Monday

"Cross" is the only word for me today. And maybe "cranky." It's rainy, the temperature's dropped about 20 degrees in two hours, but I still don't get the benefit of at least having snow as the precipitation du jour. I'm behind on laundry and not interested in catching up. It took forever for me to fall asleep last night, just humming to myself in the dark, positive that the next gust of wind was going to remove a slate or the weathervane or one of those tentatively-attached limbs over the driveway. When I woke up this morning, it was from a dream of listing endless pages of auction consignments. Christmas shopping and wrapping is done, so I'm at the stage where I'm just worrying over money spent, which is compounded by the dread of estimated tax payments. I'd rather be reading the new novel I started last night or sitting around in my pajamas and watching Remember the Night, but here I am, neatly dressed so as not to scandalize any shipping agent who might be delivering package. And I'm stuck with the dull work of finishing up a newsletter, which mostly just feels like "blah, blah, blah" at this point, which my cynical self says won't even get read. And to top it all off, someone had the chance to throw shoes at the current president and they missed. AND this happened while The Daily Show was on hiatus. Tell me again why I got out of bed?

November in Review

My, but I was reading "smart" stuff last month! I polished off five books, including The Hemingses of Monticello, which was massive. I didn't finish it until November 16, and then after that it was like a dam broke, and the other four books quickly followed.

Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello was eye-opening, but I think in some ways, I came away with more questions about history than answers. If you asked me why we decided to cancel a trip to visit friends, there would be less likely to be one reason and more likely to be dozens of factors: the possibility of bad weather, the pile of laundry at home, a lingering cold, two extra-long days of work during the previous week, etc. For someone to assess that decision from the remote world of the future someday and to proclaim me a bad friend or in general poor health would be to leap a large chasm of my reasoning. I just came away by how tenuous history is, how fragile some of our assumptions and arguments are. That said, Gordon-Reed has written a fascinating biography of one of the most well-documented early African-Americana families, and she manages as best she can, considering how little we're able to know about their thoughts and motivations.

After that I chewed through Into the Wild, which I wrote about earlier, and was reminded again how much I enjoy Jon Krakauer's writing. It's a sad story, almost, oddly, like the story of the Hemingses - something that we can't explain and a position we find it difficult to put ourselves into as readers, but by the end, it's one that we can come a little closer to. It takes a great deal of compassion to make people capable of venturing closer to a position or act that they would reject completely upon initial examination.

Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates followed, and it was just what you'd expect - snarky, entertaining, filled with little oddments and insights. The Puritans were an odd bunch, and the discussion of their "city on a hill" and how we came to co-op that as an American vision, while neglecting the sense of responsibility they felt was fascinating. It's one of the basic elements of tragedy - good intentions that somehow result in abhorrent offshoots. I realize that history doesn't often come with nifty endings, tied up neatly in a timely fashion, but I did feel that things sort of fell of a cliff at the end. It was as if the contract was for 200 pages, and somewhere around page 197, there was a realization that things needed to be wrapped up. Leaping over three hundred years of history, the Puritans are linked to John F. Kennedy. I know 21st-century politics aren't really Vowell's bailiwick, but I still would have liked a little more analysis about how the path we set our feet on then got us to the path we're on now.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, we managed to sneak in listening to Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux. I'm intrigued to see the movie, and all I can say is good for DiCamillo for avoid overly precious endings with everything too neatly tied up. (I know, I know - I'm nothing if not a walking contradiction.) Despereaux's big heart, bravery and commitment to doing the right thing were wonderful, and I look forward to seeing his big ears on the big screen.

Finally, I found Susan Fletcher's Eve Green. I made a note almost three years ago of the title after reading a pre-pub review in Library Journal, and it's stuck with me all this time. I was glad that it did. As someone who's so often homesick, not so much for family as just for a landscape and a way of life, Susan Fletcher nails down the desperate love of a place, and the beautiful part is that she doesn't even try to explain why she loves it. She just does. Love is like that. This was a gentle story that probably didn't fare well after being classified by many as a mystery. (Why, why, WHY do we have to overclassify everything?!) It's really the musings of a pregnant woman, looking back on her childhood, trying to make peace with the child she was before she brings her own child into the world. I loved it. Again, not a sledgehammer to the forehead, but a meandering story of memory and family and place. And confirmation that I really like Whitbread award winners, which I also made a note of. Let's hope it doesn't take me another three years to follow up on it!

Talpidae and Muridae

It might sound like a Shakespearean play, but it's actually the fuzzy infestation happening over here. One night this week, while reading in bed, I heard violent squeaking and rushed downstairs to discover that Charlie (aka Charles Manson) had discovered a mole.

What a mole was doing in the house, at night, I don't know. Running is certainly not the answer. Moles on a hardwood floor are less like pedestrians and more like curling stones, especially when an overzealous cat is involved. Fortunately, he found his way into the bottom of a milk crate of things set out for my brother, and I managed to carry him outside. Unlike mice, who are always looking for opportunities to escape, moles are actually very like Kenneth Graham's Mole: well-meaning, but not quick-witted. He stayed in the bottom of the milk crate, obligingly shifting out of my way as I removed every single object, and then he left by a hole in the side. I sort of liked thinking that after he hurried home, breathless and rattled, he slipped into a smoking jacket, propped his little webby feet on an ottoman, and had a cup of tea to soothe his nerves. He's rehomed now, snug under the brick walk, and probably working on his sequel to The Wind in the Willows as we speak. Written long hand on thick paper with a fountain pen, of course.

My husband actually asked me in all seriousness the next day if it could have been a vole. It was midnight, it was freezing, and I was standing on the porch in nothing but clogs and a fleece jacket, hoping no one was out and and about. I'm not sure whether I was more insulted that he'd think I wouldn't know the difference or that he actually expected me to have taken a closer look in that condition. While I always wanted to be as dignified and together as Badger, I'm afraid that I'm more like the washerwoman....

And today, after finishing my lunch, I noticed the cats starring at the bottom of my knitting basket. When cats stay awake long enough to do anything other than pester me, it's worth paying attention to. Anyway, they had cornered a mouse, who, when I moved the basket, darted around to the other side of the couch. While I went to empty my mouse-catching box (it's filled up after months of disuse), he managed to attempt an escape between the baseboards and the floor. I say attempt, because what he really ended up doing was getting his head quite firmly stuck. Panicked AND undignified, a combination I try to avoid, but then again, see previous mole-related exploits. He's taken up residence under the outhouse, hopefully consoling himself with some week-old asiago cheese bread that I put out as an apology for the rough treatment he received as our guest.

Honestly, I'm beginning to feel like a low-rent Marlin Perkins over here!

Cilia

Bronchial cilia and positive visualization - not so much these days. Normally, when I think about all my little cilia, I see them standing at attention, alert and bright-eyed, wafting with a hum of productivity and efficiency. Then illness comes along, institutes new policies that make no sense to anyone and requires that they fill out everything in triplicate, and suddenly, they're squashed under the bureaucracy of mucus, which doesn't do much for workplace morale. Blech.

Meanwhile, things to contemplate while lying on the couch: my next popsicle, a bath, and the mucus/bureaucracy metaphor....

Twenty Years

I don't tend to believe in accidents. Things happen for a universal reason, and I suppose that reduces to a religious belief, because what else is God but a sense of universal reason? That probably reduces to a rather bleak world view, too, because it implies that we have no control over what happens to us, but to me, it's how we react to what happens to us that shapes us. Circumstances are nothing; perspective is everything.

Anyway, due to a belief in cosmic reason, I thought it significant that I finished reading Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer's story of Christopher McCandless and his starvation in the Alaska bush, on the anniversary of my mother's death. His story is the perfect metaphor for her addiction. Addiction is a simultaneous running away from and running toward: fleeing a life that's too disappointing, that somehow doesn't measure up while running toward some ideal of self or existence, running toward something that explains or negates your current reality.

McCandless was a brilliant young man, disillusioned with the world, taking journeys that left him feeling isolated and dislocated from society when he encountered it. He was loving and compassionate, generous with his feelings and his possessions, while at the same time excising his parents from his life with a cold, calculated gesture. That was my mother's story as well - a brilliant young woman whose journeys with alcohol and drugs left her too raw to function in day-to-day life and leading her to make more distance journeys into their realm. She gave freely of herself, worked tirelessly to help her students, and at the same time, lashed out in ways that left those of us closest to her with scars, both mental and physical.

Like the McCandless family, I struggled to understand what would compel someone to retreat in such a fashion, to reject what seemed so obvious, to search for something that seemed so elusive and fleeting. After twenty years, I still don't really have answers, don't understand why the life she had was so uncomfortable, why she seemed to move through the world with raw skin, or what drove her to leave us time and again for something that never seemed to comfort her for long. The story of addiction remains as alien and inexplicable to me as Chris's story. While I can intellectualize the individual decisions and choices, can rationalize the thought process at work, I can't seem to reach a place where the whole process comes into focus, where the parts fall into place and become equal to the sum.

Searching for meaning is a complex concept. It's occupied the minds of philosophers through the ages, and perhaps we're not any closer to an answer, because the answer is different for all of us. Some people don't seem to search; they seem to abhor the effort, to lead the unexamined life in the ignorance we're told is bliss. Some people seem to know exactly what they're looking for and exactly how to get it, while others stumble around for awhile and find contentment, sometimes genuine, sometimes just out of the awareness of the alternative of continuing to search. Some people seem to have a sense of where a path will lead, while others don't seem to care, blazing new trails heedless with both awesome and awful results.

At the end, I suppose it doesn't matter. Both Christopher McCandless and my mother ventured into a place fraught with danger, a place where their families could not reach them and a place they could not have been called back from anyway. I've learned that I can't explain the results. I can understand the motivation, the search, that set their feet on that journey, and I have to accept that the path led out of sight, through terrain I can't follow, through a thought process I can't reconstruction. To understand that initial need to search is all I have, and in the end, all possible human stories are reduced to the same process - seeking and finding or seeking and failing. The inherent joy and tragedy in both deserve respect. We only hope that at some undefined end the seekers find satisfaction. After all, we're seekers too, and we need to hold onto that belief - that our lives will make sense, if only to us.

Woohoo!

I've been struggling for words since last night, which seems odd, considering how many feelings I've been bombarded by in the last 24 hours.

I believe we've elected a president that I actually feel proud of. Not the guy that was just less terrible than the other guy, not the guy who won by default for lack of real opposition, not the guy with great policies but a messy personal life, but a guy that I believe in.

We've elected someone other than the traditional white male. And that's huge for African-Americans, huge in a way that I don't even think I can understand, but it's huge for white folks too. We've developed a picture of racism in our country, a picture of ourselves as people we needed to be ashamed of, and last night proved that wasn't true. We're not who we've been told we are, we might not even be who we thought we were.

I've heard someone in politics talk about honesty and unity and hard work and make me believe that he meant it. Last night, I didn't hear someone who was trying to tie himself to a past in order to lift himself, but someone who was trying to tie us to our own past in order to lift us.

We've elected someone out of hope instead of fear. We've been in a dark and hopeless place, and worse, everyone keeps telling us that it really isn't dark and hopeless. Finally, someone shows up, acknowledges the truth, but says that there's a way out, that together we'll find it, that it isn't going to be easy, but that it WILL happen.

Everything seems trite, but I just can't express how proud I am that so many people opted to believe in the process, to believe in hope, to believe that the world can be a better place. We can be the version of ourselves that we want to be and the version of ourselves that we believe we once were, and I think we're all ready to do the work.

The Process

Our tiny little backroads township hall was packed this morning. Before the polls opened, the parking lot was full and the line stretched the length of the building. One man said in thirty years of voting there, he'd never seen so many people. We all stood around in the dark and the cold, making conversation with people we didn't know, and as the sun started to come up across the fields, I couldn't help but get a little teary. It's an amazing process, this election business, and after all these years, it still works. Americans can be oblivious and self-absorbed, but when push comes to shove, when we really believe it matters, we still come out, stand in line and participate in an orderly process with surprisingly little direction.

I find that the polls always make me confront my assumptions. There are guys in jeans and quilted flannel, John Deere ballcaps, women dressed for factory work, guys in ties - people getting ready to head off in all possible directions for the day, white collar, blue collar, unemployed. That's the beauty of the American election, that everyone has opinions and they're not always what you'd expect or at least not always held by the people you'd expect.

You can't vote if you don't have hope, if you don't believe in the future. Voting means not only that you care, but that you believe that something can come of that caring. As jaded as we are, and after such a battle, it's hopeful just to know that so many people still believe. And yes, this is sappy and idealistic, but so is the belief that people everywhere will think and care and do their part if you give them the chance. Idealism is worth celebrating at least once every four years.