Poppin' Pills

I was briefly back at my father’s house the other week, between the business trip in DC and Natalie’s memorial service in Loudoun, and within twenty minutes of arriving I was out on the back deck with my dad and a BB pistol. We didn’t have any cans to shoot but we did have some old prescription pill bottles which we subsequently massacred.


Sometimes my memoirs write themselves.

This Bitter Heart

Usually when my life is in turmoil and tragedy has struck and I don’t know what to do or where to turn, I go to Natalie. When good things happen, she is my first call. Default, no question. I call her, I stop by, I sit on that couch with tea and we talk and things are ok. I talk to her at least once a week. She has loved me so well. It’s been this way for 14 years. She attended my high school graduation, my college graduation.We were discussing a trip to Asheville.

So what do I do now that she is the tragedy?

Walking to my car this morning, that was my shock. I thought, “I’m so heartbroken; I really need to be loved and comforted; I need to call Nat” only to literally stop in my tracks and realize I couldn’t. I won’t hear her voice again. Nothing like showing up to work after sobbing for ten minutes.

Driving away from her house yesterday after dropping off my goodbye letter (she hasn’t the strength for a visit) I wondered if it was the last time I’d be in that driveway, in that kitchen. The word shattered doesn’t begin to describe my selfish little heart.

I don’t know how to grieve without it seeming selfish. Is there a way to do it? The person I’d normally ask that question to is Natalie.

I’m lost.

Jump Back, 1999

I just read that it was ten years ago that JFK, Jr died.

I remember that summer with clarity I don’t have for any previous seasons (or really any since). When I read that it had been a decade that summer flooded back in full-color flashes.

It was 1999. I was leaving for Syracuse in a few weeks. I’d lived with my father for exactly one year and was still getting used to freedom. I was saying my goodbyes to friends I’d known my whole life, shedding my family and the person I was sick of being. It was a typical Virginia summer of suffocating humidity and days of nonstop 90 degree sun. I was working at the environmental consulting firm as an intern and I dressed up every day and made ridiculous amounts of money. I shared an office with a guy who looked a lot like Charlie from "The West Wing". One of my best friends from high school worked in the office with me. I drove us to work everyday in the little blue Mitsubishi that I borrowed from my grandparents while they were summering in Maine. We took long lunch breaks and loved the feeling of pretending to be a grown up and having the money to back it up. Every morning we stressed about what we'd do that night.

It was the same summer that Blair Witch Project came out and I distinctly remember reading an article in the Washington Post about how it was allegedly based on actual footage. Burkettsville is less than a half-hour from my house. I saw that movie during a rainstorm. Seth and I drove back home in his pale yellow Mercedes and we were frightened of the endless forests and gravel roads of our home town. Ghosts and witches could be anywhere.

It was the summer of Woodstock ’99 and the chaos there. I remember friends considering going but never getting around to it. It was year of the final Lilith Fair; I went with friends from work.

I remember the overwhelming sense of sadness at the loss of JFK, Jr and I didn’t even know much about him. I was saddest for the Bassett family. It was just so abrupt.

Ten years. It went by at a speed I am just beginning to process.

Plates

I bought my little Subaru five summers ago and happily moved the license plates from my POS Tempo to my new upgrade. I've had the same plates since two weeks after 9/11 and through my six moves in four years, they were my constant. I kept my car registered to my father's address as he was still a co-signer on my title and I moved so often it wasn't worth the money to change them with me. And so there they were, a little piece of Virginia no matter where I was; proof I had a place to go home to.
Today I finally got around to switching my car to North Carolina tags. I avoided it; North Carolina doesn't issue a front plate and that drives me crazy. But I needed to and so I did.
I picked up my lone little plate at the DMV office inside a mall that looks like it was shabby and mostly empty even when it was built in 1985. I took it out to my car and, sitting in my driver's seat, I burst into tears.
I love where I live; I believe that this is the closest thing to a sense of home I've ever had. But that simple act of switching two plates for one was an admission that I was one step farther from my father's house.

And really, he is what I know of home.

Edit it

One of my good friends is a teacher at my old high school, something I consistently forget. I was talking to her the other day and she said an old teacher had asked about me and that teacher wanted my email address; she was planning to come to Asheville for a conference. This teacher had taught my honors English 9 class but was more familiar to me as the yearbook adviser, the person I probably saw the most the last three years of high school, saw more than my family. Junior year I was an assistant editor; senior year was head editor. Yearbook at my high school wasn't an extra-curricular activity: it was life. The high school had one of the top yearbook programs in the nation; it consistently won every major award on state and national levels. This all sounds crazy unless you have ever seen the difference between a nationally recognized book and a regular one. Then it makes perfect sense. But that sort of work requires the amount of time usually only reserved for athletes pursuing college scholarships, and so I was in the yearbook office a half-hour before school started, during two of the seven periods of the day, and 4-6 hours after school. And some weekends. (I wasn't the only one. My senior year we had a staff of 120. Out of a school of a little under 1100. It was actually one of the popular things to do) I loved and hated it, the same feelings that I still reserve for the adviser of the book. I should rephrase that. We always had a complicated relationship. It was the hardest period of my life due to everything outside of yearbook and thinking of that time brings up rough memories. I love her dearly. I had only thought of her in passing these past ten years until my friend mentioned her coming to Asheville, and now it's all I'm thinking about. What am I supposed to say about these ten years? What is there to tell? Much too much, and yet nothing. I don't know how to successfully zoom out; what big markers to hit. I don't know how to edit this.

I don't know if we will actually connect. But if we do, I hope words come too.

We Loved Our Generals

I don't think I can really top the hilarity of the last post of proposed ice cream flavors for The Dumbass in Chief so I won't even try, instead I'll tell a little tale about wars that never seem to die.
I was born and raised in Virgina, a fact I bring up so often my friends from Texas even tell me I'm a little nutty with state pride and that's saying something. For the entire 13 years of my public education in the Old Dominion we had a holiday that fell the third Monday of January called "Lee-Jackson-King Day". It was on all my school calendars and official school documentation and I never thought it was odd and had no idea it was called anything else in other places. I thought the whole nation celebrated Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr on the same day, like they celebrated both Lincoln and Washington on the same day in February.
It wasn't until my freshman year of college in New York that I very publicly found out the truth about other states. Since we didn't have classes that day several of my friends and I stayed together at a big house off campus and then got up early to go cross-country skiing. They were standing in the kitchen, all 12 of them, when I slid into the room in my socks and yelled "HAPPY LEE-JACKSON-KING DAY EVERYBODY!!!" to a suddenly silent room of Yankees.
"What?"they asked.
I repeated my salutation, though noticeably it was less emphatic than the first.
"What is that?" they asked.
I told them about the great holiday for Generals Lee and Jackson and Dr. King.
Their faces were all frozen in a stunned grimace.
"You mean to tell us that you celebrate two slave owning, Confederate Generals and an assassinated Civil Rights leader on the same day?"
"I never thought about it that way...but...yeah. We do. What, is that weird?"

(note: Virginia has been celebrating Lee-Jackson Day since 1904, as they are both rather revered Sons of the Commonwealth. When Reagan made MLK a national holiday in 1983, Virginia decided to tack on the existing holiday to the national one and managed to ignore the irony of it all until 2000, when they finally split the holidays again. Today is Lee-Jackson Day in Virginia; the Friday before MLK Day.)

Fancy Free

It seems like every time I speak to my mother some new revelation pops up. Last week I was catching her up on trips, etc when she asked me quizzically and in all sincerity, "What exactly do you DO with your time?"
I realized that my mom doesn't really know anyone my age who isn't/wasn't married and/or has children.
At my age she had three children.
Me? I have Cranium tear-away calendar.
Just a somewhat hilarious revelation.
How does she relate to me? I worry about money and where I should go get dinner and what I'm doing with my life just like most people but that marriage/children thing is quite the chasm.
I told her, "Well, I go out to dinner a lot, hang out with friends a lot, go on spontaneous adventures fairly often, sleep in as late as I want on my weekends, I'm terrible at cooking full meals for one person, I read, I waste time online, I'm not good at getting back to my leftovers...that's about it."
And she told me I was footloose and fancy-free.
Trust me, nothing fancy I own was free. That shit expensive.


Photo of the week: Mike and Natalie and Mike's new smartcar. He's been drooling over one for almost two years and finally got off the waiting list and got his own! He's about 6'2" and says it's roomy. Natalie is my dear mentor and friend and all good things. This photo made my day.

My Old Dominion

Dear Nancy Pfotenhauer;
I am a native Virginian. I was born at home, the middle of five children and didn't live on a paved road until college. My father is a war veteran and my mother has worked as a school teacher. My high school was 800 students; the school district covered half a county and in that half we had a total of three stoplights. My brother, my sister and I would ride our bikes down our dusty little road the five miles to the closest town where we would stop at the general store to buy Cokes. The closest mall was an hour away.
This "All-American" life wasn't near Roanoke, Salem, Danville or Floyd; this was 40 miles from Washington, DC.
Northwest of there, in fact.
That would make it Northern Virginia.
And that was in 1992.
I am 27 years old.

I take great offense to your crass statement that the Northern part of my Commonwealth is any less Virginian than the rest of the state because it may have a more urbanized and diverse feel to parts of it or, as in your definition, it votes in a way you don't like. Virginia is simply a place not easily understood. We are the Mother of Presidents and yet the Capitol of the Confederacy. We have the D-Day Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. We aren't the north but we really aren't the south; we are simply ourselves. Virginia is home to the writers of the Declaration of Independence, The Consititution, The Bill of Rights and the Marshall Plan. We have the oldest legislature in the western hemisphere and we are home to "The Silicon Valley of the East". We've two NASCAR tracks and the headquarters for the Washington Redskins. We are "America": past, present and future.
And Northern Virginia has, in the past ten years, survived a sniper randomly killing us as we go about our days, anthrax attacks and one of the planes from 9/11 departing from our airport only to slam into our Pentagon. We've watched the dot-com bubble grow and burst, we've watched one of our own commit the worst sort of crime at our Commonwealth's Virginia Tech. And we have survived and grown stronger because Virginia stood with us. We might squabble with other regions of our state but that keeps us together and makes us grow, just as it did our forefathers, as it does our families.
We are The Real Virginia. Just as Roanoke, Salem, Danville and Floyd are The Real Virginia.
And your short-sighted dig at us won't do anything to change that.
You went to George Mason, you ought to know better.

Sic Semer Tyrannis!

S. Spooner

Weekly Ponderosa

Got my first speeding ticket ever driving from my sister's house in Southern Virginia up to my father's house in northwest VA. I mean I've never even been pulled over. To be honest I was a little excited; I didn't know what to do and I may have scared the cop a bit when I told her it was my first time and that I had been driving for 11 years. And of course she totally fined me (to be fair the speed limit kept changing from 65 to 60 to 55 to 65 to 60 and with the hills I had to keep turning my cruise control on and off, so my 73 in a 60 isn't that giant of a ticket as I couldn't keep track of the limit and I was going with traffic) but afterward we talked about weddings for a while. She was rather nice.

Historically I've been fairly open with some of the more private aspects of my life and so I shouldn't be surprised when that openness manages to find the very clearly marked path back and bite me on the bum as it has recently. Thus I decided to develop and maintain some boundaries and actually keep some private things private. How novel. This has been met with mixed reviews, but then so was “30 Rock” and we all know that it's the best comedy on TV.

Sunday was the very first wedding in which I've been asked to write and read something for the ceremony and I was a wreck leading up to it. The night before the wedding I had four different things I was thinking of reading. I didn't know what they expected me to say! What do I know about love and marriage; I mean look at me! I was worried they wanted me to write a poem and if there is anything I can't write well it's poetry. I'd love to, it just isn't my forte. Prose. Verbosity. Grammar. Love 'em. So in the moments leading up to my speaking I still had two in hand; didn't decide until I stood up and in hindsight I chose correctly.

Here's wedding sum up: Heels. Hair. Old Friends. Old friend's beaus/spouses. Old friend's parents/siblings. Good god it's my AP US History teacher from 10^th grade. Prettiest bride. Choked up groom. Waterproof mascara lies. Wine. Mini bottles of Scotch for the boys. “Hamburgler” used in best man speech. Hid behind wall when bouquet was thrown. Groom's college buddy is giant manwhore. Calves really hurt from heels. Bell ringing. Photos. Goodnight. See you at the next wedding.

I forgot I had a ticket to Brewgrass until the day I was leaving to drive up to VA and so in a panic I hopped on craigslist to see if I could find a buyer. I got hold of a guy in town, we emailed and got it set up, he asked to take me out for a beer in gratitude (I declined as I was leaving right then for a long trip which does require...umm...driving) so then he asked if he could make me a mix CD instead. I said absolutely. So when I met him that evening to do the exchange I got money, a sweet mix CD and possibly another friend to add into the fold. I love you, Asheville.

Wise decision on my part benching Kurt Warner this week. I did it because he was playing the Redskins and that just hurts my loyalties but then he had a crappy game so I looked like a genius. Willie Parker: you let me down.

Lately my head has been the most empty it has seemed in years. I don't know what that means. I feel like my writing skills are off, my thoughts are very shallow and I catch myself staring off thinking of absolutely nothing. I rather like that the constant humming in my head has wained yet I don't appreciate feeling anything less than on my game. Whatever game that may be (unless it's a game on my list). Regardless I'm sensing and reacting to everything at a snail's pace.

VA is no longer home. I've finally come to the realization of this. I love it, I always will, I harbor deep pride in being from VA, I love my friends and my family here, but my home is no longer here. It is in NC. My heart has finally moved south with the rest of me. I feel like when I say, “I'm going home,” all the parts of me finally know what that means.

My Tended Earth

Wow, whadda whirlwind. I drove back to VA last Wednesday, stopping to have dinner with Matt and Megan, two friends I have known literally my entire life (I met Matt when I was five and Megan has been a dear friend since I was 15. I actually introduced the two of them; amazing people) and got to have dinner with Megan out at Brubaker's in Old Town Winchester. I was getting ready to leave when they said, “Just stay! You've been in the car for 7 hours already!” so I did. Great time with lovely friends and their sweet daughters. Finally got to my dad's house on Thursday morning in time to have some quality coffee and Washington Post time with my dad before driving up to Natalie's and then driving her Volvo Cross-Country out to Wegman's for the best lunch one could ever fathom getting at a grocery store. Wegmans=Heavenly experience. If you ever have the chance to go to a Wegmans, just go. Do not ask questions. And of course Natalie somehow has a chunk of my very soul and is one of the people I love most on this planet, so any time at all spent with her is a gift straight from the heavens. Needless to say it was a lovely afternoon. I got home in time for a very quick nap and then shower before delicious BBQ dinner with my dad and uncle. Love meals with bitter old men...makes me feel youthful and optimistic. Then I headed out to Arlington to hop the Metro to the home of the incomparable Emile, a friend I met literally the first night of college; someone I want to figure out a way to have in my life even more. You would do well to have her in your life in any capacity. Sitting out on her front porch in NW, drinking Sierra Nevadas and mocking her pea-sized bladder: it was priceless.

(Emilie and I at the college version of a cocktail party, Fall 2002)

I stayed there Thursday night and got back to my car early enough to not have to pay for my overnight Metro parking (gates are open til 10:30am, holla!) on the way home I dropped my car off to get inspected and piddled around the house while I waited for my car. Once I got it back I drove out to Michelle and Dave's house for an all too brief visit before cutting down Snickersville Turnpike for my trip up the mountain and back to Adventure Links. What a treat that was. I can't tell you how much I love those people. Like my insides literally flipped in joy just hearing their voices. I got a physical ache; these are people who know and love me well. Anna, Austin, Audrey, Autumn, Shelby, Dave and Scott made for the perfect sort of dinner companions and we played some entertaining board games til very late. Leaving there is never easy. I can't believe I've known them for seven years. Anna Birch is a friend to my core. I am so lucky to have her in my world.

(Anna in her natural habitat)

Saturday morning I tried to talk my dad into going out to my sister's house with me but to no avail; I made the hour trek solo to see my older sister and her four (count 'em, four) children and the new house. The house was a DISASTER. I can't blame her, the woman does have four kids and her husband works a lot but still...it reminded me so much of how cluttered my mom was with us and I got immediately angry at it. I hate that I do that; we just have different tastes and different standards (I know I am an EXTREME packrat, but compared to my family I'm SPARSE.). But I did get to see my niece and three nephews, whom I simply love and adore so it was worth it. I don't know how those boys are so genuinely nice...I hope they keep that. I got back from Bubby's and drove straight to my mother's house for a late dinner. Got to see my mom and my little sister and pick up a trunk full of my old stuff which was wonderful. My little sister is growing up and away and it breaks my heart. I got back to my Dad's in time to watch a little TV with him and then go to bed. I slept in on Sunday and took a traditional Spooner Sunday morning, which consists of reading the entire Washington Post Sunday Edition and drinking at least three cups of coffee the consistency of tar. My uncle came over again later in the afternoon and then I went and grabbed my little sister, took her to dinner, came back to dad's, dropped off the beer he asked to pick up then drove the 30 minutes out to South Riding to have drinks with the one-of-a-kind cynicism that is Amber and Mark. Two people I wish lived in Asheville with me: those two. Seriously. I could be so lucky.

So now, 833.7 miles later, I'm finishing up my trip to the VA and heading back south. North Carolina is home now and for the immediate future, but there is something so bittersweet about coming back to an area and a people so intimate to me; it's a watering of the roots in a way. This is my soil, my tended earth, these are the places and the people that made so much of me and I love them unabashedly for that. I am so blessed in every faction of living.

(Speaking of blessed and past: someone who left my life five years ago has very suddenly returned in a very full way. I am ecstatic about this. I've prayed for this person daily for five years; to have them back in the picture in any capacity is tear-inducing. We'll see where that goes in the redux.)

Drivin' Miss Spooner

For 6 of the past 8 years I have lived an average of 7 hours away from my family; I-81 has become intimately familiar to me during those long solitary treks to and from the homestead (incidentially I have driven all 846 miles of I-81, from Knoxville, TN to the Thousand Islands, NY, just not all at once.) I haven't been home since Christmas and my family has not let me forget it; for this I am grateful. I'm glad to feel missed and loved as I am. Next Wednesday I'm hopping into my little Subaru and once again doing the great seven hour exodus back to LoCo. If my past trips are any indication, this is what the drive will look like:

9:22am: Plan to leave by 10am. Swear I will be out fo the house by 10:15am.

10:45am: Leave house, be very proud of myself that I left in such a timely fashion.

10:50am: Top off my gas tank, believe this is the trip where I will only stop once.

10:58am: Be bored with the drive, put something loud on the iPod which will probably involve Jay-Z.

11:38am: Begin game of guessing to the exact mile how far it is from my house to my parents house and what my gas milage will be for the trip. Forget my bets in about an hour.

12:04pm: Pause iPod, start making phone calls to whomever I can think to call. Get 9 voice mail messages straight, hate everyone for not answering their phones to chat with me at noon on a Wednesday. Realize I'm ridiculous. Keep calling people.

12:44pm: First pee break. Curse my bladder and coffee consumption, consider pulling a crazy astronaut and buying diapers.

1:21pm: Start playing the Choose Cheesy mix as loud as possible with as many wild hand gestures as possible. Sing "Greatest Love of All" at top of my lungs.

2:23pm: Switch to "Slow n' Steady" mix which causes me to curl deep into a furrowed brow and hypothetical conversations. Quite possibly stare at nothing as I'm driving through Roanoke. Realize this is just past the half-way point; get nervous and vow to not stop for any reason. Immediately have to pee.

3:16pm: Stop to pee again. Possibly stretch. Once again bet on total mileage and time. Feel confident that I'll win. Against myself. In a fictional contest. Wave at the exit for Rockbridge. Decide driving sucks and road trips suck and driving road trips alone sucks and you probably suck too, sucker.

3:30pm: Probably start a conversation with myself. Not even probably, I will start a conversation with myself, and I will ask myself questions and answer them in turn. I will find myself charming, witty, sincere and smart. I will think I am a good conversationalist. This will be right around the time I hit Harrisonburg. That will cause me to think about all the people who went to JMU that I could give a shout out to at that moment. I'll just yell "GO DUKES!" to no one in particular. I will only partially mean this cheer.

4:08pm: Bless the inventor of cruise control, get terrible back cramp, have indigestion from questionable gas station purchase from hour previous. Be in love with the Shenandoah Valley. Listen to a random episode of "This American Life" debate whether this will keep me awake or put me to sleep. Realize I will need to fill up cuz I won't make it all the way there on one tank. Curse this fact.

4:40pm: Stop somewhere near Front Royal and fill up. Think Arbys, but do nothing about it.

5:15pm: See exit 315 for Rt 7. Cheer. Exit and feel very strange driving at 55mph. Probably break out into "Old Dominion" by Eddie from Ohio, also with dramatic hand gestures. Get a little emotional driving down the roads I've known my whole life.

5:44pm: Pull into my dad's house. Feel the whole trip was already worth it.

Need Need/Hubris

I have an over-abundance of strong female mentors and role models. Every good thing in me can probably be traced back to a lesson, a prayer or insight from the Natalies, Ruths, Joans, Ginnys and Michelles in my life (among others) and I love that about me. I talked to Michelle today, who is my third big sister in a way. We got to talking about relationships and, long story short, I again learned something. I was moaning about a certain relationship and she called me out in a way that I hadn't even considered. She said, "You and I are the same; we want to feel wanted; we need to be needed. Sometimes its a good thing, but most often its not. You are carrying another's burdens in a way you shouldn't--you aren't guarding your heart. You need to end that."
* * * * * * * * * * * *
And that's as far as I got. I started that post two or three days ago, as the weight was just being rested on my shoulders. The prospect of literally cutting a relationship out of a life because it is unhealthy...mindboggling. Heartbreaking. I know I have to; she's right. She saw what I can't see. The clutch it was next. I have tried and tried to figure out how to express it, what to write, how to write it, what even I am. I can't. I haven't. 10,000 song lyrics but no words of my own. I do have this overwhelming need to be needed, a complex codependency in its own way. I don't know if its a female thing or just a me thing, but it is something with which I subconsciously struggle and if I am to ever be freed of it, this severing is the benchmark. It will leave a void.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Three times in one day the word hubris came up, and thus I, who needs to read into everything as if the world is written in code just for me, saw it as a sign of sorts. It's not a good sign, I must say. Hubris (it's excessive arrogance, pride or presumptuousness so you can stop navigating away to go look it up and pretend you knew it all along, you walking SAT prep book you)? Why hubris? Is there pride in my inability to make a clean break from this relationship? Is it as much me fearing failure as me fearing heartbreak as me fearing me? Hubris, the destroyer of all things.
The ultimate self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness to self-annihilation.
Also, good name for a cat.