Searching for Faith

The essay below sprang from a Facebook post I made wishing my friends a Happy Winter Solstice and Joyous Yule. I planned it a few days in advance and spent more time than I expected finding just the right image and message. I realized once again, I was searching for faith.

I have been seeking  - seeking somewhere, something to put my faith in, for decades now.  When I was a child, I dismissed Christianity. It could be because we lived in the Mid-East for two years. From the age of 5, I knew there was more than one way to believe. I didn't question this. In fact, I didn't think about it much at all. 

When we returned to the States, I attended Sunday school sporadically. One morning at a small chapel at Ft. Ord, the Sunday school lesson was about hypocrites. I couldn't have been more than 9 or 10, my beliefs still not fully formed. What I took away from that lesson was not to act like you believe if you don't. And I knew I didn’t believe. I discussed this with no one. I was not a questioning child and I kept my own counsel, even then.

Throughout the rest of childhood, I went to church now and then. At the last place I moved with my family when I was a junior in high school, I went to youth group purely for social reasons. I stuck out like a sore thumb in that town but I craved acceptance nonetheless. I watched what I said at school until I realized I was also monitoring what I thought. I still wanted to be accepted, but from that moment, I went my own way. I didn't think much more about faith or religion until college.

 The most "shocking" thing I learned my first year in college was  communion wine in some denominations is not grape juice. It actually is wine!  In an anthropology class much later, I learned of Weber's belief that he had an "unmusicality" with religion. I latched on to that phrase and have carried it with me all the years since, believing I, too, am tone deaf to faith and religion. But I envied (and still envy) those who have faith and believe in a power higher than themselves, whether it is a monotheistic Goddess or God, a pantheon, or the spirit and essence of nature. 

In my early 20s, I researched Wicca by reading a few books.  I did some rituals for a short time.  I didn't do them long enough for it to become a habit and I don't remember talking to much of anyone about it. A few years later, I discovered Unitarianism.  That's the closest I've to faith, though for a little while in 2008-2009, I flirted with Christianity .

That was largely a function of where I worked at the time, a faith-based organization. I was surrounded by people of faith, many of whom were conservative. I sensed a power there, and a surrender to something other than self. It would have completely altered my belief system and politics.

I became a member of a local Unitarian congregation when I moved to Rockford. Even though I only planned to live there for a few years, I felt the need to put down roots to establish relationships. It didn't work out as I intended. I slowly drifted away, first because of illness, and eventually because the groups I tried to be part of fell apart for whatever reason. My regular attendance ceased in 2011.

The roots I put down were shallow. Part of the blame lays squarely on my shoulders. After services, I did not stick around for coffee hour. I felt especially awkward at the time and abhor small talk, so I usually fled straight from the sanctuary to my car. Besides, once people find out I don’t have kids, pets, or a favorite team, they're often at a loss for conversation with me. On my side, I can be tongue-tied. It's improved over the last several years but there are still moments I can't think of a single thing to say.

Nearing 50, I still seek something to believe in and a community to belong to with that belief. Maybe I am tone-deaf to religion like Weber. Maybe I am faithless. Maybe I don't need any more faith than what I already carry. Yet I keep coming back to this search for the spiritual, something higher, more elemental than the woman that I am. Maybe if I knew what I was looking for, I would have found it by now.

Faith is a very personal thing. This is why I haven't discussed it openly before  now. It has not been for lack of people to ask.  Since I was a teen, I have had access to people of faith, whether pagan or Judaeo-Christian or something else. Some have been classmates, casual friends, co-workers, or friends on social media. Others have been close friends or more, the very people I could be vulnerable enough to ask.

But I have never liked to pry. Yet I keep coming back to this question of faith. I poke around the trailhead but can't a path. I love research, but there is only so much you can learn from it. I need to stop googling and reading. I need to ask real people.

Will you share your story (or a piece of it) with me? What led you to what you believe in? I genuinely want to know.  It may help me find my own path.

---

Conundrum

(Written on a receipt during a Crane Wives show, inspired by the niggling thought that I'm a little too self-absorbed, a glass of wine, and live music.)

     The Chardonnay,

     The past angst

           and the present

    The reflection,

    The inner turmoil

    The words, the

     heart on my sleeve

            Why can’t I

    I just write about

    the mundane…

    a toaster…

   the weather

Mid Life #1: We are Here

Generation X didn’t start the fire. We looked at it and said, “Whatever.” We are no longer young adults. Most of us have not and will not set the world on fire. The demographics say there are far fewer of us than the generations that book end us. We hear about them all the time. but we are here, too. We exist.

Sometimes, I think I’m old. Awhile back, my boss referred to my younger office mate and I as Laverne and Shirley.  She didn’t know who that was, so I sent her a link to the opening credits. A couple of minutes later, she turned to me and said, “I get it.” More recently, she told me she hopes she’s as cool as me when she’s my age. That is the best compliment I’ve been given in a long time. My office-mate, is one of the good ones.

Talking with a friend recently, I mentioned that we are getting old after the phrase “a quarter century” was used. He countered that no, we’re just getting started. You know what? We’re both right. By the time you’re in your mid-40s, a lot of milestones are behind us, but there is a lot ahead of us, too. Don't look behind. The past is gone. Look ahead.

https://www.thehenryford.org/visit/henry-ford-museum/exhibits/your-place-in-time/

Making Sexy Awkward Since 1986

A boy named Tom sent me a rose during Homecoming my freshman year of high school. I was 14, new in town and shy.  I didn’t know what to do with the idea that a boy might think I was pretty. He was a sophomore and must have been shy, too. I don’t think we ever spoke the entire year. But I did press that rose in my scrapbook, where it continues to decay to this day. 


On the last day of school that year, I received a note from  another boy, Brian.  It was in English class, and our desks were arranged in a circle. I remember seeing the note passed from one kid to another. When it reached me, I was surprised to see it had my name on it.


I opened it. “Jennifer, will you go out with me?” it read. I glared in Brian’s general direction. I wrote my reply, “I think you have the wrong Jennifer.” There were at least two other Jennifers in the room. Surely it reached the wrong one. I sent it back. It came back. He had the right Jennifer. I thought he was being mean. There was no way he could be serious.  I looked right at him, tore up the note, and crushed it under my heel. I never saw him again. Four years later, it dawned on me he actually was asking me out on purpose. Sorry, Brian.


I moved that summer and soon met James, my first boyfriend. Probably the only reason I thought he was serious is because several friends I trusted told me he was…and I had a crush on him, too.  We were at the mall on a busy Saturday. He pulled me into a corridor. I knew where this was going. I thought I was ready. We were pressed against a wall, his lips coming toward me, and oh no! Probably his tongue, too. I ducked. He never tried to kiss me again.


Three years later, it is the tail end of my freshman year of college. I have had a mad, mad crush on Scott since the moment I laid eyes on him in the fall.  He has also had a mad, mad crush on me for several months. 


Our friends were not oblivious to any of this. But we were. They went home for Memorial Day weekend.  Scott and I decided to go out for dinner together. This is not a date. We will not admit or see that it is. After an awkward dinner devoid of conversation, we sat under a tree, picking green aphids out of each other’s hair. 


Two years later, Scott and I were not together. We are taking a break. I am a mess. How will I live without him? I am strong. I don’t need him. I cry. I write. I study more. I write some more.  I am woman, hear me roar!  How will I live without him?  


This is how: I discovered a computer bulletin board system.  I spent hours online talking to people I would never meet in person. But there’s one person I joke with more than anyone else and pour my heart out to. I learn to flirt because of him. Eventually, we tell each other our real names.  We email and send a real letter or two. We have a fling online. That fizzles. We remain friends. 


A few months later, we start talking, on the phone in the middle of the night, for hours and hours. I do most of the talking. He listens. I am preoccupied with my final semester and oblivious as ever.  Still, the desire to meet in person is strong. We do meet in person, but not before Scott tells me how much he misses me. I have to make a choice. I don’t know who to choose and am bad at risk-taking.  So when I finally meet my online friend, I threw on more ice queen armor than I ever have before or since…for an entire weekend. To ensure it lasts, I avoid eye contact. But somehow, we remained friends. He still tracks me down every so often. And I appreciate it.


Years pass.  Now it’s 2002. I am at a friend’s house for a costume fitting. I am prancing around in leggings and a t-shirt, almost oblivious as usual. There’s a guy there I suspect is going ask me out at some point. A few weeks later, he does. That’s the one I marry.

August, 1989

August 1989: 

Bombing down country roads I’d never seen before or since, driving a car that took my family and I from Michigan to California and back again and Michigan to Virginia and back to Michigan.  When it rained, water inexplicably filled the back-seat passenger’s side foot well.  The dusty light blue upholstery on the ceiling sagged around the dome light.

The car I drove in wooden shoes, very briefly, just to see if it could be done, the Tulip Time we taped the fortune cookie fortune “A thrilling time is in your immediate future” to the dash with band aids.

The car that when it was cold out, made you wonder every time if it was going to take off again when the light turned green

The car I rode in the year I was seven, when in the middle of the journey cross country, I saw snow for the first time in two years, when at the end of the journey, we were greeted by the same ice plant ground cover we’d left on the other side of the world just months before

The care I drove and drove and drove, almost never filling the tank back up.  (Sorry, Mom and Dad.)

The car I learned to drive in, early on Sunday mornings, past the mall where I would later to duck to avoid my (almost) first kiss

The car with an after-market cassette deck that I was ever grateful for because almost all the radio stations were crap in my teen aged opinion

The car, weeks before, I’d ferried around friends from Washington, D.C. and Detroit, showing them the corn fed, tulip-bedecked wasteland I now called home.  (What else did we do that week besides dye my hair red with McCormick food coloring?)

The car I drove when I accidentally lost Lake Michigan that spring when I was a miserable square, dark-minded peg in a school of round, pure-minded pegs who’d known each other forever.

The 1979 Malibu station wagon I grew up in from Michigan to California to Virginia and back to Michigan,  we took one last long ride together, bombing down roads I’d never seen before or since, windows rolled down, open to the blue August sky, blasting Disintegration.

It’s Only Words: Thoughts on #metoo

The #metoo campaign has been on my mind since it first appeared in mid-October.  I am saddened but not shocked that so many I know have been assaulted or raped.  In the midst of that first week, a male friend made light of it.  I wanted to tell him off, but I bit my tongue.  We were in mixed company.  This group of friends is thicker-skinned than me.  It is assumed this particular friend is just joking.   We make allowances for him.  I bit my tongue because I am the quiet one in the group who feels she has to speak loudly and rudely to be heard. I bit my tongue because I knew saying something would do no good.

Unlike a lot of women I know personally and virtually, I am fortunate that I have never been assaulted. I’ve never been in a situation where I was absolutely powerless.

In tenth grade, another student on the school bus described in detail how he would like to tie up me and a friend and what he would do.  We said nothing.  I remember to this day feeling threatened and vowing never to be alone with that kid.  He was two years younger than me, but bigger and stronger.  I’d found him creepy before, but now I had a definite reason.

A year later, at a new school 150 miles away, I walked home from school one day when two boys decided to follow me home in a car.  They drove slowly, keeping pace with my steps, yelling that I was a bitch and that they would kill me.  I did nothing to provoke this.  I barely knew these kids.

That time, I did say something to my parents.  They followed up with the principal.  The principal followed up on something unrelated my Dad told him.  It was associated with the shouted death threats but as far as I know, there were never any repercussions for them, just confirmation what my dad said was true.

Years passed.  In college and grad school, I did a few stupid things like walking alone across campus well after dark and accepting a walk home from a man I’d never met in person.  I never felt unsafe with any of men I socialized with at the time, whether they were friends or something more.  I trusted them and never felt any of them would be violent towards me.  

In my twenties, I settled for a relationship with a man I did not fully trust, who I was not completely comfortable with.  He was verbally and emotionally abusive.  I truly believe he would have been physically abusive had he thought he could get away with it.

These are the experiences I remember.  These are the times I remember feeling unsafe, the times I was made aware that the men hurling words at me could physically overpower me.  

Words have power.  Words can summon fear.  Saying what you would like to do to another person does not make you more attractive.  It does not make you stronger.  It does not make you better.  It is not funny.  It is behavior that should not be brushed aside or laughed about.  This behavior is not acceptable.  If it makes you uncomfortable, call people out for it.  Don’t bite your tongue like I did.  The next time it happens, I am speaking up.

My experiences pale in comparison to what so many have had to endure. But I will stand by the women and men who have experienced assault and abuse.

The Words I Don't Keep

The words I don’t keep

That I set free on paper

Are my gift to share

If they are too easy,

Too plain, too transparent,

Pass by

If they are too obscure,

Too hard, too much,

Seek them only if you choose

If my words sing to you,

If they solve a mystery,

If they make you wonder

Know I am grateful

Know that I am honored

The words that I set free

Are my gift

Accept them as you please

  

Inspired by an interview on NPR with Instagram poet Rupi Kaur, found here:  http://www.npr.org/2017/10/09/554561078/poet-rupi-kaur-art-should-be-accessible-to-the-masses

Changeless

Two poems, written a lifetime apart:

MEMO TO MYSELF

(January 29, 1993, two weeks from being 21)

MEMO:

            Learn what you want

                        (And some of what you don’t want)

            Do well

            Eat your vegetables

            Blow soap bubbles in the spring

            Appreciate some fine art

            Exercise

            Play in the snow

            Take night walks

            Blow bubbles in your milk

            Be nice to yourself

            Be nice to others

            Have a good cup of coffee

            Laugh

            Cry

            Have good friends

            Fall in love

            Sing!

            Wear hats

            Travel (if only in your mind)

            Be yourself

            Write

            Read

            Never forget to be young (ever)

ADVICE

(September 3, 2017, smack in the middle of being 45)

Take the meeting

Ask the question

Open up

Get hurt

Heal

Don’t dwell

Don’t hold back

Learn

Live

Reach

Assume people like you

Don’t worry when they don’t

Know you’re good enough

Run if it feels wrong

Stay if it could be right

Go with your gut

Send the resume

Trust yourself

Own yourself

Be yourself

Don’t let go of who you are

Kiss the boys

Take the chance

I don’t often wear my heart on my sleeve.  I save it for paper.  This has been my modus operandi since I was a teenager.  It has not changed in part because I have written sporadically as an adult.  Before, I wrote constantly from the age of 10 until I started college.  Sometimes, it was for school.  Most often, it was for the fun of it.  I just did it; it was part of who I was. 

The core of who I am does not change.  When I wrote “Advice,” I had completely forgotten about “Memo to Myself.”  Written a lifetime apart, they speak to each other.  They speak to me.  I am writing to my older self and to my younger self.  At least one of us is still around to take note.

Friendship, Flirting, and Digital Angst (1994)

In the waning days of college, my best friend Jennifer and I decided to take a road trip to Iowa City. We would drive her shiny new red Grand Am six or so hours to a gathering of like-minded people who we’d never actually met.  We knew them from ISCA.bbs.  Added to the mix, we were going two hours out of our way to pick up a friend in Cedar Falls.  

Bulletin board systems, or .bbs for short, were social media before anyone coined the term, but without the graphics.  ISCA.bbs was the Iowa Student Computing Association bulletin board system.  Users from all over the world logged on.  If too many people were logged on, you waited in the queue until somebody logged off and it was your turn.  If you had access to a computer, a modem, and some time, you could be there.  The vast majority of us were college students, though there were some high school kids and a few past adults past their 20s.  

This was before the internet as we now know it existed.  Netscape was brand new in 1994. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, wasn’t even a teenager.  Outlook and Gmail didn’t exist.  Basic e-mail was picking up steam on colleges campuses.  If you received an e-mail from an address you didn’t recognize, you would probably open it and try to figure out who sent it.  Sometimes it wasn’t hard. I received a few messages from GoD.  I knew exactly who it was. It really was the Wild West. 

Even without graphics, it was possible to spend vast amounts of time online on a .bbs. There were “forums” or “rooms” for all sorts of topics on ISCA.bbs, from the esoteric to the silly.  You could have private conversations via eXpress messages, or “Xes” for short.  You could argue about history and literature or get critiques of your writing.  

You could commiserate or blow off steam.  You could mess with people’s heads just for the sheer black-hearted fun of it.  You could tell jokes or spread rumors. You could make friends or enemies. You could laugh or cry.  You could flirt or fall in love.  You could do almost anything on a bbs, and you did it with text.

When you created an account, you had to come up with a new name to use online.  You could use your real name, but most of us came up with something new.  On ISCA, there was CatsEye, Glass Falcon, Cyanide, Captain Chaos, Caramel Delight, and Vlad the Impala among thousands of others.  We were from Iowa, Michigan, Maryland, Washington, Australia, the United Kingdom and just about everywhere else.

Jennifer and I set off for Iowa during rush hour on a Friday.  It was a few days after Kurt Cobain died. Stuck in construction traffic outside Lansing, we heard about it on a random radio station as we channel surfed for better music.  We didn’t care.  Grunge wasn’t our thing.  I remember we couldn’t find anything good on the airwaves. Instead must have popped in a CD or continued our four-years’ long conversation about absolutely everything.  
Jennifer was my other half.  We talked from the night we met at freshman orientation until a few years after graduation. We synced in all sorts of ways.  We finished each other’s sentences.  We looked at each other and knew what the other was thinking.  Sometimes, we even got our classes mixed up. She was a little shorter than me, more outgoing and a lot smarter.  We did everything together.  I think we even signed up for ISCA at the same time. I really believed we would always be in each other’s’ lives.

I haven’t seen Jennifer in close to twenty years.  We lost contact for a while but it doesn’t change the fact that she is the only friend I’ve loved like family.  To this day, I would drop everything for her if she needed me.

So, around Chicago that night in April 1994, we lost the thread from I-94 to I-80.  We were north of where we were supposed to be.  We drove into the darkness of I-90 west of the suburbs, then south on I-39 and finally, to I-88 west.  No lights, no exits, no cell phones. Just a road map and hours of darkness ahead of us.  At the end of it was a friend from ISCA we’d never actually met, waiting to be picked up outside a bar in Cedar Falls.  Was that as sketchy then as it sounds now?

Sometime after midnight, we stopped at the last gas station in Illinois to call information for the number of the bar where our friend was waiting.  We called and the bartender paged Rob.  He laughed at us and took it in stride, like it was no big deal that we were running late. The bar would be closed well before we arrived.

We’d never met Rob in person.  He could have been an ax murderer for all we knew.   What I did know was this:  he’d had a rough few years.  He smoked. He drank.  (I didn’t do much of either.) He was intelligent with a subversive streak and a loner– totally my type in those respects. He was also a few years younger than me.  I found him sometimes unsettling and a little dangerous, but instinctively I knew he had a good heart.

The previous semester, Rob taught me to flirt - in brilliant green and amber text. It was an education he perhaps didn’t know he was providing.  We were very different in some ways and similar in others.  He wasn’t the only guy I flirted with on ISCA, but he meant the most. We connected on an emotional level.

There was no eye contact or stammering to worry about on a .bbs…in theory.  Even though we sat typing at computer monitors hundreds of miles apart, I often blushed and averted my eyes from the screen. (I was a master at avoiding eye contact in person.)  A rose composed of an ampersand and punctuation marks could make my day. We communicated on ISCA, through e-mails that the other person didn’t always receive, talked on the phone, and exchanged blurry pictures through the mail.  

I think we met in a forum called Babble.  The name says it all.  In Babble, users talked about everything and anything.  We talked about life.  We joked.  We healed.  We flirted.  We held virtual happy hours and crashed on virtual couches in dark corners. We were lighthearted.  We were serious.  

I remember when one user burst in to Babble and said his parents were getting divorced. He didn’t know what to do.  We were there for him, reaching out and listening across the miles, across dial-up connections from everywhere. 

The first exchanges Rob and I had were about a mutual admiration of vampires.  Before the end of September 1993, we were talking a lot in private eXpress messages and exchanging e-mails.  

Because I wrote about that year in excruciating detail as it unfolded, I have a record of what was typed when things moved to more than flirtatious, banter between unseen strangers.  It went like this:

Rob: “So what do you look like?”

Me (coyly):  “What do you want me to look like?”

Rob:  “Yourself.”

That stopped me in my tracks.  He wasn’t flirting.  He really wanted to know.  Be still my bruised heart!  

The fall of 1993 I was reeling from breaking up with my first serious boyfriend. Scott and I had known each other since the second week of our freshman year.  Near the end of that year, we stopped ignoring what was obvious to everyone but us.  We were wildly attracted to each other.  We were a couple for the next two years. Between my junior and senior year, we broke up, painfully but without malice.  For other reasons, he transferred to a school close to home.  

I did not know college without Scott.  His absence was palpable. I was so used to him by my side that I could feel he wasn’t there. Anything would remind me of him.  That we never stopped talking even though we’d broken up couldn’t have helped.  I was fragile. I was tough. I was a mess. 

I tried to run from all that by writing a lot, by spending too many hours on ISCA, and by flirting more than I ever had before, mostly online.  I was still shy, but I could be daring behind a keyboard.  It was a real rush!

My fling with Rob was over by the middle of October, but we remained friends.  We still talked online and on the phone.  By the spring of 1994, there was still interest in meeting IRL –in real life – so I jumped at the opportunity to go on a road trip to Iowa.

By the time Jennifer and I got to Cedar Falls, it was 3:30 in the morning.  The bar had been closed for an hour and a half.  As we rode up, we saw Rob sitting on the curb reading, his long legs stretched before him.  

He walked up to the car like he knew exactly who it was. (For all he knew, we  were the ax murders.)  I stayed in the driver’s seat.  Jennifer got out of the car and greeted him with a hug.  I did not because, well, it was apparently time to put my guard up even if I was truly happy to finally meet. 

From there, we drove to a Happy Chef diner.  We were all hungry.   I later recorded it as “a pale imitation of Denny’s.”   What I didn’t record was what we talked about or how much my guard was up.  I now have no idea what the conversation was.

Rob was pale, tall and thin.  He stood about a foot taller than me.  Online, he had a knack for saying things I didn’t know how to respond to, because it was off-color or because I had absolutely no frame of reference. His brown hair was dyed black and shaved underneath. What wasn’t shaved fell to his shoulders.  Like every other guy I ever really cared about, he wore glasses.  He had kind eyes and a nice smile. 

Sometime in the next few hours, he snuck in between my defenses, ever so briefly.  I remember a hug that was a little handsy if polite.  No lines were crossed.   He knew his way around a girl.  He didn’t need directions, just signals I wasn’t giving.  

I was 22.  I was growing my hair long again.  It was dyed dark reddish brown against my fair complexion.  I wore lightweight tortoiseshell glasses and a motorcycle jacket that always made me feel tougher than I actually was.

I was a bit intense, I guess, and apprehensive about my future.  Graduation was just weeks away.  Grad school was in my future, but the details were unknown.  

Even in the long skirts and loose t-shirts I often wore, I was a somewhat of a tease.  Coy was my middle ground.  I may have come out of my shell that year, but I had no idea how to proceed.  

I had a delicate confidence.  I felt a certain power of feeling attractive even though I was self-conscious. I knew how to take things only so far with any sort of romantic or physical attraction.  I was afraid of how I would react, so I either ran when things got too close or I became standoffish for what I thought was my own protection.  I held myself back from emotional danger even if it meant withholding friendship and affection, even if I wanted the very same thing in return.

There are a few pictures of that weekend.  In one, Rob’s arm is around Jennifer.  They lean into each other in one while another friend from ISCA looks on. There are smiles all around. In another, a group of us are at a party.  Rob has his arm around me; I am not completely comfortable but not hating it either.  I let my guard slip. Is this visible in the grainy picture?

Most of the weekend, he tried to get closer. Most of the weekend, I inched just barely out of reach.   Someone should have told him, “Just kiss her or don’t.  Stop acting like you can’t find her lips.  Someone should have told me, “Stop playing keep away and just kiss him already.”  He was a gentleman and I was curious but afraid.

All there ever was was a peck on the cheek at the end of the party and a peck on the cheek when we dropped him off at the bus station the next morning.  His ride home fell through. We could not afford the time to drive him back to Cedar Falls, so I bought him a bus ticket. 

I lived in my head so much that year.  I journaled obsessively.  There are five composition books of every tiny painful detail of being twentysomething, passionate, confused, heartbroken, hopeful, and exhilarated with life.  Rob is mentioned often.  I  would not have encountered him without ISCA.bbs. I’ve never had another friend quite like him.  

On ISCA, we were Akasha, Didi, and GoZeR.  

Didi:  “Thank you” doesn’t say enough for our endless conversation all through college. Thank you for being my best friend even though I didn’t like Doctor Who then.   Thank you for dealing with my sad manic self our senior year. (Okay, and every other year, but especially that year.)  You are a saint.  I miss you.

GoZeR:  Thank you for bringing me out of my shell.  Thank you for listening and making me laugh.  Thank you for everything on ISCA I remember and probably some stuff I don’t. Thank you for tracking me down every so often in the years since.  Thank you for giving a damn. 

Thank you for being there, for being who you were that moment in our lives.  You helped me find my way.  I love you both.

Author’s note: “Friendship, Flirting, and Digital Angst (1994)” was inspired by the perfect storm of finding an old friend from college one week and the very next week, learning an old friend from high school had died.  Each was present in my daily life in some way only about a year.  The friends we may be close to for only a short time can have a lasting impact on our lives. 

Reach out to your old friends. I don't care if you haven't seen them in decades. Find them; it is so much easier than it used to be. Find them and let them know they made a difference in your life.

Sexy

(May 8, 2008)

Shirt rumpled, sleeves rolled up,

Deadline looming, wheels turning

Pausing only to put thought into words

Furrowed brow, mussed hair,

Tie loosened, open shirt collar

Lean back in the chair,

It’s after hours

Papers scattered, thoughts focused

Intense, adrenaline-fired exhaustion

Lights dimmed,

Features bathed in monitor glow,

Intelligence, inspiration in overdrive, overtime

Sexy.

____________________________________________________________________

Inspired by Ira Glass and “This American Life Live” as seen at Kerasotes Showplace 16 in Rockford, IL.  In Dec. 2008, I saw him live in Springfield.  And yes, I'm a giant dork, but you probably already knew that.

Address Rasa

(July 31, 1999)

At the cusp of the future

I sit in the blank void

Listening to the voices

I caught years ago

When someone else was me

Best Friend

(December 12, 2010)

The sisterhood of comfortable silence

Of girlish laughter and knowing looks

Being only a phone call away

The sisterhood of facing it together,

The crazy joy and tribulation of life,

Or just going out on a messy December day

I miss you like the one that got away

Scenes from a Small Town that Starts with a Z - circa 1989*

The other night, I was rooting around in the ancient history of my high school journals. After catching up with an old friend recently and reminiscing about a deep conversation on the staircase at an alcohol-free cast party at my house, I wondered how much of that conversation I’d recorded 22 years ago. (Yes, I spent a lot of time on a dark staircase just talking at a party at my own house. My shoes have been neat to stare at for my entire life.) I didn’t remember all the details then. Nor do I remember all the details of the recent event, but both were they type of conversation I’ve apparently always loved, the sort that meander from one thing to the next that are an exchange of ideas instead of a competition.

Here’s an excerpt of my summary of that conversation in Nov. 1989:

 

“We talked about what we think of dating (those of us who don't 
and why we don’t),about our morals...

I don’t remember what all but it was just good conversation. I

found it special. Some of us got to know each other quite a bit better.”

Deep stuff, this stuff of high school students! Ah, but lest you think I was only introspection and angst as a teenager, I offer you this from October 31, 1989:

 

“Happy Halloween! B. and I had a great time. We just went out ‘raging’ more or less.

Piled 5 people in M.’s jeep and 4 more in K’s car and egged D.V.B.’s house. 
Actually, we just drove by and threw the eggs, so I doubt

the house actually got hit.”

 

I apparently also smoked a lot that night, even going so far as to buy my own cigarettes for a change. I’m not sure what’s more hilarious – the fact that we egged someone’s house, but not exactly, or the fact that I had completely forgotten about that night.

 *Names have been abbreviated to protect the vaguely guilty.