Not Too Good For a Free Banana

 A few years ago we started the game of trying to think of the quintessential story of a person. Like, if you had to explain the essence of someone in one story, this is the one you would tell. I thought it would be fun to get some of them down.

* Rachel *

There was a heavenly year when we lived in Atlanta that Rachel lived with us. She was the perfect housemate: quiet, considerate, tidy. She was working for the CDC, and every morning she would slip out the door like a whisper. I never heard the shower run or her packing up her bag, and I was always mystified when I realized that she'd already left. It was a masterclass in being unobtrusive.

One morning, though, I happened to be down at the dining room table, which had a partial view into the galley kitchen. I saw Rachel slip into the room, the light a gentle early morning grey. The whole time she'd been living with us we had generally managed our groceries separately. We ate dinner together, but other food and snacks were kind of separate. On that particular morning, there was a gorgeous bunch of bananas on the counter, practically glowing in the flat dawn light. Rachel had purchased them the day before, and now she broke one of them off of the bunch, put it into her lunch bag, and was headed out the door when I saw her come to an abrupt halt. "What's she looking at?" I wondered. What she was looking at was a nasty brown banana that I had purchased the week before. It was sitting it the fruitbowl like some kind of garden slug. Slooowly, Rachel pulled the perfect banana back out of her bag, and looked at it for awhile. Then, with the determination of a person who has seen the hard road that must be walked, she put her perfect banana in the bowl, picked up the brown one, and headed out into her day. That is Rachel. The kind of a person who would never eat a perfect banana if others had to suffer with less. Also who would never let food go to waste if she had anything to say about it.

The only thing that would make that story a better description of my sister Rachel is if it included some glimpse of the inner steel that appears in the face of a challenge. If she'd beaten me in a race to the banana, that would be a perfect story.

How Now, Brown Coat?

 Many years ago, Vivian and Jerry came to visit us and we went to an REI Garage Sale. There was the usual assortment of returned tents and bicycle pumps, and a lot of healthy-looking people milling around looking at stuff. We examined the box of Smartwool socks and thought about whether we needed a gently used camp stove, and then, almost incidentally, I glanced at a brown coat hanging alone on a rack. It looked warm, probably too warm for me in Atlanta. But Vivian had just moved to New Hampshire so I called her over. The coat had been marked down significantly, maybe $400 to $75 or so, which seemed exciting. Still, Viv wasn't too sure. "I wasn't planning on actually spending any money here," she said. "Just put it on," I said.

The coat was warm. Really warm. 

"This coat is really warm," said Viv. "New Hampshire is really cold."

"Just get it," I said. And she did.

After that I would get occasional messages from the frozen north. A couple of times each winter I would hear from Vivian specifically about the coat. "Thanks for making me get this coat," she would say. Or, "that brown coat might have actually saved my life today." I felt vaguely happy to have given good advice but didn't think about it too much. Until...

Until.

We moved to Colorado about the same time that Vivian moved to San Diego, and one day I got a package in the mail with a note that said, "You need this more than I do now." Inside was the coat, looking just as placidly brown as ever. I laughed and hung it in the closet. It wasn't winter yet. In fact, we hadn't had a winter in years as we'd just been living in Thailand, so I'd almost forgotten what cold was like. But eventually it did get cold. Really cold, like sub-zero, try not to breathe while you stomp through the snow to break the ice on the chicken's water dish sort of cold. I learned to use a scarf to seal up the space between my neck and my jacket. I learned to take my metal earrings out, and not to touch anything without gloves. And I remembered the coat. On one particularly cold day I reached past the other jackets into the wayback of the closet, pulled out the brown coat, and put it on.

The world shifted just a little bit. Suddenly, I felt...different. I felt SAFE. I felt like the gods of winter no longer had any power over me. I thought that Vivian had just given me a coat. What she really gave me was a superpower.

The brown coat is magic. It is a forcefield. It is a space heater in the Arctic. It is warm clothes out of the dryer. It is a black cat sleeping in the sunshine. It is almost as good as having a sister walk into the room. It takes a world that is trying to kill you and makes it...fine. You can walk out the door into the meanest cold imaginable wearing the brown coat and after awhile you think, hey, why are my ankles a little chilly?  I wear the brown coat every winter, and each time I do it brings me joy. It makes me think of Vivian. It makes me happy to have been right so many years ago. Somehow it makes me feel like a better person, the kind of person who could go outside and do stuff. It makes me feel like going on an adventure, like I could do anything. Cold is nothing to me. I am invincible.

So thanks for the coat, Vivian. You wove a spell of love, down filling, and possibility and cast it over me. I'm forever grateful.

Happy Birthday, Beth

 

What to say about Beth except that she makes the world better. Her heart and her hands are always full, making food, snuggling a child, fixing something for someone. If you have to be stranded on a desert island with someone, I highly suggest you consider Beth. She would get the coconuts open, if you know what I mean.

Something Great

 Fathers day 2005

Beth

you were with me
when i figured out
how to dance
to feel music
corner of my eye
i saw
your face shining
i didn't know
what i looked like
but your face said
you were watching
something great

you were with me
i was 7
under the bleachers
open gym night
that awful smell
was intoxicating
weight machines
i could barely reach
you said to try
i remember
ignoring
the other muscle
in the room
laughing at me
you saw how
i loved to lift
and your face said
you were watching
something great

you were with me
when i asked
questions
in the car
why that mountain
was flat on top
why people stand
with a thumb up
why trash doesn't
go out the window
why our bodies
lean when we turn
you knew, i asked
and your face said
you were listening to
something great

ou were with me
when i jumped - fell
i love to jump
i love to fall
off beds
off houses
off bars you made
off cliffs
off diving boards
out of airplanes
you were with me
i needed
someone to catch
and your arms said
you were catching
something great

you were with me
when i became
a parent
learning to watch
patience
it's complicated
and a gift
to be an adult
with a shining face
for a child
now i know
as i try
that when
you were with me
as a child
i was the one
watching
something great
thank you

A Grouse About Turkey

It’s January 22nd and I’m cooking a turkey for no particular reason. I didn’t even buy this turkey: some buy turkeys and others have turkeys thrust upon them. I’m doing it as a favor for Connie, and I ought to have a better attitude, as Connie is well past 70 and has recently been dealing with breast cancer. Someone else thought they were doing Connie a favor when they gave her this turkey, but the oven in the retirement community where she lives is too small and it has been taking up all of her freezer space since November. 

What can you say when you ask “Is there anything we can do for you?” and the response is “Please cook my turkey.” So I’m cooking a turkey, but I’m not happy about it. Maybe I’m not happy because Connie only wants “some of the meat” back, which means I’m going to have to carve and debone this turkey. Maybe I’m not happy because Connie has two grown sons who live in town who almost certainly have ovens. Maybe I’m not happy because the turkey neck had been shoved so far up into the abdominal cavity that I literally had to get out pliers and stabilize the turkey by clutching it to my chest to get enough purchase to pull that thing out of there, and when I did the turkey slipped out of my arms and skidded across the kitchen floor leaving a contrail of bloody turkey juice as it went. And then I had to go change my clothes, mop the floor, and clean the pliers. Maybe I’m not happy because I’m kind of a selfish jerk who should just get over it and stop complaining about the minor inconvenience of cooking someone else’s turkey. 

On my better days, this kind of thing is exactly why I go to church. If left to my own devices I would probably find some way to serve...occasionally. I would volunteer at the food bank, or maybe go back to volunteering at the library, where I didn’t have to talk to anyone and where I never ended the day with my cats sniffing at the stains on my forearm. I would help out, for sure. But I suspect there would often be other things to do on any given day. I suspect that my volunteerism would rarely be uncomfortable for me, or involve any actual sacrifice. I’d hang out almost entirely with people who have my sense of humor and whose voting record rather conveniently matches mine exactly. Church throws me into a mix. It makes me do nice things for OTHER people, possibly people I don’t even like very much. And, It makes me cook turkeys, which I definitely don’t like very much. On my better days, church makes me a better person.

But I guess that today isn’t one of my better days. It makes me wonder, in the overall accounting of my life do I get more points because I did this even though I didn’t want to? Or way fewer points because I complained about it the whole time? Have I just become spoiled, so that any minor inconvenience is cause for complaint? (probably). I believe in cleaning when you’ve helped make the mess. I believe in shoveling your elderly neighbor’s driveway. I believe in connecting with people who aren’t just like me. Theoretically I believe in cooking turkeys for breast cancer survivors, and maybe someday I’ll even be glad to do it. But today is not that day. Today I’ve got a turkey in the oven and no thanksgiving in my heart. Maybe I’ll do better tomorrow.

Where did it all go wrong?

At 3:00pm MST on December 27th, the Rees Family was snuggled together at the Gregory house in Fort Collins, CO, cozy by a fire, under blankets, eating Christmas snacks. 13 hours later, at 3:00am PST, we were huddled with our luggage in the bike lane of a foggy, empty street waiting for a man we'd never met before- Hal losing his ability to speak, and Mae unable to walk smoothly.

It started out ok. We drove to the Denver airport. Got there on time. Got through security without issue. Found our gate. Flight boarded when it was supposed to. We had a little delay due to a mechanical issue, but soon we were in the air, on our way to the San Luis Obispo airport. I was thinking my kids might be tired by the time we got home that night, because it'd be an hour later than when they'd been going to bed. But things were going smoothly. Our friend Dallan was planning on picking us up to drive us home.

At around 9:28pm, just 10 minutes away from our destination, the pilot comes on to tell us that because of low visibility, we're diverting to LAX. LAX!! The whole plane couldn't believe what was happening, and I felt bad for the flight attendants fielding all the panicked questions. "Did they even CHECK Santa Maria airport?" "This has never happened to me!" "Are they going to put us up in hotels?" "Los Angeles? They're just abandoning us in Los Angeles?"

We land in LA just after 10:00pm, but have to sit in the plane on the tarmac for an open gate. Finally, we begin deboarding at 10:45, and the kids and I wearily make our way to baggage claim with the rest of the pilgrims, as Gordon bravely finds a customer service rep to discuss options. We think maybe they'll comp a rental car, and we'll drive home late. Or they'll rebook us for the next day, and put us up at a hotel.

Instead, they announce that they've provided two buses to get everyone up to San Luis Obispo. At this point, I'm realizing we'll be getting to the SLO airport at an hour when no public transportation will be running, all of our friends will be asleep, the taxi service is practically non-existent, and what few Uber/Lyft options there are will be highly overtaxed. United Airlines obviously does not care about this, though. They said they'd get us to SLO airport, so they'll get us to SLO airport. We thought about renting a car on our own, but there were none available that we could find.

So, we join the huddled masses outside LAX waiting for a bus, and finally get on the road after midnight. Tired, wired, and wondering if we'll be spending a few hours on the other end waiting for things to start waking up. The kids are a little wide-eyed, and unsure about the future, but so far have good attitudes.

We consider all kinds of options. We think maybe we could talk someone into getting into our house with a spare key, getting our car key, and driving our car down to be waiting for us. But we can only think of a few people we could ask, and one set has a baby at home, one set happens to be on a basketball trip to Bakersfield, and one set has a really early morning planned the next day, and we just didn't feel like we could ask more of them. So, we decide to just head for SLO and figure it out as we go.

However, the entire group of passengers starts to get antsy at 1:45 when the bus inexplicable pulls over a little north of Goleta, and the bus driver gets off for a few minutes. He finally gets back on and keeps driving, but everyone was on edge, wondering of the bus was having mechanical issues, and we were going to have to wait for another bus to come get us. (To entertain myself, I was inventing plotlines, like he was collecting a shipment of drugs)

The good news is that Gordon is quick on the Uber uptake, and reserves us a ride before options disappear. The bad news is that the fog starts to thicken, slowing our progress, and we start to get nervous anew about how long this will actually take.

But we pull up at the airport at 3:22 (Hal and I have not slept a wink), grab our bags, and head for where we're supposed to meet our Uber, which happens to be just outside airport grounds (Uber wouldn't let us select anywhere on the grounds). Mae can barely get her legs to work because she's still half asleep, and Hal looks like he's coming off a heroin high. 

Turns out the driver assumed we meant to be picked up at the airport, on not on the side of some random road, so Gordon and I load up all our luggage, and we prod the kids back across the street and back to the airport. We get in a very nice car, driven by a very nice man, and spend the last 30 minutes of our long journey listening to soothing Christmas music in Arabic.

The last of us drift off to sleep around 5:00am PST (6:00am MST), and I don't think any of us have ever been happier to be in our own home before. The kids were real troopers, though, and in the light of a new day, see it as an adventure, but one they never want to repeat.

Deep Dark Blue

 deep dark blue

A poem by Mae Rees

Stingrays 

Ready to play 

Mariana Trench in reach

The screams of your drowning friends

Rock formations collapsing behind you 

Storms crashing in the waves 

So vast, too hard to get out.

Not so nice down low.