Be Here Now

Molly had a grand mal seizure while at work stocking fingernail polish at Long’s this week. Waking up in an ambulance wasn’t her favorite thing, and speeding to the ER, again, wasn’t ours. All three of us felt our lives immediately contract, but I had planned four days of writing in Sea Ranch with my friend Wendy and I decided to go anyway.

At first there were flurries of phone calls, torrents of tears, guilty hand-wringing, and massive misgivings. Driving from our house in Sea Ranch to the one cafe in Gualala with wireless internet, Wendy said, “If you need to go home to deal with all this, honey, that’d be okay—you know that, right? I mean, I love it here and I love that the writing is going well, but you do what you need to do. Okay?”

“Here’s the thing,” I said, staring out the window at the ocean, “We’ve been dealing with crises like this for twenty-two years, Dan and I. More than that, actually. What I figured out not that long ago is, if we let shit like this derail us from the things we want for ourselves, when we don’t go ahead and do these things anyway, our lives get so...small. So narrow, you know? And bleak, filled with frustration and resentment.”

Wendy nodded. She has her own tsuris.

“Dan is handling things at home,” I said. “I trust him. It’s okay for me to be up here, I think, and it’s even okay for me to go ahead and feel happy.”

Hovering off shore, maybe ten miles out, was the same layer of marine fog I noticed the day we arrived when we first caught sight of the ocean. It doesn’t seem to roll in at night and clear off in the late morning the way you’d expect. Over us, it’s clear. The whole time we’ve been here, nothing but breezy sunshine.

A Buried Lead

Good things were accomplished today. I almost finished an essay about mole-making I started five years ago, I finished another essay about death and elephants I’ve been struggling with for at least a year, I power-walked for seventy-five minutes along a path at the edge of the ocean; I beat Wendy, decisively, at Scrabble, I organized all my beads in preparation for creating necklaces for three of my friends’ girls who are about to graduate from high school, I read an analysis of Michele Obama’s belt and big-beaded necklaces, and I realized that suffering has, for a long time and mostly invisibly to me, transformed my daughter into a bodhisattva.

Bon Voyage

Sitting down after not writing for awhile feels like listening to the rumble of big turbines firing up in the hold of a city-sized ship. You stand up on deck in your new hat and your heavy wool coat watching seagulls overhead, preparing to wave to whomever you’re leaving behind, and then slowly, before you hear anything, you begin to feel a depth of sound vibrating in the soles of your feet, and it grows into a shudder, like an earthquake, which is accompanied by a whining scream and periodic clanking until you realize what you’re feeling is fear. You can’t visualize what’s happening down there in the machinery, for one thing. Maybe it smells like diesel and bilge water. Maybe sweat-streaked workmen in grubby overalls are yanking on huge levers and monitoring valves and shouting to one another over the din. There must be a large store of fuel down there, coal maybe, or something more instantaneously flammable, like petroleum, or—even more frightening to consider—something explosive. Possibly nuclear.

What it sounds like, basically, is danger. And inevitability.

Where are you going, exactly? And why aren’t the people you’re waving to going with you?

Shouldn’t the process of booting up your laptop—the dainty pressing of a single M&M-sized button—while you sit in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, drinking tea in your pajamas, feel tame and predictable? Relatively risk-free?

It doesn’t.