a moment in the day: couch

I can't believe we got that hulking thing through the narrow door and into the garage. I can't believe we were able to haul it all the way from the living room, through the front door, down the porch steps, past the car and along the side of the house, back to here. I can't believe my hands haven't fallen off. I'll tell you one thing: getting an old couch into a garage would be a lot easier if you had a garage door that wasn't broken in the down position.

For a moment, Stephen and I just stand here and look at it sitting there, without its cushions, in the clutter of the unpacked and unorganized art-studio-to-be.

Our success was not without its casualties. The upholstery along the back of the couch is frayed from rubbing against the door frame. And rubbing against the frame of the back door to the house when we first tried to take the thing down the stairs and around the corner into the basement. And from getting wedged in that corner during that one harrowing moment when I wasn't sure how we'd get it back out and Stephen would have to live in the basement forever and I'd have to throw food and art supplies down to him over the couch for the rest of his life. I've got an ice pack on my finger from when it got pinched between the bottom of the couch and the concrete step, Stephen's got a rip in his favorite jeans.

Still, we did it. It's done.

"If we ever have to get this thing out of here," I say, "let's get two strapping young men to help us."

"Yeah," Stephen says, and then, in all seriousness, "Or my mom."

a moment in the day: galley

Mid-day, catching a quick bit of lunch in the midst of all my move-in chores, I sit down at my desk upstairs and flip over to facebook, and one of the posts I see is this picture.

-along with the caption, "To hold a book with your name in it..."

What a lovely thing. The picture is of a page of the early galley for City of Weird, the anthology I'm editing for Forest Avenue Press. Sadly, we weren't able to give galleys out to all the contributors - they're for booksellers and blurbers and the media - but along with being a writer, Leigh Anne Kranz is a radio personality (sssso not the reason I chose this gorgeous story, which, like all of the stories, I chose blind), so she got a sneak preview. How wonderful to witness, even in cyber form, a writer's pleasure at holding a publication for the first time.

I stare at the picture for a moment: the story title, Leigh Anne's name, the tiny bits of phrase. Empty of the pink-fleshed fish. The sonar of hunger.

I remember when I held my own first contribution to an anthology for the first time. 2009, Portland Noir. I was at Powell's, mid-day on a Friday, running up to the fourth floor to grab re-sorts to take down to my displays, and out of the blue, sitting stacked in three face-outs on a cart in the Publicity book corral, was a whole mess of Portland Noir. I just stood there looking at it. It took me a long time to pick it up. I don't know why.

From my journal:

It was a full cart and I stood there sort of moving the other books around, putting Orange Room books with Orange Room books and Green Room books with Green and… well, hovering around. The appearance of Portland Noir in the store changed everything. I had slipped from the anticipation Portland-Noir-Is-Being-Published phase, the I’m-going-to-be-published phase, to the Portland-Noir-Is-Out. The I’m-published. The thing against whose absence I’ve judged my existence ever since… I don’t know when. As early as Sophomore year in high school?

I’m distracted by the fact that I’m not sure if that sentence I just wrote about measuring something against an absence of something is correct. Oh well, what the hell. What do I care? I’m published now. They can’t take that away from me.

Ha, my silly words. But a moment like that is worth some silly words.

I click like on Leigh Anne's post and scroll down, reading people's comments of congratulations. Somewhere along the thread of comments, Leigh Anne says that it made her cry, which makes me cry, and I think, my goodness. Holding my first publication for the first time was a wonderful feeling, the best, but sitting here, looking at Leigh Anne's picture of hers, which I had a hand in, feels even better.

*

City of Weird doesn't come out until October next year, but here's a little sneak peek at Leigh Anne's story:

The Seattle pod moved south. The sonar of hunger echoed between them. The homewaters were empty of the pink-fleshed fish they loved. They swam fast and close to the shoreline. They followed a troller in the fog, moved in with stealth to pull the fish from the hooks. The grandmother killed a great white shark easily, turned it belly-up and held until it drowned. She learned the technique on her first long migration, from a pod in the Farallons, the triangular islands where sea lions lounged golden on the rocks and bled scarlet in the choppy water.

a moment in the day: crow

I get, wet, out of the shower in our new bathroom with the new blue paint and the new vanity and the new toilet and the new cabinet and the new floor. I throw on my old robe. Taking a nice, hot shower in the new house is wondering how much bigger that spot in the basement is now, that wide, dark spot where the water spreads out from the leak we discovered yesterday. It's two o'clock in the afternoon and I'm cleaning up after a morning of unpacking, organizing and cleaning in the kitchen, not to mention cooking up all the fresh greens in the refrigerator so we can freeze them since, yes, on this second official day in our new house, the fridge decided to die like the last of my dreams of financial security.

Through the window, two crows, one after the other, fly straight at me so that for a moment, here without my glasses on, I think at least one is going to land on my head. Then one, then two, they swoop up and land on the edge of the roof. My roof; what a strange thing. I put my glasses on in time to see one dip down from the house and land in the center of the backyard. Crows are odd creatures - so sleek, yet they walk like toddlers. She toddles through the sparse grass and willy nilly dandelions that will someday be a garden when we can afford it. Her head jerks and twitches as she looks for things to eat. Finding something I can't see, grabbing it in her beak, she flies up and lands on the fence that separates my yard from the neighbor's. Sits there for a minute. Surveying. A fence is such a different thing to a bird. A perch, a place to rest, as she looks around for where she wants to fly next.

a time to say...

Goodbye bay windows and French doors.

Goodbye lovely, little dinky kitchen with black and white tiles and beautiful, old wooden cabinets painted white.

Goodbye mysterious periodical pee smell coming from the back closet, which we could never find a source for.

Goodbye streetcar rattling by below our third-story windows on a street with the fabulously redundant name of Lovejoy.

Goodbye four trash bags of old video tapes we never played because they were old video tapes.

Goodbye too many coffee cups.

Goodbye pocket doors that turned one main apartment room into two, the art studio and the bedroom, and that Stephen ritualistically closed every night when we got into bed and opened again with a creek and a crash every new day.

Goodbye too many vases.

Goodbye layer of kitchen grime built up on the too many vases that we decided to keep.

Goodbye ten minute commute to work.

Goodbye bottle of coconut syrup in the back of the cabinet that I don't remember when we bought and I don't remember when / how we used half of.

Goodbye stacks of chipped plates given to me by Mom, given to her by Noni, which I couldn't bear get rid of even though I have so many unchipped Noni plates left.

Goodbye view, far off against the horizon, of the off-ramp to the Freemont Bridge, suggesting the river.

Goodbye black and white checked hat, which was Stephen's grandmother's and which I wanted to wear in the winters but which was too big for my head.

Goodbye Stephen's old records, which someone in this building will have to have really eclectic taste to want to procure for their own.

Thank you mysterious neighbor woman who came into the laundry room and took the Prince, the Duran Duran and the grandmother hat.

Goodbye big grass lot down the block where Nicholas liked to walk, which I used to like to call The Old Pooping Grounds. [We cleaned up after him, of course.]

Goodbye periodic bear walking down the street that I would than realize was a squirrel crawling by on the wire just outside my window.

Goodbye two-minute walk to Kathy's house.

Goodbye horse rings all along the curbs.

Goodbye used twisty-ties and expired batteries and takeout Chinese soy sauce packets.

Goodbye carpet under the bed that Kitty threw up on and that José peed on, the day Stephen and I got engaged.

Goodbye big tree across the street that filled the bay window in our bedroom so that when we lay in bed, it felt as though we were lying in a tree house.

Goodbye nights sitting in bed watching movies and periodically looking out the window, past the tree, to where the rain poured off the streetlamp and made a spray of gold.

a crybaby's guide to moving out

Things that make you cry as you're packing up your life and fixing up a new house and moving out of the apartment where you've lived for ten years:

• The suggestion that you weed out your grandmother's dishes and only take the ones that aren't chipped.
• Listening to old Rufus Wainwright CDs as you paint the bedroom and thinking about how much living you've done with this man you met because your aunt once sent you a copy of Poses, and thinking about that poor woman in that song who never fell in love with anyone except for "The Art Teacher."
• Radiolab.
• David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall - the story about the parrot, the one you used to get tired of hearing because you had it on two different books-on-tape that you used to listen to when you walked around the Pearl District looking for help wanted signs when you first moved in.
• The poor bug who suffocated in your paint tray.

a moment in the day: pizza

It's ten o'clock at night, but we're in bed eating pizza and watching Strangers with Candy. Last pizza night in the apartment. We've been painting all day and Stephen's coming down with a cold and we have to be completely moved by the end of the day Tuesday, but you see, we don't have a working oven at the new house, so this will be our last pizza night for a while, and we had frozen pizza burning a hole in our freezer.

All the lasts. Last load of laundry in the apartment basement, last time driving home from work to the apartment, last night eating pizza in bed in the apartment. Red Christmas lights framing the bay window.

Something funny happens on the TV and I laugh out loud and my heart is full of grief and the pizza tastes good.

Yesterday we were working on the woodwork and I heard a sound, a soft, mournful discordant chord. Stephen started saying something, and I did something I never do, I said, "Shhhh!" And we listened. Faint, but a train whistle heard in the house. A first.

a moment in the day: out loud

It's just the Baseboard Guy and me at the house. I'm on the top of a ladder in the second bedroom, painting the edges of the ceiling with a brush to prep for when Stephen takes over later with the roller. The Baseboard Guy is just through the open doorway in the dining room, hard at work fashioning a new length of baseboard for that empty spot in the first bedroom, which is why I'm calling him the Baseboard Guy. Later, he'll be installing some new windows, and I suppose then he'll be the Window Guy.

The Baseboard Guy makes a lot of noise. He pounds on stuff and he scrapes at stuff and he uses some sort of nuclear robot machine to pound nails into stuff - but underneath it all is a murmur. I keep thinking he's talking to me. But he's not. I realized it the first time I thought he was talking to me and he wasn't: he's talking to himself.

"Mmmm, OK, OK," he says. And he pounds on something.

Pretty much every time he's about to pound on something, he says to himself, "OK."

Then the murmur is numbers. "Five, five and twenty-five." He's calculating something or measuring something. "Two-forty," he says, low under his breath, "Five, no, six. Six. OK."

All afternoon, he talks to himself, a kind of nice, comforting drone under the staccato of the scraping and pounding and drilling, the sounds of destruction that really mean whatever is the opposite of destruction, oh yes, construction.

"Alright, alright, OK," he says.

I like that each person who has a hand in making this house different - the Baseboard Guy, the plumber, the roofer, the cleaner - is such a particular person. Each one has some quirk. This Baseboard Guy, I like that he talks to himself.

"I like that he talks to himself," I say.

Out loud.

Oh yeah. I guess I do that too.

"OK," the Baseboard Guy says, "Two-oh-five, yeah. OK."

a moment in the day: two weeks

It's six o'clock on Friday evening, and I'm off to dump the last of my green tea in the break room sink and put the tea bag in the compost bin so my Powell's coffee cup doesn’t collect a mold forest during the two weeks I’ll be off work. Two weeks for finishing the fix-up on the house, packing up, moving in. Saying goodbye to the apartment where we've lived for ten years.

I've been working late to tie up any loose ends I can think of, and most of the Powell's Industrial Warehouse has gone home for the weekend. As I leave the bright light of the Marketing work space, cup in hand, I find the warehouse dark. There's some light along the rows and rows of bookshelves far off across the huge space, but where I walk, past the lockers and the shipping line, it's dark and quiet and almost eerie. A very different thing from the bustle of the day. Almost lonely.

For a second, I feel like I'm moving out of Powell's. When I'm here next, I think, I'll be coming from... and I almost think home, but then I think, the house.

In the quiet, empty break room, I tilt my cup over the sink, and the dregs of my tea run down the drain.

When I'm here next, I think, and the thought is so strange, I'll finally be calling it home.

a moment in the day: paint chips

Stephen and I stand in the room that will someday be our bedroom: paint-splattered wood floor, army helicopter stickers on the wall, the exposed drywall where the ugly prefab fireplace was demolitioned over the weekend. We have a little stack of paint chips and Stephen's holding one to the wall, up against the wood molding around the door, and we're talking about color.

I've felt so emotional throughout this house process, grumpy and sleep deprived and periodically wanting to burst into tears because, say, Stephen announces that we'll have to keep our section of the sidewalk clear and then nudges a weed to its death with his shoe to demonstrate. I just know the house is going to smell like old cigarettes forever, and the thought that I'll never hear the streetcar go by the house and I'll never hear the Amtrak train whistles at night fills me with grief.

The color on the paint chip is green, a late-summer green, like hot sun through waning leaves. I picked the paint chips out, and Stephen likes my choices, and that makes me incredibly proud. The choices weren't arbitrary. We've been talking color for a long time. But just the fact that my opinionated artist husband asked me to pick out the paint chips with my own eyes and is standing here, now, nodding and smiling and saying, "Yes, I think that's going to look really nice," fills me with whatever is the opposite of that grief thing I was just talking about.

He uses his hand to cover the green squares above and below the shade we're considering, and I stand back like it's a portrait in an art gallery. I say I think it's great and he says he thinks this might be it. We turn the card over to see what the name of the color is so we can make a note of it. It says, Footy Pajamas.

essay

Try to write an essay. Think about your past. Try to make connections between the person you are now and the person you were then, but the person you were then is lost inside the blind blank of your memory.

Read your diary. Try to find the part of your past that will serve the essay you're trying to write.

Get lost. Get cushy in the lostness of all the details behind the blind blank of your memory.

You're sixteen. You just got a haircut and a perm. You're bursting with the bigness of your life.

A direct quote, errors intact:

I'm getting my braces off, on Tuesday. Noni and Coco are here, but they're going to be going home to the Summit before Tuesday. Noni loves my hair. She says I look like a cross between Brooke Shields and Audry Hepburn. I wonder what Audry Hepburn looks like.

A moment in the day: moving

I sit at my new desk, facing my new wall. It's a dry erase board. Someone put my name on it, my name and an arrow, for the computer guy so he'd know where to move my computer when he got me all set up in here, my temporary workspace while they gut and remodel the Marketing Department. About half the Marketing team is in here, organized in a close ring around the inner wall of the conference room. Now that I'm all moved in and the computer is up and running, I could erase my name from the whiteboard but I don't.

That impulse to make a home.

When I moved into Powell's Industrial Warehouse a year ago, I brought with me as much as I could of my old desk: my tape dispenser, my cubicle decorations, my sock monkeys.

This afternoon as I packed it all up, my supervisor ducked under my desk to pull my computer out. He pointed at the small wooden box the computer sat on.

"Does it matter to you whether you keep that or not?" he said.

I didn't know what purpose it served.

"Yes," I said.

Now, and for the next three weeks, maybe a month, this whiteboard is mine. And those dry erase markers, the blue one, the orange one, the two red ones, those are mine. I'll probably never write anything on the whiteboard but I could if I wanted to.

I arrange my desk. I arrange my snowflake. I didn't want to throw away the tiny snowflakes Lenore and I stamped out of paper back before the holidays. Three sat on my desk all winter - then two when one disappeared. No real reason to keep them there - just that at first they were cute and then they were mine. It's spring and there's no need for paper snowflakes, but when I tossed one in recycling this afternoon - a tiny flick of paper into the bucket - it hurt to let it go.

Gently, I place my last snowflake on my new desk next to the lamp that I never turn on. Behind me, coming in through the open door of the conference room is the chug-chug of the warehouse and the sound of the Rolling Stones.

a moment in the day: the Remainders girl

With Cal, hanging holiday lights at the City of Books. Cal's on the ladder, jingle of the knot of keys latched to his belt loop, and I'm down below keeping the strand untangled. Turn, and to the left of me, hauling stacks of books onto a table, is that young brunette from the Remainders team. She's in profile, and lo and behold: a pregnant belly.

Though I've always loved children, though they've always loved me, I've never really wanted to have children. I was always more child than mother. Blanket in arms for most of my childhood, forever wanting to hold onto something soft to make me comfortable. Sometimes I wonder if it's all those blanket years that make me so full of wanting, now. Wanting that next publication, wanting that next comment on my last silly status update, wanting to fill myself up with cheese. Wanting, sometimes, with nothing on the other end of the sentence - just wanting.

I don't remember how old I was when I stopped carrying the blanket around all the time. Backy Dacky was its name, and it was pink, white and blue knit zigzag stripes that faded with all the holding, faded and got full of holes. As I got older, I used to cut tiny strands from the loose ends of the holes and knot them around necklaces to hang, hidden, under my shirts. I'm not even going to tell you about the time I tried to hide Backy Dacky at the bottom of my carry-on bag to take it with me on my trip to Europe, and I'm not going to tell you how old I was.


Fifteen.


Looking at the pregnant Remainders girl - I don't even remember her name - I'm struck by how similar that belly seems to my blanket of long ago. That holding. How lovely, to walk around the bookstore, to go about your workday, with all that joy, all that fear, all that miracle held inside.

a moment in the night: lovejoy skateboarder

It's 12:30 at night, which is also 12:30 in the morning, and I'm just up from a dream to walk Nicholas in the dry icy cold, because after his 8:00 walk and after the movie, it was pouring and he was asleep under the covers, and we thought we might get away with it. I had fallen asleep right after the movie. Stephen had read a while, then turned the light off not long before Nicholas nosed his way up from the covers and stood by my pillow, staring me down in my sleep.

Being blinked out of sleep by the bathroom wishes of a dog is enough to make your walk across the street feel surreal. It's not raining now, but the sky is deep and starless, and streetlamp light shining down on puddles of shiny yellow leaves all across the sidewalk makes everything look like the detail of a painting Stephen might paint. The way he always says he likes to paint trees that don't look like trees but like beautiful paintings of trees.

Skishing by, down Lovejoy, half gold, half silhouette, is a skateboarder in a pair of those long shorts that come down over your knees, a cap backwards on his head.

Strange how you can so love the place you live and the life you have here and still pine so hard for that other home.

adopted

This is a little late, but I just thought to check online again, and here's an updated page on He Who Was Known as Ditka. I remember those first few days I had to try hard not to want to call him Ditka (or, occasionally, José). Now it's strange to see him with that name.

the continuing adventures of nicholas c. o'dittle

When you're moving to a new home, there are lots of adventures to be had.

There's the initial discovery of this place. Running all around as soon as you're let down by the nice Indigo Rescue lady. This weird place with half-made paintings all over and questionable creatures lurking.



There's the scary moment when the Indigo Rescue lady leaves and you're left with these two strange people you don't really know. They talk to you in goo-goo voices and take you on a long walk in the neighborhood, but you don't pee. You're not sure you're ready for the commitment.

There's the trip to the big pet store for more supplies, and there's lots more exploring in the apartment and sitting in laps and being petted, and you think you're kind of starting to like these strange people.

The woman holds you and says, "Nicholas, Nicholas, Nicholas."

The man is very tall and he looks down at you and grins and says, "Dawg!"

They take you out on more walks. All along neighborhood streets full of Art Deco apartment buildings and up to the park. You don't hesitate anymore; you trot along fast and the tips of your ears make a tiny flopflopflop as you go.

But you don't pee. You're not sure you're ready for the commitment.

Around seven (you know this because you're a very sophisticated dog who can apparently tell time), the tall man who calls you Dog leaves to go to another store and get you a new blanket. The woman kind of wants to give you a blanket that was once used by someone named José, but the tall man who calls you Dog thinks you need your very own, new blanket. You agree with this. Not only are you your own man, but, well, these people have a little shrine to this mysterious José, with a book and a framed portrait and plastered paw prints and things, and you think that's a little odd.

You keep these thoughts to yourself.

You're glad the tall man who calls you Dog is the one who has gone out to do the shopping, because he's clearly the one for the job. He's the Adrian behind your new wardrobe with the dashing green collar and matching harness and leash.



You sit in the woman's lap while she taps at the computer and posts pictures of you for her friends and family to see, and you think this lap fits really nicely. Then the phone rings and it's the tall man, and he wants the woman with the lap to tell him the size of the bottom of your crate (which incidentally matches your wardrobe). As she measures it, you pee on the rug.

You are ready for a commitment.

There are more walks and more adventures. There's trying out different places to sit in this new place.



And discovering the doppelganger who lives in the mirror.

There's the first play.







There's watching the tall man do yoga in the morning.

last night's dream

Whenever I have plans to go home to California, my nights are filled with dreams about having to come back. And food I want but never get to eat. Actually, all my dreams contain some element of food I want but never get to eat. Last night it was some sort of pie. Cream on top, and the filling was banana. There's no way I'd want to eat that in real life.

10

I've just started listening to Suite française on my walks to and from work. Started it on Tuesday, and my brain did what it always does when I read about those times in history that seem so... full. It felt a little jealous of that fullness, that importance, and a little... what would you say?... disappointed, I guess, to be living in a time that seems so normal. Certainly a time that seems comfortable.

But then days themselves can be full. Tuesday. Full of stress and lovely moments and good things and bad things. Work day was nonstop as Powell's changed out its New Favorites displays for its Holiday Catalog titles and this year whole cases were moved and tables taken down and hundreds of books put in and taken out and mostly by me. Stress and exhaustion, and then I'm thinking about the air raid I didn't live through, that I listened to being read to me in the opening of Suite française, and then I'm walking to the cupcake store on my lunch break and presenting my morning helpers with cupcakes and I feel great, and then I'm back schlepping books.


A full day, too, because every time I popped on the computer--before work, at lunch, in the evening--it was lovely news for Stephen.




An image of the magazine cover with his art on it.





An image of a big sign outside of Seattle's Winston Wächter Fine Art gallery that includes Stephen's name.





[see it sort of in the middle, there?]



The news that they've already sold his beautiful series Les Humeurs.



In the evening it was a trip to meet up with the man who's been building my website so we could consult and he could hand me the keys and teach me to drive it around a bit. Lots of stuff packed into a thing like that--all sorts of stuff about future and ambition and hope and what a dangerous thing hope can be. Drove home in fog so thick it seemed to be carrying the car.

Then late, an e-mail, the kind with bad news, scary loved-one bad news--not the really dire kind, not at all, but it's a note equal parts reassuring and terrifying--and funny in that particular way he's always funny. Stephen standing in the doorway to make sure I'm OK.

Finally: past my bedtime, another full day tomorrow, and I go to get ready to sleep, and Stephen says, oh, we forgot the anniversary.

Five years from our engagement. It's right there on the calendar, and we've been watching it approach. We are big homage-payers and celebrators. But the day was just too full to fit it.

But, look.

Stephen and me in the kitchen, and I take my two fingers and touch the little boxes of the calendar where they have the days printed. The Tuesday box says 10. The Wednesday box says 10. I put my fingers on two November 10ths and Stephen laughs out loud. It's not our anniversary at all. The day was just so full the number on the calendar grew. We still have tomorrow.

james

It's ten-thirtyish and we're sitting in bed talking. I'm about to go to sleep, and he's about to get back up and have some computer time. Before he does, he says, "Shall I read to you?"

Settle back, close eyes. A. A. Milne from 1924. When We Were Very Young. The famous first appearance (in book form) of Edward Bear (Winnie-the-Pooh) and one of Stephen's childhood books. Lovely to be read at bedtime when you're forty, going on forty-one.

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great care of his mother
Though he was only three.
James James said to his mother
Mother he said, said he:
You mustn't go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me.

[lovely e h shepard illustrations, which stephen made sure to let me see.]

lovely sound of wild parrots out the window in the morning.

watching baseball in the family room with mom and dad.

studying, with maxx and zoë and frank, the ways and the natural habitat of the snerfaladerf

(and the doodleflork).

this place has always been home. for so long, no matter where i was, no matter where home should have been, this was home. what wonderful - to be here now in that period of my adulthood in which where i live is home too.