Ggma Reviews Airbnb

Last summer Best Boy bought the Dr. a big toy for his birthday – a “mid-life” motorcycle. Two safety courses and MDOT endorsement secured had us planning a week long trek mid-September from LA up the Cali coast on the Pacific Coast Highway-Route 1 and back down via Yosemite and the Mojave. The guys on their bikes with Mimi and me in their GTI (chase vehicle), we were off. 

This adventure will be recounted eventually but for now it’s just to set the scene. I was going to be MIA for a bit. Ggma was all set-up safe and sound tucked in at TOH (The Old Homestead).  Meanwhile we were exploring abodes via Airbnb. Each one of the places we stayed had a unique charm.

Airbnb isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – opening a home to complete strangers or being the stranger inhabiting someone else’s space. Nightly, with great expectation we’d drive up to an address, secure the keys and play house. There were a few places we wanted to pocket the keys and become squatters while others weren’t more than a lay-over for our weary heads – glad to move on down the road after a few hours rest. Nothing was so scary or strange to make us want to pack up and leave.

Surprise sleeping arrangements weren’t much of a stretch for Best Boy, the Dr. and me. In our previous life, it was called a furlough. An ironic term -“furlough”. The standard scenario was a missionary family would report to churches that had financially invested in them (you know Return On Investment and reporting to the shareholders type of thing). I think we had 30 churches to visit. Typically we were hosted in parishioner’s homes. I shudder as I write those words. 99% of the meals and accommodations were perfectly lovely encounters (especially if you, dear reader, happened to have hosted us at some point). But that 1% is like gravel imbedded in a leg after laying a motorcycle down on a curve – too painful to dig out every last piece and just barely visible under the skin so as to never be forgotten. Again, I go on record to declare I have writing material for years to come as this is way cheaper than any therapy.

It takes some serious chops to continually be in someone else’s personal space and not go bonkers. An overnight might not be long enough to notice things that would be a complete creep out. Since being hosted was part of our lifestyle, we had zero reservations about letting others use our apartments in Spain (yes, plural because we lived in five places in a little over a decade). If we were Stateside for the summer visiting those churches, our empty place was open to house travelers with co-workers managing the bookings. Sometimes guests would leave behind thoughtful hostess gifts. One in particular was  unforgettable and left in the most interesting place – peeking out from under a bookshelf in our bedroom – a hot pink thong. Honeymooners. ’nuff said.

Back to the story at hand. Having returned from the West Coast, I went to catch up with Ggma and immediately assessed she was no longer comfortable with any kind of absence on my part. We were at another fork in the road. By December, with nasty weather threatening our doorsteps, a new plan was improvised. Ggma would now be “riding in a sidecar”.  She’s in our space at the Money Pit or I’m in her space at The Old Homestead.

After about two months journeying on this new path during an extended stay at the Money Pit she asked,

“Where’s the lady who owns this house?”

“Well, the Dr. & I own this house.”

She scowled at me with that look like I was lying through my teeth. Clearly we were having one of those moments. This can’t be fixed.  This can only be managed. This I know: in her eyes, at that moment, I couldn’t possibly be the owner of the Money Pit and she wanted a word with whoever was in charge.

“Well, (with a tone of disgust) I am ITCHING to get at that filthy front window I’m staring at all day!!”

Distraction is the best course of action to move us along this road to ruin. Trying to go over the fine points of the family tree is futile. I had opened the drapes and sheers so that she could enjoy a clear view as she monitors the comings and goings of UPS, FedEx, USPS, garbage trucks, day-care drop offs and pick ups across the street, and oh, yeah – school buses. I hear it all. She’s got an eagle eye on when school is out and those kids are running hither thither and yon – when they aren’t wearing jackets and they should be headed indoors to get at their homework.

With a subtle move, simultaneously opening the front door to grab the mail,

the sheers were drawn shut.

Out of sight. Out of mind. End of discussion.

But this place where she’s staying – whoever owns it – needs a housekeeper.

Her Airbnb rating: Two stars…maybe.

the no expectations vacation

When the one expectation I had for this time was met within the first 3 hours, it really makes for a relaxed ride.

Our decade plus in Spain was marked by frequent visitors – some expected and loved, others complete strangers.  It took a while to figure out that the key to a successful vacation experience for people had everything to do with the what they were hoping to accomplish.  So regardless of how well I knew people, the early hours of their stay were marked by planning.

I started with a litany of questions to sort out their expectations.  Were they art lovers who would drool over The Prado? Were they kitsch shoppers that would buy cheap T-shirts and key chains and call it a day?  Were they open to real cultural experiences that they would allow ME to do all the planning?  Did they need to eat every few hours?  If I had the answers to these questions, then I could probably come up with itineraries that would keep them happy.

So now before we plan any trip for business or pleasure or a combo of both – we work out those details as best as we can.  There has never been as smashing a success as last year’s great escape.  Not every time away can be centered around cliffs, sun umbrellas and a suitcase of books to be devoured.

This trip was a last minute mental necessity – a need to reconnect and get some face time with Best Boy and Mimi.  There is something strangely wonderful about being in the Entertainment Capital of the World and not needing to go or do or see any of the sights…except for hanging with them.  I dare say that our future holds return trips with Donny Diva in tow where we’ll be back at Disneyland or Universal Studios or Legoland or the San Diego Zoo or – or – or…

Not this time around though.  There is nothing looming on today’s horizon except for the fact that I know we’ll eat more than once.

RIP little red bus

In these old houses, one innocent project always leads the way to ten unexpected detours.  I suppose it starts back at getting our bamboo fence put in last summer.  Next was having the massive, ugly white pine taken out of the front yard which opened up the view to the porch and exposed how badly we need a paint job.  That put me in a bind because I can’t for the life of me figure out what TWO colors I want the trim painted…the body of the house will stay the same but I just need to settle on TWO.  But they should be in line with the roof color, right?  And the gutter work we had done with the new roof two summers ago…

That led to the fact that the basement window frames are showing their 100 year-plus age and needed serious work -which lead me to thinking about finally having glass-block windows put in, thus doing away with the frames.  So we got the estimate months ago and found that getting work done in the winter is cheaper.  Sure – no brainer but they have to do the install before the end of February before their busy time of Home and Garden trade shows starts in March.

That is where my funk began.  It messed with all my glorious plans of escaping the gray and saving my sanity with a Cali trip…not to mention my Best Boy / Mimi deficit.  Being old enough for an AARP card, it is time to act my age, bite the bullet and make a grown-up decision.  Trip cancelled and install scheduled for Tuesday of this week, although I have a sneaking suspicion it will be canceled till the following week since they are predicting 8″ of snow over the next four days.  THAT is a 25 lb. bag of salt in my open wound.

They need access to all six windows from the inside.  So I swallow the bitter pill and begin to do what is seems like I have been doing for the last two years in Billy’s basement on my own rat’s nest of stuff.  I am finally figuring out why I’ve been in such a bad mood for so long.

It is an emotionally exhausting process on top of the horrid assault to my sinuses to be digging through years of memories.  There are almost 40 boxes of books that represent the grueling years of graduate and post-graduate study that are going to be donated to a not-for-profit that takes theological libraries and redistributes them around the world.  That was a lot of groceries not purchased…alot of old cars that randomly wouldn’t start…rental, after rental, after rental…and no cruises on the Caribbean.

Then there are the boxes that held the early creative years of Best Boy and Shop Girl.  Pieces of wood, colored with magic marker which became instrument panels for F-16’s.  Dolls made of socks, buttons and a little glued on lace.  Glow-worms, Pound Puppies, a Cabbage Patch named Phoebe, a box of micro mini cars and helicopters, a remote control 4×4 that lit his face up like a Christmas tree…this is the hard part.

They aren’t just old toys.  They are old memories.  I am clinging to the Clean House mantra that keeping the toy doesn’t preserve the memory.  I know that.  It’s just the stuff of life that has gotten us to the place we are at today.  It has no real value now that its weight has doubled with dust mites.

I am glad that I can at least snap a digital photo here and there before things disappear into the black recesses of a contractor’s bag bound for the Salvation Army.  I know that in this town there are hundreds of families who’s kids live for the Saturday trip to the resale stores to claim their own $1 prize.  And if it keeps these trinkets out of the landfill one more year…so be it.

Obviously, there are those things doomed to the blue city garbage bag immediately. Last garbage day that meant 10 bags not counting the loads of recycled cardboard!  When I can find a way to eek a bit more life out of these things, I’m committed to that.  I’m most thrilled to have remembered a Hispanic cultural center / library in town that is willing to take lots and lots of kids books in English and Spanish. It feels like the good they had in my kids’ lives will keep on.

That is really the issue here.  Perceived value.  That is why things have been dragged from pillar to post over the last twenty some odd years because they were “their” possessions.  I always knew this day would come but I never wanted to rush it.  There was enough inherent pain with each move, with each good-bye, with each pulling up of tender roots.  We couldn’t just drive by the places they spent a year here or two years there.  Those places are 4000 miles away.  So I kept the stuff.

Yesterday on Facebook, a friend was looking for some skis.  I quickly replied that Best Boy’s skis of high school years were still leaning against a door frame upstairs.  He stopped by with his two kids to take a look to see if they’d fit the bill.  We even had a pair of ski boots someone had given the Dr. years ago that were the right size.

The six-year-old noticed a bag of Legos on the dining room table and asked about them.  “Oh, those used to be Best Boy’s and I cleaned them up real good so that I’d have a toy or two here when Donny Diva comes to Momo’s house to stay.”  The nine-year-old piped up, “Our Mom threw away all our Legos and never told us.”  I tried to stifle my reaction.  “She DID WHAT???”  I know the whole story and for a few years theirs looked doomed to be a repeat of our as they made two different trips to live in Israel.

There is only so much you can move with you with two kids to settle in unknown surrounds.  How much storage will you have?  Dishes or Legos?  Coats or Cabbage Patch dolls?  I know the story from inside the mom’s brain.  But I also heard the betrayal in that little voice as she said to her dad, “That was our stuff and you never asked us…”

I get it.  I’ve been given permission.  I’m glad to do away with the ball and chain that has been dragging behind us all these years.  But I also know that Shop Girl doesn’t quite understand the tug on my heart since Donny Diva hasn’t started making things yet, drawing on things yet, adoring things yet…she hasn’t doubled over in laughter yet as she sees the places his imagination will take him and with such unlikely tools.

But the truth is still that with Billy’s basement all cleaned out and freshly painted, I don’t miss him less because all that stuff isn’t down there.  And I won’t love Best Boy and Shop Girl one ounce less because I tossed the Little Red Bus.  Nonetheless, it still stings just a little remembering how proud he was to have made it and been picked to be front and center at the year-end program chirping out in English since it was a British School…”The little red bus goes up and down, up and down, up and down.  The little red bus…”

34 to go

I thought that the first part was the hardest part – but I think this half is really the killer.  We are on the downward slope.  It should just be a coast from here till Spring but this is when things get really tough.  I don’t like how the radio announcer has a smile in her voice telling us to expect snow the next three days.

Just about a year ago, we got away for the vacation of a lifetime…and now it seems like a lifetime ago, but it wasn’t. Looking at all the photos quietly nestled in my iPhoto library brings some small measure of satisfaction as I re-create the days in my head.  I was there.  It did happen.  I was a lucky, lucky girl.

Then there’s this year.  Lots of things have pressed in making such extravagance absolutely out of the question.  And I’m OK with that.  Really I am.  Really.  Seriously.  No, I really mean it.

This is when the gray seeps into my brain – when Spring seems like it will never ever return again.  There might not ever be another night sitting on the porch in the dark listening to the cicadas.  Surely, something has gone wrong with global warming and we’ll be stuck here in late winter – never to get out. It seems as if every commercial on TV points in the direction of warmer climes.  Target looks like a color wheel exploded and hatched little swim suits and cover-ups even though it hasn’t been warmer than 30º in months.  A friend is headed to Costa Rica…others, Jamaica – still others to Florida.  Best Boy posted an innocent picture of something lovely from Santa Barbara and it sent me careening over the edge.

In an impromptu puke session the other day, the Dr. and I reflected a bit about the very Western mind-set that oozes from every pore of our beings.  You know – the one that says we should seek personal satisfaction and fulfillment in every arena of our lives.  Our jobs should be fulfilling our deepest longings and our “giftedness”.  Our dinner parties should be warm, intimate events with meaningful conversations and long drinks of wine. Every occasion should be a celebration of life.  Our vacations should be…

Who do I think I am to be entitled to any of that?  Do the people in Mumbai living in the slums think these thoughts?  There are thousands of families in Michigan alone still losing their homes to the mortgage crisis and they aren’t thinking about being “foodies”.  There are kids in the inner cities all over this country that may never get out of a six block area.  The earthquake in Haiti DID happened but it seems to have taken a back seat to a big snow storm that took over the headlines. When I am done pouting about how my life doesn’t measure up and I get over being angry that circumstances in my life don’t allow me to do what I want to do…I pause long enough to take a deep breath and an honest inventory of what IS.

There are two cars parked beside my very warm house.  There is enough stuff hanging in the closets to keep dozens of families in threads for a long time.  Our bills have been paid every month during this last year. I have gone to the store to buy groceries every time we were out of essential things like oreos and ice cream.  We have electricity and hot water – clean water for that fact. We live in excess.  Lots and lots of excess.

Suddenly, I hear Billy’s voice echo in the darkest recesses of my spoiled, self-absorbed brain…”Quit your belly achin’!”  So, I will suck it up and get back to my basement.  There’s no better therapy than some early Spring cleaning to unload some of this excess baggage.

Let’s get crazy!

This is a re-post from my brother-in-law’s facebook page.  For years he’s been involved in finding ways to facilitate international adoptions.  Thought I’d share their latest hopes and dreams…

HAITI ORPHAN PLANE

Sometimes the time is right for a great dream. At others, it is an audacious vision that is simply ahead of its time. Several years ago some friends gathered together to talk about how to make a significant impact in the orphan crisis. Was there a way to break through the bureaucratic log-jam and financial barriers that restrict the number of orphans worldwide from finding loving homes? While recognizing the value and important protections provided by agencies, we wondered aloud whether there wasn’t a larger door that could be opened for the over 100 million children without parents.

We talked about a 50-year old, Oregon farmer named Harry Holt who would just not give up until the U.S. Congress had passed special legislation allowing him and his wife to adopt 12 mixed-race, Korean orphans. He flew them in on a plane the media dubbed the “Stork plane.” That was 1955. The crisis was the plight of children fathered by American GIs during the Korean War and rejected by the culturally protective Koreans. The “Stork plane” was followed in 1958 with an aircraft carrying 107 orphans. This was only the first such attempt at breaching the orphan adoption bottle neck. Eighteen years later there was “Operation Babylift.” In 1975, in the terrifying days preceding the fall of Saigon. President Ford set aside $ 2,000,000 to help pay for 30 orphan planes from Vietnam. In a few months 2,000 children had been rescued.

Operation “Pedro Pan” from 1960 through 1962, though not focused specifically on orphans, was the largest mass exodus of children for humanitarian reason in our North America. In 22 months, thanks to the commitment of a 30-year-old priest, Bryan O. Walsh of the Catholic Diocese of Miami, 14,000 minors were evacuated from Cuba.

And, then of course, most recently is the orphan plane into Pittsburgh. Yesterday, spearheaded by these same friends, a task force (most of whom are adoptive parents) gathered to discuss making that slumbering dream come true. The crisis is here – a devastating quake in Haiti taking the lives of perhaps several hundred thousand. The need is incontrovertible – the neediest country in our hemisphere already overwhelmed with its 380,000 orphans, now, in a week’s time, suddenly responsible for tens of thousands more. The precedent has been set. The only question is, do we have the will? We have been assured that we have a strong advocate in Congress. The word we were given was “don’t worry about Washington D.C. prepare the catcher’s mitt in Michigan.”

And so we shall.

We are committed to rescuing no less than 10,000 orphans, in a State that has suffered the worst from our economic recession. And perhaps the weakest will lead the way. Perhaps we will help start a flotilla of planes filled with Haitian orphans who have lost everything, including arms and legs, but who will gain the protective nurture of loving families, with room in their hearts and homes for at least one more.

The time for dreams to become reality is here.

The time to fulfill the hopes of the most desperate and vulnerable is now.

Stay tuned.  (Timothy John Stoner)

storytellers

Travelers.  Wanderers.  Immigrants.

We were surrounded by the unfamiliar and my soul was longing for something to hang on to in this place where all of my cultural cues were misplaced.  The songs were unrecognizable.  There was no snow.  It was midnight and the neighbors were banging on the radiators upstairs in jubilation.  It was Christmas morning and I was thousands of miles away from home.

In the following years as I became acclimated to my surroundings, I began picking up on the nuances of  Noche Buena.  Families would gather late – for a huge meal before going to midnight mass.  It was one of two nights all winter that the heat in the apartment building would be on all night long.  I had to come up with a way that we could stay up late too – albeit our family gathering was only the four of us…sometimes more depending on whatever ex-pats we could host.

Each trip Stateside in the following years, I would visit a favorite children’s book store and leave with armloads of stories about Christmas.  That stack of books became the center piece of our attempt at making the wrong feel right. We had something to keep us up till midnight.  We could eat and we could read together as a family.

Once permanently removed from the foreign back to the familiar – it all fell apart again.  Here there was too much to do.  Almost too much family but we couldn’t say that outloud without great misunderstanding.  We missed the huddling together to read but Best Boy and Shop Girl were churlish teens by then and bored with the whole routine anyway.

Somewhere – sometime – we caught the NPR stories.  We replaced our books with the radio stories that meant Christmas to us.  Do yourself a favor…sit…be quiet…and listen.  That is what Christmas is about anyway.  Listening with our hearts.  My Christmas gift to you – a link.

a moving day

I’ve been doing a lot of looking over my shoulder these days.  Moving always does that to me.  This one wasn’t my move but one I fully participated in.  The experience always has me thinking back over the 22 some odd moves the Dr. and I have made…some before Best Boy and Shop Girl were around – but most after.

I was about the age Shop Girl is right now when after 5 moves in less than 5 years I got a taste of a big move.  It was time to pack up our things for our overseas adventure in Spain.  Best Boy was two and a few months – Shop Girl a hearty 7 months old when a semi-truck pulled up to the front door to haul away the air freight shipment I had prepared.  Each box had to be weighed, measured, a bill of lading prepared in triplicate, customs paper work and off it went.  That sentence actually took me months to do and seconds to write.  I remember standing behind a screen door with tears running down my face from exhaustion and fear of a new life I knew nothing about – trying to explain to the 2 year old where all his toys had gone.

That was only the beginning.  I know a thing or two about packing.  The next handful of places never lasted more than 4 years and some as short as 3 months.  I could pack for a week or a month or a year at the drop of a hat.  A dozen years after that first trip over the pond, I watched as the things most precious to us were loaded into a 12 foot sea-worthy container headed back to the States with Spain at our backs.

Not one of them has been pretty.  Some I’ve been glad to move on and leave the particular space with a whole hearted “good riddance” – others with fond tears flowing but none without a good bit of trauma.  Everytime your life is dragged out of the dark cupboards and closets, basements and out from under beds it is traumatic.  To touch everything you own and visually and mentally assess it as it gets prepared for its new place is exhausting.

Shop Girl’s experience last week was no different…except maybe adding the stress of adjusting to less sleep than she’s ever had in her life as the mom of a month old baby and continuing to deal with the whack job of a landlord that started this whole mess. It was no wonder that in a brief pause between truck loads, with no one else around but me and Donny Diva – she collapsed into wrenching sobs when she looked at the chaos starting to take shape as a livingroom and she said, “I’m home!”

I knew what she meant.  She gets to start where it took me forty years to get to.  She gets to give Donny Diva a bedroom to call his own.  She won’t be playing Goldilocks like I did for most of my life.

It wasn’t a pretty move – a smooth move – an organized move.  One small U-haul truck, a handful of able bodied friends and family, the sunshine of a Saturday post-blizzard, the job got done…moving all the personal belongings of a new family from one rented space to their own 6 blocks away.  She has a long winter ahead to organize closets and decide where things should best go.

I wish that all this first-hand experience would have taught me to travel lightly through life.  I fear it hasn’t but I also detect a change.  I’m no longer responsible for Best Boy and Shop Girl’s things.  What is left in the basement will get offered then tossed.  They haven’t asked for it in 10 years – they probably don’t care.  But up until now – I didn’t feel like I had the right to throw away their past – the bits and pieces of the places we’ve lived.  We can’t drive by those apartments, tiny houses  and condos, the place where they planted a tree in the yard, point a finger to remember those days so I chose to drag some pieces with us.  I’m not sorry I did…I’m just ready to move on.

If I have learned anything from this last year of sorting through Billy’s life – it is that disorganization leads to waste…I buy another doo-hickey when I can’t find the one I think I have. In my effort to hold on to things that SOMEONE might need SOMETIME – others could be getting benefit from it now if I’d just get it packed into the car and drive to the closest donation drop box.

Oh, and Shop Girl…I’ll drop off your boxed wedding dress tomorrow.

For good visuals of how I’d like to live from now on..check out Shop Girl’s producer/musician friend Evan Slamka’s video with Marjorie Fair’s Empty Room and then be a good Do-Bee and donate a box of junk you keep dragging around.

cellar door

Cellar door.  Cellar door.  Cellar door.

How apropo that  J.R.R. Tolken was the first to draw our attention to the beauty of those two words and how they sound (phonaesthetics).  If he were still alive today, I’d beg him to invent a new word or two in those wonderful fantasy languages he created that combined good phonaesthetics and functionality.

Cellar door.  Cellar door.  Cellar door.  Grandma.  Granny.  It’s the G-R combo that gets me.  My skin doesn’t even crawl as much hearing abuelita.

I am not reacting to the idea – just the sound.  It grates on me.  I fully embrace and am proud of my gray hair and the age it represents. What’s not to love about having enough experience to handle whatever an 8 lb. wonder can throw at me?  I can easily tuck him under my arm and still make lunch.  Changing diapers, regardless of how frightening they may seem…I’ve seen it ALL.  But the name thing?  In our family all the best ones are already taken…these roll easily off the tongue.  Yaya.  Nana.

Shop Girl and I have deliberated long and hard behind closed doors over this one.  It has to sound right.  It has to feel right.  If the Kid could call me Cellar Door – I’d let him.  Fact is, he can’t call me anything at this point.  But we are going with Momo.

It just so happens that one of Shop Girl’s favorite books by Michael Ende is Momo.  Widely read by school children in Europe (wanna get me started again on another rant??), it seems be scarce in these parts.  Maybe that is all part of it too.  There are hundreds of variations and nicknames for my new role…but how many Momo’s do you know?

p.s.  The photo is as close as I could come today for the theme.  Truth is, it’s the door to a lighthouse in Sagres, Portugal (if I remember correctly)…but we can all imagine that somewhere in the world – there might be a cellar door with such a great looking latch, right?

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

This week between the end of August and Labor Day seems to be a turning point in my life year after year.   It was particularly tough marking time between Billy’s death and the actual funeral Labor Day weekend a year ago.  But for decades prior to that, it was back to school time.

Time for routine – and it was a welcomed change after unstructured hazy hot days of summer especially in Spain when the heat really seems to crank and brush fires leave that acrid smell hanging in the air.  The first weeks back in books was welcomed as life settled into a certain rhythm were I could count on a few uninterrupted hours of quiet.

This morning there is a certain crisp chill in the air reminding me of clock watching, hurry up breakfasts, a mad dash for backpacks and the rumble of yellow buses pausing at pre-determined spots along streets.

Of all the seasons, I seem to be most productive in the Fall.  Almost a decade past the decades spent tied to the academic calendar, I still feel my internal motors revving up.  Today, after a two day adventure in Maytag repairman school, I have things to do for sure.  There is laundry (with my fingers crossed that the $250 repair plus another $50 invested in things that broke after he left – will hold).  There is a suitcase to pack.  A plane to catch tomorrow morning.

Best Boy called me on Monday mid-day to say that the trip planned for LA (which I knew nothing about) was going to be a month long rather than a week.  We all know this is the trip.  He may come back for a visit after a month but this is the “move”.  It’s been planned for and talked about for over a year but made all the sweeter knowing his Mimi is THERE and not here.

It wasn’t until a news story remembering the events of Hurricane Katrina during these days in 2005 that I realized that Shop Girl and I were settling her in LA four years ago right now.  Without a TV or a radio during those days and feeling cut off from world events yet thrown into the world of Ikea and unpacking – we “missed” Katrina.  I didn’t see images or get brought up to speed until weeks later.

Four years later – lots of water under lots of bridges – lots of changes.  I will settle into a new quiet around here -at least until The Awaited One decides to make his entrance in 6 weeks or so.  I embrace this new chapter of quiet and chaos in juxtaposition.  The Dr. and I can always escape to the land where a stop at the corner can get you Chinese food and Donuts at once.  You gotta love the City of Angels!

spelunker

After a hard week of soundtrack work in Nashville for Shop Girl, her swelling belly brought about a rabid desire for nesting.  Homeward bound – nothing was going to stop my Fast for a minute longer than a necessary pee and some peanut butter crackers for sustenance.  Early morning fog softened the vistas through Tennessee and Kentucky taking me to places long forgotten but dreamy in the recesses of my memory.

Vacations for Billy were generally spent close to home doing the things to keep the house in repair…painting inside and out.  Finances never allowed those fantasy vacays to Disney.  But somewhere along the line, I don’t suppose I was more than 7 or 8 (sibling memories could help here), we headed South.

One of our stops was at the famous stables of the Kentucky Downs racetrack.  I was thoroughly entrenched in that love-of-horse phase that so many pigtailed girls go through and I still remember the marvel of the sleek chestnut bodies and silky black manes towering over me.  The wonder of wonder was being allowed to stop in the souvenir shop and three items were purchased specifically for me.  Somehow I recall some whining from the bro/sis combo to the tune of, “She’s a spoiled brat!” and “Who cares about dumb horses anyway! I just want to get home!”… if I was about a 3rd grader – that made them tweens and what is worse than being stuck in the backseat of a family car with no air conditioning, dvd player, radio or space for that matter.  This was sometime before 1965 or so, people!

But the pièce de résistance of that trip was a tour of the Mammoth Cave.  I am not even sure if that was actually our final destination or just another stop along the way.  Regardless, it marked me for life.  Fear gripped me as we began the steep descent into the bowels of the earth.  Shivers worked up my spine not just from the change of temperature but from the mere fact that I was being held captive by tons of limestone.

Eyes wide open, peering down crevices that could swallow me whole – my heart pounding so loudly in my chest it buzzed in my ears…once all senses adjusted, it became the most spectacularly magical space.  Colored lights highlighted the stalactites and stalagmites.  Underground rivers flowed silently by into inky black. Musty, dank air hung thick.

When Best Boy and Shop Girl were about that same age we read George MacDonald’s children’s fantasy novel  The Princess and the Goblin and its sequel The Princess and Curdie out loud around the dinner table.  MacDonald launches into his ideas of mountains and caves within the first pages of the second book:

A mountain is a strange and awful thing.  In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains.  But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them – and what people hate they must fear.  Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough to them.  To me they are beautiful terrors.

He continues a few paragraphs later,

All this outside the mountain!  But the inside, who shall tell what lies there!  Caves of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones – perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaselessly, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones arc rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires – who can tell? – and whoever can’t tell is free to think – all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages – ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool.

Not too many months later, we found ourselves on a sweltering day under a blistering Washington D.C. sun, queuing up at the Smithsonian with Shop Girl and Best Boy in a full melt down.  Once inside we mapped out our visit including my one MUST SEE.

We were ushered into a room where all the lights were turned off and told to stand in the center and wait.  Suddenly, the recessed display cases set deep into the walls like mini caverns were set ablaze and sparkled with the most gorgeous display of gems in every color of the rainbow – exposed from where they had been hidden miles below the earth’s surface for centuries.  Suddenly the deep underworld of Curdie, the miner’s son, was brilliantly brought to reality.

Caves.  Me.  Facing fear.  Getting choked by the demons of claustrophobia or delighting in spelunking to discover precious veins buried deep within?  That is where my mind has taken me in the last few days.  Sparked by a conversation on the porch with Shop Girl and Mimi about facing our greatest fears and finding buried deep within ourselves those treasures – valuable resources – veins of gold and silver that steel our souls and weave through us – belying the hard, gray exterior that can seem cold to the touch.  Who are we really – deep in the core?

During my treks back and forth to Indiana over the weekends of the last few years, I had spent a good deal of time fearing the death of my father.  How was I going to face that?  What would it look like?  Feel like?  I planned the funeral in my head.  I talked through eulogies.  I wrote in notebooks while I drove.  What would his face look like when the real Billy was headed through the ceiling of the room that confined his physical body?  How would the Mrs. survive?

We have crawled through some dark twisty passageways this year.  The Mrs.’ voice echos off the walls.  But the thrill of every caver’s life is finding yet another tunnel, another underground waterway, another secret grotto – slogging through the mud and muck to chart new passages. These twelve months have been that journey for me.  Sometimes coming out into a wide space – a chamber – where standing upright I blindly pat the perimeters of the hard space. Other days I find myself crawling on my belly – squeezing through impossibly tight spaces.

So here’s to facing fears and finding the gemstones hidden deep within.  New adventures, new discoveries, new pains, new joys await. It takes hours of tumbling in the grit for the shine of those stones to come to light. Keeping my headlamp burning bright and forging ahead – daring fear to block my way.

After weeks of spelunking in Billy’s basement with all its similarities to the Mammoth Cave, I feel like yesterday my eyes had become so adjusted to the filtered gray light that I finally looked up and could almost see three of the four walls.  I have dug deep this year – quite literally – and as each layer is uncovered, I am in awe of the precious gems I keep unearthing.  Do you still have all your marbles?  I sure don’t.

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