this town

A girl on the street was wearing a cigarette through her earring hole like an earring. 

On the way back past her with my Thai iced tea, I saw that she was wearing a Number 2 pencil through the other earring hole.

That is all.

running, again (or again, again, again)

Every summer, as we know, I take up running. 

Every summer, I end up giving it up because my knees can't take it. 

I mentioned this when I was home in April, and my brother said, "You have to start slow." 

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that he might be right. Because of my fighting class in Universe City, my running has historically been limited not by my lung capacity (I can go out and run three miles if I decide I want to do so) but by my leg muscles, which get tired because running is a different motion than everything else I do. I began to wonder whether, by starting out with a three mile run, I have been introducing my muscles to running too quickly and maybe they haven't able to stabilize my knees because they are so tired.

The last time I ran without knee pain was in and immediately after Rwanda. The way I started running that time was by walking. I walked up and around the hill above my house, and then I walked down and around the peninsula behind my house, and then I walked over and around the bay where I lived. At some point, walking got to be not quite enough exercise, and I started adding running bits. It was only a few feet at first, but eventually I ran more and more, and soon I was running 45 minutes at a time.

I'm trying that again.

Last week I went and had my stride analyzed and bought a new pair of running shoes. (I had been running in a pair of trail shoes that I bought in 2005, before I went to Tanzania. This was perhaps not the best idea ever. Before that, I had been running in a pair of Nikes that were too wide for my feet and therefore had to be laced tight to keep my foot from sliding around, only that hurt my arches, so I laced them loose and then did kung fu on concrete and did something terrible to my foot and the back of my heel hurt for a year.)

Friday night, I started out in my new shoes. I walked, and then I ran, and then I walked again. I think I ran about 8 blocks. Today, I did the same. I think I ran about 10 blocks, in one or two block increments.

It was hard to stop at a block or two. The competitive side of me wants to keep going, to keep running. But I have to keep that in check, and maybe, with time, I'll be able to call myself a runner once again.

bike

There is something about this city that inspires me to walk and take the bus and ride my bike. Maybe it is that there is so much to do in such close proximity, or maybe it is that everyone else is doing the same, or maybe it's just the annoying parking. 

I set out on my bike this afternoon with plans for chai, a pedicure, and maybe Ethiopian, and 13 miles of pedaling later, I had done all three.

That might have been a little ambitious, considering that my bike rides lately have been a mile or two. 

But on a day when the sun comes out unexpectedly, how could I resist?

I found the chai place by googling "best chai [Gone West]." It was a tiny little box of a place in a nearby area where I rarely find myself. I sat outside in the sunshine at a little picnic table with spicy tea in a mug whose handle was the arm of a monkey dangling on the front of the porcelain. 

I had my toes painted turquoise at the salon, a friendly place back in my own neighborhood. An older woman came in as my pedicure was finishing up, and she exhausted me even in the few minutes I heard her give endless precise directions about the color of the polish and the brand of polish and cutting her ingrown toenails correctly and oh could she see a few more colors before she decides? and isn't this one maybe too old and it will be clumpy?

It was a relief to leave her behind and get on my bike to head to Ethiopian, five miles away. 

My friend D. met me for Ethiopian, and I ate ravenously. Breakfast was so long ago. I kept telling myself not to eat, this afternoon, in anticipation of Ethiopian food, and it was worth the wait. We ordered three sauces between us (the four sauces last time were, we agreed, a little excessive). We were delightfully full of delicious food. 

But never too full for the ice cream cart across the street. 

I rode home in the failing evening light, standing up on my pedals on the hills, feeling so very happy to be alive and to be here and to be now.

2013 accident #2

I was sitting in my room, playing way too much Bejeweled on my new iPhone, if you must know, when I heard a car honk long and loud and then a thud.

It wasn't a very loud thud. I actually considered just ignoring it, but my car and my roommate's car are both parked right in front of our house, and I dragged myself away from Bejeweled (it is a serious addiction) to go check on them.

What I found was a very small woman standing outside the door of a big sedan, yelling about how the other driver had hit her while she was stopped at a stop sign. 

The other driver, a tall man about the same age as her (mid-sixties) got out of his car just for a moment, and then got back in his car and drove away.

Lawyer that I am, that was when I started down the steps, because I wanted to tell him that driving off was the worst thing he could do. 

I was too late, of course, to save him from himself.

I really do not like being a witness to things that might require me to testify in court. We law-like people would rather be the ones asking the questions.

Fortunately, the lady took my name and number and went to a friend's house to call the police, and I have not yet had to talk to anyone. Maybe we can keep it that way.

 

membranes

So I went to the doctor, because I thought I had a sinus infection, and he told me that my sinuses are full of mucus (enough that the membrane in my ear doesn't vacillate when he puffs air on it), but they aren't infected, they are just full, so good luck with that.

Then he told me that once my immune system went batty like this I should expect to develop allergies wherever I live, if I live there long enough, and I stared at him in horror as all my hopes for ever being free of this struggled to survive. (I don't believe him. I refuse to believe him. My hope lives.)

Then he told me to try zinc gluconate lozenges, because they are a local immuno-suppressant, and I am trying them, and now my mouth tastes like metal all the time, but they might actually help. (It's hard to say after only 24 hours. I will keep you posted.)

Then he told me to call for antibiotics when I feel like I"ve been hit by a truck.

Lovely with a touch of sarcasm.

different this time

Some mornings, riding the bus over the bridge, I want to close my eyes and drift, but even on the tiredest mornings I force myself to open my eyes as we go over the bridge, because I want to enjoy every moment I have back here in Gone West.

It's different this time. 

Last time I moved to Gone West, I was just back from South Sudan. I think I was stunned for at least the first year. I'd been going back and forth between Africa and North America for five years, and I didn't know who I was without that. 

I felt stuck when I lived here before. I loved the city, but I was working a temporary job. I hadn't made a good group of friends. I lived alone.

Now I feel free. I have a job that I love and I do well and I could do for the rest of my life if I wanted. I have yet to have a Saturday without plans. Or a Sunday, for that matter. I live with other people, so even when I stay home, I am not alone.

All of that, yes, but also the part of me that never quite felt like it fit in here in the States has faded. I grew up a third culture kid, and that will never go away, but the brilliance of one's 30s, if lived deliberately, is that you learn to like yourself. I think I would be happier now in New York, or in South Sudan, or anywhere, than I was five years ago.

But I'm here, and I'm so happy to be here.

where?

Not long after I moved back to Gone West, I made the mistake of putting my earrings and watch into the front pocket of my sweatshirt before I went to bed, and in the morning I found one earring and my watch lying next to me on the bed, but the other earring was nowhere to be found.

I looked under the bed.

I looked through the covers.

I looked along the edge of the bed frame.

I looked through mthe sheets when I took them off to wash them.

Nothing.

On Sunday, I washed my sheets and they were not quite dry as of bedtime, so I put on my second best sheets. I don't think I've used them since I moved in, since if the favorite ones are dry I will just put them right back on.

This morning I woke up with my lost earring sticking in my back.

I just... I don't even get it. Where did this earring come from?

circles

I have never had dark circles under my eyes on a regular basis, not until I moved back to Gone West. 

It isn't Gone West itself that is causing the dark circles (this really is my favorite place ever), but it's a whole combination of things: a trip to the Mitten followed immediately by an interview and an acceptance of a new job and a month of packing and a move and a new job and another trip to the Mitten and saying yes to everything and and and...

I also have roommates now, who get up later than I do, and we tend to start a conversation right as I should be going to bed.

But! Last week I forced myself to go to bed in time to get something in the general 8 hour range (although never quite eight hours) and lo! the dark circles are not a permanent fixture. 

I'm fighting my way back to regular appearances here. It's just that sleep is pretty much my number one priority. Sleep and having a social life. 

I do so love this town.

by foot

I'm not really sure why Gone West feels so much more walkable to me than Universe City ever did. For about the same distance as my usual walk to shopping here, I could have gotten to a reasonable shopping center with some restaurants with outdoor seating in Universe City. And yet, I drove. I always drove. I think I walked there once.

It never occurred to me in Universe City to do what I did tonight: to leave my house at 7 pm, walk 45 minutes up to my usual stroll-shop district, have some ice cream, and walk 45 minutes back. 

I think it occurs to me here because I started here with no car. For the 2.6667 years that I lived here before, I just walked and walked and walked. 

 

On my way home today, I tried to walk a new route to see the pretty houses. (I love the houses. They are a whole 'nother post, the houses.)

I literally do not think there is a block that I have not walked in this neighborhood, in a rectangle about 15 blocks wide and 20 blocks long. I keep thinking I've found a street that I didn't used to walk down much, and then I remember how very much I've always liked that house, or that yard, or that fence.

The only change is that the houses are even more beautiful than before, because the housing prices continue to go up in this neighborhood. I cross the street to look at a window or the trellis over the porch, and I worry that someone is going to think I'm scoping them out for a burglary or something, but the fact is that I am white and middle class and not obviously drug addicted, and the combined privilege of those things exempts me from a lot. I get smiles instead of suspicious looks.

And 

... 

I wrote the previous paragraphs last night, before I fell asleep with the computer still on my lap.

insist

T. used to say that I was a turtle, and this is still true. Sometimes. I will absolutely stand up and insist when a thing matters, to me or someone else, but when it comes to things that don't matter much, usually food, I can't bring myself to make a scene.*

Case in point: T. and I went out to lunch once c. 2000 at a restaurant overlooking the river in her hometown near Chicago. I ordered a mint chocolate chip milkshake, but it came out as a chocolate chip milkshake. I think we got it corrected, but only because T. either flagged the waitress down herself or badgered me into doing it. I would have left it unmentioned forever so the waitress wouldn't feel bad. (Even though the waitress probably cared not one little bit. Hey, I was 20.)

Today I got a Thai iced tea from a different stand than usual because it was late and my usual stand appeared to be out of salad rolls, but when I got it, it was awful. It was undrinkably sweet and really watery. Rather than request new - what is the point, anyway, if the sweet is what she has? - I walked behind a tree, dumped out the iced tea into the tree's roots, took my reusable cup to my usual place, and paid all over again.

And then I laughed and thought how T. would call this turtle behavior. It probably is.

(Or I could blame it on the combination of growing up 1. in the Dutch-American context where you take what you get and are grateful for it, 2. in the missionary context of eating what our host feeds us so we don't embarrass anyone, and 3. in the Liberian context of that's what is available today, so eat it.)

* I stand up and insist for a living, after all. I will also do it when meat is involved.

not so

The sky looks fake tonight, like someone painted delicate little puffs onto a pale blue surface. It finally warmed up out there, and of course I have to be inside right now to get things done. 

Things. The all-important, unspecified things.

I've accepted this, because I can see the light green spring leaves waving against the sky, and because it's supposed to be beautiful and warm every day this week, and even more beautiful and warm on the weekend.

In April it feels like summer will never come, but of course I simultaneously feel like it's already come, because I'm here, in Gone West, and everything is new and lovely.

I talked to someone today who anticipated, when I said that I'd been so excited about moving back to Gone West: "Oh. I was expecting you to say that it wasn't as good as you remembered."

NOT SO.

street

On my walk from the bus to the office, there is a man who stands on the corner, smoking a cigarette, with a sign asking for money. He is there every morning, and he never makes eye contact, even when I smile and I'm ready to say hello.

I don't give money to people on the street. I feel the impulse, but I have seen too much of the damage wrought by drugs and alcohol, and the thought of my money contributing to that makes me sick to my stomach.

I do try to smile and make eye contact and say, "sorry," when someone asks me for money.

On my walk up the street from the office in the other direction, there is another man who stands on the corner, asking for money. He is there every day, and he asked me for money a few times, but I smiled and said sorry and we had a brief conversation instead. Now he just reaches out to shake my hand and say hello. 

I think I might have to buy him coffee soon and have a real chat.

random Sunday points

Random point numero uno:

I will never be able to spell the word maintenance without spell check. That much has become clear in 33.5 years. 

Random point numero dos:

I drove out into the beautiful Gone West surrounds yesterday and even though I went camping out there once in the years between living here and living here again, it made me happy all over again that I get to live in this town. Those cliffs and waterfalls make my heart hurt with the beauty, in a good way.

Random point numero tres: 

I need to work on my Spanish.

Random point numero cuatro: 

Additional things that have made me proclaim aloud my happiness to live in this town:

1. A roof-top bar on Friday evening, while the sun was shining.
2. The general system in which I work here, which is much much better for the clientele with which I work than was the one in Universe City.
3. El auto-bus.
4. Thai iced tea and salad rolls from a little sidewalk stand. ("I just had to accept that I was buying the salad rolls solely for the peanut sauce," a coworker said to me, and that is completely true. I am buying the salad rolls solely for the peanut sauce. But wow, it is delicious.)
5. A little store full of locally designed and sewn dresses, with a sale rack and the willingness to alter the next size up when they didn't have my size.

crisscross

My car has State of Happiness plates and even a license plate frame from a dealership in Gone West. It was driven in the Gone West metro area for the 14 years before I bought it. It belongs here as surely as I feel right at home in this city. No one can tell from looking at my car that I am anything but born and raised here.

And yet, I am realizing that I've never really lived in a big city with a car. Big, bustling highways have always been adventures, not daily life. 

Sure, I like driving 80 in a 55 mph zone in Chicago and being the slowest car on the road, but do I want to live that way? (Ha! Not that drivers in Gone West drive 80. Ever. This is a land of slow drivers, unless they are either 1. 19 year old boys, or 2. drunk and driving the wrong way on the highway.)

I don't really like driving on the big, bustling highways, even such as they are in this city that has long outgrown its 6 and 8 lane highways. (Chicagoans are laughing right now, because their highways are 6 and 8 lanes per side. Here I mean 3 and 4 lanes per side.) I don't like how they all crisscross so rapidly in a city whose core is so small. I don't like how State of Happiness seems to believe in placing the signs that tell you where to go exactly at the point where you need to exit, so that there is no advance warning at all about that left hand exit coming up until you are actually level with the exit.

I do know that soon, when all these highways are as familiar to me as the streets of this neighborhood I finally get to live in, I will feel affection for the crisscrossing interchanges, too. In the meantime, I got an iPhone a week ago, in the Mitten, and I have been depending on the google maps app to get me places. 

I've never really been interested in the GPS idea, and I'm even less interested in it now that I have it. I always want a big picture of where I am going, and "In one quarter mile, take Exit 98767 toward 7485 Street" doesn't really do that. All I can see on the little screen is the very next turn and occasionally the one after that, and that isn't enough for me. 

Also, am I the only one who keeps missing turns with the GPS that I feel certain I would have found if I had actually seen a map that would show me how many streets there were before my turn? A couple of days with Siri telling me where to go and I'm ready to go back to that atlas in my trunk.

And then possibly grumble about how we did things in my day and how we walked to school uphill both ways in the snow and how we had to finish our plates and how we were grateful for those lima beans* because we were so hungry.

I do, after all, drive a car with a manual transmission, by deliberate choice.

* I actually really like lima beans.

7:40

I looked at my watch this morning as it lay on my nightstand and saw that it was 7:40 already. Since I catch a bus three blocks away at 7:51, I needed to hurry.

Ten minutes later, finally ready to go, I grabbed my watch and put it on.

When I looked at it the right way up, I saw that it was only 7:20. And I'm all ready to walk out the door. It must have been 7:10 when I only looked at the minute hand upside down.

This is also confirmation once again that I cannot estimate time. If I could, maybe I would know that I have an entire half hour extra.

love prose

I flew back last night, one flight straight from the D to Gone West, and even though I knew how very much more I like Gone West than ever I liked Universe City, still I was surprised not to feel the old tearing feeling of leaving. 

Gone West feels so much closer to the Mitten, and I don't approach returning here with dread. Instead, I feel that familiar jolt of happy recognition when I see Gone West, SH on the flight monitor and again when I watch the landscape I know pass beneath the wings on landing. I cannot explain how light I feel now that I do not dread returning to the place where I live.

I would gladly have slept in this morning, but getting up to walk to the bus was not the same burden as was dragging myself to work in a town that never did make me happy. (Even though, disclaimer, I loved and miss the place where I worked in Universe City.)

I'm not sure how long one blog can consist primarily of bits of love prose to a city, but I clearly intend to test it out.

happy

I don't even have words for how happy it makes me to be back in Gone West, you guys. 

I read this thing a few weeks ago where some advice guru told people that where you live is not as important as what you do, and this is possibly true, but where you live matters so incredibly much. I had a fine life in Universe City. I had friends and activities and routines.

But living in Gone West feels like I've come back to life. I remember again how you can actually love the place where you live. It doesn't have to be merely the backdrop for your life; it can be a character in your life. 

I wandered up through my favorite neighborhoods today. I walked through the school playground. I drank tea in my favorite cafe. I shopped in little boutiques. I wove through the park around the water towers. I came down that long flight of stairs. I meandered along one of my favorite streets. I sat in that pretty little park.

This afternoon could have happened three years ago.

People keep asking how it is to be back, and the strangest thing is how it feels like I never left. Maybe I only imagined those 2.5 years in Universe City. 

I have fallen right back into the same places and routines that I had before I moved away, and it feels like nothing has changed except that suddenly I find myself lost in this bigger Trader Joe's, because even though it was my first, familiar Trader Joe's, my brain now expects the layout of the smaller one in Universe City. But then in the chain grocery store, I know exactly where to go, as if my brain remembers this one better than the one in Universe City.

I am so very happy to live here again.

roundly cursing

I drove back down to Universe City yesterday to pack up my office. By the time I got down there and ran a few errands and packed a few things, I was feeling pretty lonely and desolate, as one does while trying to leave a place, so I texted S. and then I went over to E. and K.'s house to pick up their old microwave.*

E. and K. turn out to have a cable knit throw that has fleece on the back.** I curled up under it on their couch. The gas fireplace was going, and K. made chai, and we sat and talked, and by the time I left with their old microwave in the back seat of my car, I felt like a new person. Human connection will do that.  

Then I went and hung out in S.'s living room with little K. running around dancing and demanding attention. S. made chili cheese burritos. ("Do you eat meat?" she asked, and it was one of the days when I decided abruptly that I do eat meat, and so I did.) I have never failed to leave S.'s presence feeling refreshed and wiser.

But then it was 8 pm and I had barely started packing my office. I was fortunately in a much better emotional place than I had been at 1 pm, so I put my friend D. on notice that I needed her on the other end of the line, and I packed and sorted and threw away. Three hours and two overly-full recycling bins later, I had my car loaded up and I began my drive back to Gone West. 

At 11 pm.

State of Happiness is in that lovely (I use this term sarcastically) spring stage where the weather changes every five minutes. By the end of the two hour drive, I had roundly and loudly cursed 1. the other drivers, and 2. the State of Happiness Department of Transportation. 

It was raining, you see. Sometimes it was raining lightly and sometimes it was raining hard, and for a state known for its rain, State of Happiness is remarkably badly equipped for rain. 

It all goes back to the studded tires. Look, I lived in the Mitten for 12 years. I learned to drive in the Mitten. The Mitten gets a great deal of snow, and we do not use studded tires. We are not allowed to use studded tires. And I understand that there are mountains here, and passes, and studded tires are handy, but they wreck the roads. 

I have never encountered louder roads than the roads in State of Happiness. Every road here has troughs where the cars have driven over and over on their studded tires. Those troughs are incredibly loud when you drive in them, but because they are troughs, your car is inevitably pulled into them. Staying outside of them and still in your lane is a constant battle. It's like sleeping in a bed that caves in toward the middle. No matter how many times you pull yourself out, you always end up back there.

Also, because they are troughs, they fill with water. I never really understood hydroplaning until I drove in State of Happiness. If your car falls into the troughs, which it will, you will hydroplane. This is unpleasant at 70 miles an hour at 12:30 am.

Also, other cars cannot seem to grasp the concept that the troughs full of water mean that any car behind you is practically drowned by the water your car kicks up. So they slide right back into your lane in front of you, even though there are no other cars around, blinding you in a white cloud of water. Or they drive into a bigger than usual trough and spray up so much water that you can't even comprehend whether your car is driving straight. 

There was cursing. There was loud and angry cursing.

I didn't think I was going to make it home alive.

I did. Barely. With several close calls.

* "Do you guys have a moral objection to a microwave, or do you just not have one?" I asked when I moved in. This is, after all, Gone West, where people do have objections to things like microwaves. I can survive without a microwave, but it is useful for things like warming my sinus rinse water, reheating cold tea, and heating my flax seed pillow.

** I am now searching online for a cable knit throw with fleece on that back that costs less than the $129.99 one at P0ttery B@rn.

keep/back

It is fully possible to be too tired to do anything but drag oneself to bed after work every day, except I just moved into my new place on Sunday and so I have to drag myself through room-organizing every evening before I can fall into bed and sleep like there is no alarm clock in the world that could possibly wake me up. I want to cry when my alarm clock goes off.

Already I have started to look forward to my walk to and from the bus stop. The train is a few blocks further, but the bus is just a quick little walk down quiet streets, and when I get off at the end of the day I can feel my stress fall away as the streets get progressively more neighborhood-like in the three blocks from the main road.

It is almost as silent in this house at night as in my house in Universe City. You would never know that there are two highways not two miles away. My room is bigger than one could possibly expect out of an old house - probably twice the size of my room in Universe City, with a huge closet - and right now I even have my little orange couch in here. (I could put it out in the living room, but there is a cat, and he has mangled the couch that is out there, and I have quite an affection for that little orange couch.)

I re-opened my library card first thing, and now I have a list of books on hold again already so that I can walk up the hill on my lunch hour and pick them up, just like I did for two and a half years before I had to leave Gone West.

I work, and I walk to the coffee place, and I explain over and over again all day long where I've been for the last few years to everyone who keeps asking. I'm back, and I'm happy to be back.

And yet, I can hardly bear the idea that this weekend I must go back to Universe City and take the last of my things from my office there and leave behind the key that gets me into that old, familiar building. I want to keep Universe City even as I get Gone West back.

new

I had forgotten how completely, insanely, debilitatingly exhausting it is to start a new job. I forgot how quickly things look terribleterribleterrible when everything (save the streets) are new and I am no longer the experienced, competent one but the new person. I forgot how much worse everything is when I forget to eat.

But tomorrow I will be one day less new and things will be one day more familiar. I will remember to eat and drink.