As the Dodgers would say...

40 B4 40
45 minutes to go...


I haven't put nearly the time and thought into writing in the past 40 days that I had hoped.  So I can add that to things like working out, eating right, sleeping enough, calling the people I love more often, and generally not being a hermit to the list of things that I want to do and just don't seem to get around to very often.

It's one thing to get started, it's another altogether to change longtime bad habits.  We've all been there, we'll likely all be there again.

So - in these last minutes before I enter my (gasp) 40th year - I'm not gonna sweat it.  I'm going to relish in all that I have been doing.  Working hard, enjoying Colorado, spending a luxurious week with the friends I love the most on this planet, celebrating, planning a wedding real quick like, falling more and more in love with this man I'm going to spend the next 40 years with, making a life together.  No wonder I haven't quite gotten around to oatmeal for breakfast and a workout every day.  So what -  there's always next year.

What I am is what I am

40 B4 40
5 days to go...

Five days?  Five days?  Where did the last 39.999 years go?

Well, let's see -
Alice Springs, Australia - Anchorage, Alaska - Camp Verde, Arizona- Townsville, Australia - Wickenburg, Arizona - Maryborough, Australia - Tucson - New Orleans - Tucson - Cleveland - San Diego - San Francisco - Barcelona - New York - Brooklyn - Manhattan - Wanderingalloverthecountryoncouches - Santa Monica - Denver, sweet Denver.  Ah - no wonder I'm pooped.

I've written much about the where in the past.  Many posts about wandering, moving, home, staring over.  Today I'm more curious about the what of the past 4 decades.  (Shit, I'm counting in decades now!)

I've been many things - daughter & granddaughter, niece & big sister, teammate & camp counselor, runner & jumper & dancer, top student & Hey-Mon hard worker, traveler & homebody, teacher & fund raiser, mentor & volunteer, apartment renter & home owner, event producer & hired hand, girlfriend & ex (& then girlfriend again), disaster responder & master planner, co-worker  & colleague & boss, neighbor & stranger, friend & confidant, aunt & playmate, and on and on...

So many roles, so many lives already lived, so much leaving one place to start over in a new one.   So which one am I?  Which what is who I am?

.

Defiance

40 B4 40
8 days to go  (aaaaahhhh - when you skip a few days the numbers drop so precipitously!)


Everyone watches the news and feels for the families.  We all grieve and hold each other a bit more tightly when we have collective weeks like this that rock us, again and again, with back to back nightmares that keep us glued to the 24 hour news cycle.

This morning my mind is rattling around with how different my own, personal, reactions are to each of this week's horrifying stories.  First, a bombing at the Boston Marathon - 3 lost and 176 injured/hospitalized.  Now, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in small-town Texas - initial estimates of 70 lost and unknown injured, this morning's reports are more manageable at 15 lost and 160 hospitalized. 

Both terrible, tragic events.  Both sudden and without warning.  Both streaming live into our livingrooms.  And yet - my heart and my head are world's apart on how they are reacting to each. 

I'm not angry about the Texas explosion.  I'm terribly sad for that town and those families, they remind me of my own small town of Wickenburg, AZ and I imagine many of the families that I grew up with being affected in this way.  The brothers and uncles and guys we went to JrHi with as volunteer firefighters trying to evacuate and rescue people they've known all their lives.  The teachers and nurses rushing to help in schools & nursing homes and each being faced with familiar faces that are today in terrible pain and fear. 

With news like this West, TX explosion - my mind goes immediately to what the Red Cross can and will be doing to help in the days and weeks (and months...) to come.  I start calculating the sheltering needs, trying to learn what's left of the town to support the response and from that - from how far away help must travel in this part of Texas.  Wondering how many people have friends and family unscathed that will take them in and how many others will rely on the open hearts and hands of our volunteers and partners that will leave their own friends and family to take the very best care of these strangers.  I'm proud and hopeful and calm.  They will hurt and they will grieve, certainly - but all will be OK in this town, they will come back together, and they will be ever stronger for it.

But I'm not angry, and I am not afraid.  This explosion was an accident and accidents happen, don't they?

Perhaps more telling, I am not definant when learning of the Texas explosion.  Within very seconds of learning of the explosions at the finish line in Boston on Monday I felt a rising up inside me.  It was fast and fierce and it was definitely pissed off.  I, like thousands of others, scrambled to gobble up good news about those I knew who were running or working or watching - but even that personal connection to real people was overshaddowed by a burning inside. 

I am on fire. 

I am a member of a marathon family, a group of people who are moved by sport - moved by the unmatched power & pride of bringing people together in this fundamentally public way for no other reason than for each to triumph and to overcome and to, well, to be together.  Every year for the past 7 (8?) years I stand in Fort Wadsworth at the very base of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge and feel my heart swell and my eyes overflow as the Howitzer blows and 40,000+ runners start the New York City Marathon.  They head across into Brooklyn and on to Central Park to meet both the personal and public challenge of completing this physical and mental race.  Every year I feel the collective electric community.  The coming together of countries and languages and faces and strangers - who each arrive with their own singular focus - but who each cross that bridge and pass through our city as a community, together, proud, and strong. 

They also do so without fear, without a thought in their minds that they might lose a limb, or a loved one.  Or at least they used to...

Things will never be the same at the base of the VZ bridge - the sound of that Howitzer will be haunting instead of celebratory, the cheers that rise from the crowds of runners and volunteers will not drown out the voice in the back of our minds - What if it happens again? Today? Here?

I am defiant.  Or is it belligerent?

For West, TX - I am briefly saddened, and then immediately aware and relieved that they will be in the good and strong hands of neighbors and friends and volunteers from around the country that will put them back together, good as new (collectively, I don't mean to at all diminish the loss of life and the holes those families will always feel).

For Boston and New York and London and Chicago and every other well-publicized race (for it was the publicity and the shock value that drove the insane, wasn't it?) -- I am defiant and angry and ready for battle.  We will not lie down, we will not cower and hide.  We will rise up, on fire, defiant and belligerent, and as a community of strangers - we will cross the finish line together, even if we are still, just a little, afraid.

Turn it off

40 B4 40
11 days to go


Stop. Showing. Blood on the sidewalks.

Today is the kind of day where we hear the initial report, select our own personal & private reactions, and then go home to watch and re-watch the news.  We do a quick inventory of who might be involved and then we call/text/email/Tweet/Facebook/Safeandwell.org/Googlepersonfinder our friends to see if we can get a tiny confirmation that all are OK, that our people are safe and sound.  We check and re-check to see if there's new info.

We do not turn it off.

We watch the same gentleman fall mid-stride over and over and over again.  We hear the eyewitness accounts and we are glued to the running commentary.  We listen to the screaming soundtrack and we're obsessed with the wobbly cellphone footage.  We watch the count of the injured and lost creep ever upwards. We hang on every bit of new information as though it will reverse and undo what's happened here today.

Turn it off.

Turn it off and love on your loved ones.  Sit closer together.  Open that bottle of wine that you've been saving for a special occasion.  Check in.  Say I love you.  Remind each other how very valuable these friendships and relationships and loves truly are to you.  Listen instead to the sound of your own story and your own strength.  Watch instead the snow fall and the sun set.

Do not re-live and re-watch the blood on the sidewalks.

Turn it off.

Too much

40 B4 40
15 days to go (and miles before I sleep)

It'll be a surprise to no one here that I've skipped a full week of writing.  I was, you see, distracted, and, as evidenced below, my heart was so full that I couldn't find the words to capture it all anyway.


It's too much.  It's too, too much.  The love and details and outpouring of this-is-your-life style telling of tall tales and the wink across the table because there's so much more to share but no space in between all the other telling to tell it... that, is, too, too much.  The gifts and the wine and the bloodsweatandtears and our shared histories and the building of The Tribe that make this laughter possible is too, too much.  The miles traveled, the sweet details put into each moment, the songs collected & sung, the favorite food made with hands and hearts that love too, too much.  The ones who couldn't make it, that wove their fantabulous ways into the conversation and the stories all the same, for it isn't the same without them in the mix.  The sassy, salty, giggly gifts.  The kind words.  The melding of old, inside jokes into new, collective ones.  The thoughtful, far-back-into-our-history re-tellings of from whence we've each come, to today, to this place, to this time and to bringing our whole selves to this table.   It's all too, too much.

We are each made up of tiny pieces of the ones with whom we are surrounded.  And I, very cleverly, have surrounded myself with simply the best. 

Each of these wonderful women who continue, over time, and each in her own way, to selflessly and repeatedly give bits of themselves over to be sloppily pasted together into the me you see before you.  The sum of their (spare) parts is miraculously held together with bubble gum and bailing wire in the shape of my sometimes brave, often wobbly, occasionally strong, definitely running-scared, and ever-learning self.  And for every ounce that they have graciously spared, I'm that much more put together, that much more witty and wise and sarcastic and bold.

Thank you darling friends.  Try as I may, I can not say what I want to say, I can not find the big enough words to explain how deep is my love, and how full is my heart.  And so instead - in the wise, wise words of one Miss Judy Blume (who surely speaks to each member of The Tribe):   "We are friends for life.  When we're together the years fall away, isn't that what matters?  To have someone who can remember with you?  To have someone who remembers how far you've come?"

So, for Amy & Amy & Lisa & Joanna & Sawnia & Erica & Nancy Jane & Libby & Tammie (and the many more who didn't fit in the house) - I am looking forward to remembering how far each of us have come for the *next* 40 years.

I am in awe that you each also chose me.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

40 B4 40
22 days to go


I've skipped a couple of days here and don't feel one bit guilty about it (OK, just guilty enough to say that I don't feel guilty, carry on).


One gets busy sitting around in one's pajamas and solving the world's problems. 

These are the kinds of vacations that make my world's problems disappear anyway, and that make my world go 'round, for that matter.  Nowhere to be at no particular time and nothing to do when we get there (or don't get there, whatevs).  Just coffee and wine and non-stop catching up.  The kind of vacation and the kind of crowd where you're planning your next meal 3 bites into your current one, and where that's the most complicated planning of the day.

Pure bliss.  True happiness.  And total relaxation.  

It takes a certain blend of friends and location and timing to make this magic happen.  A recipe of long spans since we've seen each other, lots to do (but absolutely no rush to do any of it), great food, and comfy chairs.  Add a dash of just sitting around and smiling at each other because simply being in the same time zone is a wild improvement over yesterday.  And generosity. Generosity of spirit, of talents, and of time spent suspended away from our real lives so that we can soak each other up in this vacation version. 

Yep, that'll add up to some seriously good vacations.  Let's start planning the next one while we're only 3 bites into this one, shall we girls?

Wrote a note said be back in a minute...

40 B4 40
25 days to go


... bought a boat and sailed off in it.

Tropical island.  Desert island.  Remote island.  The isle of Manhattan.  I'm not fussy, I just want all the most important people in my world to be there, all together, all at the same time, all on permanent vacation, for all time.  Too much to ask?  Probably.

But this week we're getting pretty damn close to it.  Thanks to the love and generosity (of time, talent, and travel-willingness) of some amazing women, I get to spend the next week in a tiny, magical version of that island dream.  True, I wish that I could have alllllllll the girls I love there together this week, but time, money, space & life just don't always cooperate, even in dream making. Also true, New Orleans ain't an island (yet).  But it'll serve nicely as the backdrop for getting this particular band together. 

Anticipation:  "the act of looking forward; especially : pleasurable expectation".  Thank you Mr. Webster.  (Although the 2nd definition doesn't bode well: "the use of money before it is available").

In anticipation of the joyful and sweet and hilarious and heartfelt and bittersweet and likely embarrassing and definitely memorable moments ahead... I can't wait to hug your necks. 

Hope (and pray?)

40 B4 40
25 days to go


This is not fair.

Before we get any more worried about it though, these things happen, they're warning signs not death sentences.  Better news is often just - around - the - corner. 

So then someone tell me why it is that hundreds of thousands of (I'm sure sweet and well meaning) teens get pregnant each year (733,010 in the US in 2008 alone) and so many perfectly capable (and sweet and well suited) grown-ups who desperately want and are ready for a baby just can't seem to get there.  I can't put this disappointment and frustration and heartbreak into words on this page, there are not words strong enough or painful enough.  Too often I've seen much time, effort, sacrifice, and yes - money go into hard earned pregnancies with parents that want nothing more in this world than to raise a strong, smart, joyful kids, only to have it all washed away in one moment of terrible news.  The ultimate definition of unfair.

But today, today we're remaining positive and hopeful.  Only the best and warmest thoughts and wishes (and prayers, if that's your thing).  Here's to looking around that corner and finding nothing but sunshine, and healthy baby coos, and a long life lived learning all of the world's wackiest details from surely one of the best mothers-to-be of all time.