I don’t say “I’m trying to balance the books and this year is 20% down on last year and last year sucked, tourism has been wrecked by the economic slowdown you moron and you’d know that if you watched the news. It wasn’t’ just the US that was affected, your little crisis is still crippling the rest of the world.” I don’t say “The municipality is a bunch of bureaucratic criminals; they just raised the price of my liquor license 6000% and are insisting I put in handicapped facilities that are costing me in excess of $4000.” I don’t say “I’d love to sell because but I can’t because the municipality hasn’t renewed my concession on the land.  And because I can’t sell I am missing the last years of life my parents have.”

 

I can’t say any of this, so I turn and point at the ocean, the fisherman is on his way back through the waves with his small boat and the sun is dropping down to kiss the sea and I say “What’s not to love?  What more could one want?”

 

Facing Forty

There’s a new trend to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of horrible events. We just had the 9/11 ten year memorial and now tomorrow, this Thursday, we will be celebrating the 10^th anniversary of my 30^th birthday.

 I’ve been told the 40s are better. Compared to the 30’s they’d better be but I really don’t believe it.  Not on a deep cellular level.  I’m hitting this birthday the way a bug hits the windshield. I’m bracing for the impact with my life flashing in front of my eyes and my internal organs ceasing in anticipation knowing that this is it, from now on decay is all they can look forward to.  My best girlfriends both have babies and all I can think is – it’s too late, I’m too old – that part of my life is over.  Over and what have I done with it?  Where have the years gone?

I realized I was 29 years old when I first spoke at Story Salon.  29 seems a lifetime away from 40.  And it is – the lifetimes of my children have filled this time and they are finally and too quickly not needing me anymore.  I read a study that says people get happier the older they become.  They concluded in the study that happiness is due to lowered expectations.  That we expect less from life as we age and are more contented with what we have.

When do my expectations lower – will this ever happen to a Virgo, or will I always have expectations of myself that are too high?  When am I going to be content with the life I have – with a life which many people would dream of, the dreams of my childhood – when do I realize that I will never be a wealthy novelist, when do I give up on trying?  Or when do my dreams come true?  And when will I be ok with it either way?  And my other dreams?  I realized the other day that I’ve never been loved.  I told this to my mother and she said to me “Your dad and I have always loved you.”

And they have – my children love me too – but that wasn’t what I meant and she knew it.  But it had to be about her.

The  29^th anniversary of my mother’s 40^th birthday is on Friday the day after mine.  On the weekend of my 21^st birthday she turned 50.  And when I said I wanted to do something fun for this birthday, she said “Well I didn’t get to do anything fun for my 40^th birthday  - and what are we going to do for my birthday Friday?”

My mother is the glass in the windshield I am hitting reflecting back what a lifetime of bitter unfulfilled expectations can give you – what a lifetime of being a Virgo creates.

 

And I try to breath while my lungs cease waiting for the impact because after tomorrow there will be many more days, days which could bring joy and contentment  - if I let them.

 

 

mommy

My mom has just been diagnosed with a malignant tumor in her abdomen the size of a melon. They say it's over 20 cm in diameter and growing. They say it's a liposarcoma, a rare form of cancer where your fat cells become cancerous. I know they are wrong.

I know what is inside her, filling her. Twenty years of anger, twenty years or more of disappointment all pushed down, all swallowed. Twenty plus years of rage at the world. I say twenty years because I remember when she wasn't that woman. I remember when she was a happy person, everybody's instant best friend, the charming beauty with no obvious attributes but the power to attract and please none the less.

My father remembers her to, that's what has kept him married all these years, those glimpses of sunlight, those moments of joy when the angry bitch subsides for a moment and the sweet woman he married reappears.

My brother has hated her for so many years now. He's lived off her, used her, abused her, treated her like she was dirt. She's been his servant, his housekeeper, his cook, his slave, hating him, resenting him while he hates and resents her.

I don't know who's fault it is. My father who loved her well, then hated her with equal force, or my brother who never respected her and has treated her like an idiot his whole life or my sister who left and did not return, the ultimate betrayal of a mother's love. Or it is mine, the one she has always fought with the one who never stood up for her enough, the one who always sided with daddy from the moment she was born. I don't know who changed her, in order to breath I must believe ultimately she changed herself and although we all probably had a hand this was her choice, her decision to transition into the beast, her option to hold on to all the rage, to hold on to all disappointment, to hold it all deep inside herself festering, mutating into something that would kill her.

And now she is the sweet woman again. My father's crying every day because he will miss her, after threatening to divorce her for 20 years he can't stop crying about how he doesn't want to lose her. After years of telling her to cover her fat guts because it's sticking out, after years of not touching her with enough love to notice a growth the size of a child within her after years of taunting her about her weight her weight that was this thing, this thing growing inside her, this toxic ball of hate growing. Now he loves her, now he is going to miss her. My brother's angry, it's the emotion he knows best, for in his heart he is her child. He's angry that she's sick, he's angry that she doesn't want the operation.

The operation. My grandmother died of cancer. I don't remember her, my only memory that is about her is playing in front of the hospital on the lawn with my siblings because my mother had to go into the hospital to see her mother and I wasn't allowed to go in. I was four. My mother lost her mother when she was so young. I never realised that before. When I was little my mother was old, the most oldest, a grownup. And now I think, she's too young to die. 70 is too young to die. Now I think I'm too young to lose my mommy.

My mother thought she'd dodged the bullet, when she turned 65 she relaxed. No one in her family had gotten to 65, no one except her grandmother. Her grandmother had lived till she was in her 90s. Everyone else had died young, her mother, father, brother, cousins, uncle, aunt. She'd lived past 65 so that was it, she could live forever, at least as long as her grandmother. Sometimes life is not cruel, sometimes it is just ironic and sad.

I was the first one to ask if the operation was a good idea. It just didn't sound like her. I'd heard her talk enough times about it, about how the best thing about her mother's death was that at least the butchers didn't hack her into pieces before she went. When I look back now I've had so many conversations over the years about cancer with my mother. I realise now it's always been on her mind. So many conversations where she talked about how you shouldn't cut into tumors they would just spread, and conversations about how chemotherapy was worse than dying. So many conversations over so many years, conversations I wasn't really interested in having, conversations I never really listened to.

She is scheduled for the operation on the 21^st of this month. I talked to the doctor after I read online about the disease. I asked the questions I could remember to ask with call waiting beeping in my ear destroying my every thought, “Doctor what are the beep beep chances it regrows?” beep, beep “50%” “And then you beep beep operate again?” “I don't know beep beep if we'll be able to beep beep operate again.” “Why” “Too much scar tissue.” “And if it regrows beep beep” “It regrows agressively” beep beep “So if she doesn't have the operation beep beep how long until she dies?” beep beep “We don't know the growth beep beep rate so we can't predict the progression of the beep beep disease” “And if she waits beep beep for the operation beep beep” “We don't know how fast the tumor is growing but it beep beep is larger than when the scan was taken beep beep.” “The scan was taken two weeks ago” “Yes, it's a current scan beep beep I would think that the tumor will be inoperable in three to six months.” “So what are the chances that you open beep beep her up and the tumor is too large to operate on now.” “Beep beep, that is a possibility”.

After the call I was in favor of her having the operation, 50/50 didn't sound so bad. Online I'm seeing there is about a 30 percent survival rate for this after five years, less after 10 but young people don't get this disease. Young people haven't swallowed enough rage for this illness.

My first instincts were to go to her. To fly home, to be with her. And I am going, but in two weeks, not the day I wanted to leave, not the minute I wanted to fly but in a time frame that is practical logical. I don't feel practical or logical. I want to fly to her side and hold her around her fat belly, hold the tumor close to me and tell it that I love it, that I love her.

She says she's going to be fine. I know she wants to believe that. And it's possible. I know that. But I also know that this is the end. That my mother's life is at it's end. Whether she lives another 6 months or beats the cancer and has another 10 years this is the homestretch, this is all that is left. I want her to live this end as well as she can, I want her to spend her last days knowing she is loved, doing things she loves to do. I want her to fill the void with love, not hate, to exercise the anger and resentment and disappointment. I want her to die being proud of me. I want for her to live the rest of her days and die bathed in love.