Curmudgeonness

How a good day looks to a curmudgeonness

This month, I turn 59. Technically that’s still considered middle-aged but I feel older than time. The one good thing about it is that I’m one year closer to laying claim to the curmudgeonhood I never realized I’d been gunning for my whole life. Age is coming close enough I can see the silvery-white of its hair roots because, dammit, those hair roots are mine.

 I’ve felt old since at least 20, probably because 21 meant legal, can’t-get-out-of-it adulthood while anything after 25 or 30 seemed unimaginably Jurassic. Had I lived in nineteenth rather than the early twenty-first century, my perception of what constituted the beginning stages of decrepitude would have been more accurate than not: at that time, life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe was only around 40. From where I stand now, the decade of the great 4-0 strikes me as fabulously juvenile, the beginning of everything, minus cribs, playpens and parents. You’re on your own, baby: ready or not, here comes life.

 Everything I’ve read online assures me I’ve got until at least 65 until society is formally allowed to call me old. However temporary, that’s a comfort and I’ll take it in lieu of the plastic surgery that’s turned 66-year-old pop star Madonna into an bona fide Area 51 alien. But some people out there insist on pushing boundaries and getting on my one last nerve, like that nice young hairdresser at the local Great Cuts. I love the cute pixie-punk haircuts she gives me; but the last few times I’ve seen her, she’s also insisted on giving me a senior discount. Because I’m still lucid enough to know that maintaining manners is desirable in a public place, I smile and keep my grumbling—along with the extra five bucks—to myself.

 Yes, I like saving money. Discounts are, in fact, the great promise of the cheerful red AARP card I carried for five years and never used. Now that I’ve dispensed with membership, I have just this to say: keep your discounts to Denny’s, Joe’s Crab Shack and other havens of the white-haired and infirm. Don’t age me into oblivion because I’m quite able to do that for myself, with a little help from the Neptune Society. I don’t know where they got my name though being on the AARP mailing list probably didn’t help. For the last few years, the friendly people at Neptune have been sending me letters detailing the benefits of cremation when I didn’t even fucking ask.

 I suppose I can’t be too hard on AARP. They’ve been lobbying Congress for reforms to help older Americans since the 1960s, so yes, they mean well. It was their monthly their monthly magazine that really sent me over the edge (the ugly tote bags they sent with each new subscription didn’t help). Without fail, AARP magazine covers featured fit, good-looking individuals with newly graying hair, airbrushed for maximum presentability. Now to be fair, I’ve been known to use a filter or two on my own pictures. But dammit, where were all the truly old people, the ones with walkers, canes and oxygen machines who are on more meds than they can remember? Brooke Shields and George Clooney don’t count. I’m talking the real real here, not the still-in-middle age people like me.

The companions every curmudgeonness needs

Rather than call myself a curmudgeon, though, I’ve opted on another word: curmudgeonness. It doesn’t exist in any dictionary that I know of which makes it even more delightfully contrarian. A curmudgeon is that old man down the street whose home is more lair than castle. You know the one: the crusty cuss who yells at people to get off his damn lawn and refuses to give out candy on Halloween. From what I’ve been able to gather, the proper term for someone like me who identifies (more or less, depending on the day of the week) as female, is termagant. Since I don’t consider myself a nag, though, curmudgeon is a better fit, especially when tamed and claimed with the feminizing -ess ending.

I do like one of the possible etymologies of termagant, though, which the Google English dictionary suggests is a hybrid word that came from the merging of two Latin ones: tri (three) and vagant (wandering). The GED further speculates that these root words seem to refer to the idea of the moon wandering between heaven, earth and hell under the names of three Classical goddesses associated with it: Selene, Artemis and Persephone. That’s all lovely and poetic until you start wondering what the hell wandering moons have to do with being an unpleasant female. Unless it has to do with ancient taboos against menstruation and Hippocrates’ claim women were the weaker, more hysterical sex because their wombs were prone to wandering. But misogyny is a sneaky thing and anything vaguely associated with female are targets for negative cultural reframings.

 All this is to say that etymologists aren’t sure where termagant came from, any more than they know how curmudgeon—which some believe may partly derive from the Middle English “cur” (dog) came into usage. What is known is that termagant was once a gender neutral term. Linguistic evidence shows that before the 16th century, termagant was used to describe overbearing males. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy me. My dislike of the world termagant has nothing much to do with anything except my own quirks. The word reminds me of “termite,” that nasty little insect with a voracious appetite for anything made of wood. Anything that sees my house as its next meal gets no respect from me. I still prefer the anti-social grump down the street who yells at kids and delivery people. At least he’s mostly harmless when left alone in his native habitat.

W.C. Fields

 But can you blame curmudgeons—whatever their gender—for how they are? They’ve seen it all so nothing surprises them anymore. They’re too old to really care what anyone thinks of them or their habits. Curmudgeons may be prisoners of bodies that have seen better days. But they’ve lived through and survived enough that they can say and do what they want. Better still, curmudgeons get their very own holiday on January 29, which happens to be the birthday of W.C. Fields, the great Hollywood Gold Age comedian who allegedly hated dogs and babies. He did occasionally own a canine, enjoyed entertaining his friends’ children and doted on his first grandson. But that’s beside the point. Like all good grumps, he was cynical and proud and not afraid to show the world who he was. “A man’s got to believe in something,” he once quipped. “I believe I’ll have another drink.”

Reading Cards & Stars

I bought the first of many tarot card decks when I was 11. I was a mostly reasonable girl, but the box they came in had tantalized me with promises that the cards could offer glimpses into the future. More than anything I wanted those promises to be true, more than I cared to admit. I’d long harbored a deep fascination with the supernatural, the paranormal and the occult. In a place beyond reason deep in my bones, I knew that life—and life on earth—were things of profound mystery.

What I especially loved about my deck were the illustrations that looked like scenes from a fairy tale. Each of the 72 cards were based on a system created by nineteenth century British academic and spiritualist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith. Both were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study of metaphysics and magic. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I bought the cards; I was just a curious child who hoped her colorful new cards could answer her most burning questions: Will I pass my math test? Does my crush like me back? Will my mother ever stop driving me insane?

At around the time I started learning the meanings of each tarot card image, I found an inordinately beautiful hardback called Astrology sitting on a shelf in my parents’ library. I knew in general that astrology was a divination tool like tarot, but one that “explained” through a system of twelve symbols. As it showed me the influence astrology had on societies through time, the book revealed that the tool I had thought was so simple sought its deeper answers in the mathematical relationship of planets to each other to the constellations through which they moved.

Detail from St. Mark’s Cathedral clock tower - Venice, Italy

 I never found out which of my parents had bought the book though I had my theories. Before I was born, my mother had been a hardcore Catholic with establishment beliefs about divinity. She had venerated Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a few pious saints and all church teachings until everything tied her up in knots she eventually severed like the Gorgon’s heads they’d become. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine her contemplating alternative, non-dogmatic ways of understanding the unknown and unknowable.

Of course, a reasonable girl like me knew that tarot and astrology weren’t to be taken seriously. They were on par with my mother’s Catholicism which seemed like a rarified form of the mythologies she’d read to me in childhood. That didn’t stop me from nurturing my occult interests, talking about astrology and especially the meaning of birth signs (but never tarot, that seemed a witchy bridge too far) with friends. As far as we giggling girls knew, it was just a crazy system developed by even crazier ancients that was mostly wrong but on occasion more correct than we believed was possible.  

Louis MacNeice

It doesn’t surprise me now that I would be drawn to studying the meaning of things and understanding the world through symbols. In college that took the form of a dedicated passion for literature. That led to a surprising discovery that linked back to my occult interests. One day and apropos of nothing, I leaned that the author of my beloved astrology guide, Louis MacNeice, had also been a poet who had versified and published alongside fellow Oxonians W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, who came to read his work during my first year; and whose words, like those of all the great writers I studied, struck me with the force of falling stars.

What I wouldn’t know for many years was that my interests were more interconnected than I realized. Tarot cards first emerged in fifteenth century Italy, stronghold of the Catholic faith my mother had abandoned. But it was the French who adapted them for fortune-telling purposes in the late eighteenth century, just as the Romantic movement—which celebrated imagination over reason—began taking shape. Astrology originated almost two millennia before tarot in Mesopotamia before spreading to India and Greece, where its western version was born. For ancients, it was inseparable from the science of astronomy.

It was the early Christians (and Jews) who condemned astrology as antithetical to biblical teachings that warned against divination. Later, tarot cards came to be considered in a similar way, especially by fundamentalist groups. As suspect—and even demonic—as some believed these tools to be, they nevertheless inspired many, and especially those who, like MacNeice, centered their lives around imagination and creativity.

Carl Jung

Psychologist Carl Jung was ultimately the one who gave me courage to more openly indulge my eccentricities. I don’t know when I learned that Jung had studied astrology and tarot; and that both had led to his ideas about human archetypes and the collective unconscious. Perhaps it was in the uncertain years after graduate school when I turned to my decks for answers. It was then I told a roommate who studied psychology about how liberating Jung’s esotericism felt to me. We spoke only one about this and never again: with PhD student authority, she told me that mainstream psychologists considered Jung an outlier and a crank.

I could have told her that Sigmund Freud, the founder of her discipline, had based part of his work in  ideas taken from ancient Greek fictions and philosophies; and that his work, which he believed was scientific, was far more anecdotal and theoretical than empirical. But I didn’t and just flashed my never-mind-me-I-just-study-literature smile. Jung’s work was also theoretical. But what made it more suspect than Freud’s was its open, artist-like reliance on intuition and its proximity to the mystical.

Despite my roommate’s cold shower of a response, I’d found my vindication. While I appreciated reason just as much as I appreciated science, neither could satisfy my need for wonder. Or the need to imagine possibilities beyond what I could see. There’s a richness in allowing space for unconventional ways of knowing that stand apart from the kind of dogma that drove my mother away from her faith; a richness I would not trade for all the four-square certainties in the world.

Cat Ladies Strike Back

An out-and-proud childless cat lady, I do not own a pussyhat to prove my allegiance to felines…or to other women. Not that it would be especially advisable to wear one in the Texas summer heat. But the political zeitgeist almost demands that I get one, if only to celebrate Kamala Harris’ brilliant takeover of the political limelight from the unhinged ex-president, current Republican presidential candidate and convicted felon known as #45.

Pussyhats first appeared in all their pink glory at the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington, a mass protest against #45 and everything he stood for including social regressivism and the curtailment of women’s rights. If I think of pussyhats now, it is because I, like millions of other cat ladies, have been hissing and spitting at the remark made by J.D. Vance, #45’s equally mad and unsavory VP pick. His too-loyal wife recently called it a mere “quip” meant to explain a larger point about political inclusion. We cat ladies beg to differ.

In 2021, Vance told former Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson, that America is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and '[now want to] make the rest of country miserable, too.” When that comment resurfaced at the end of last month, it unwittingly gave birth to what I call the Great American Cat Lady Moment.

To this particular cat lady, our moment seems an almost inevitable outcome of many things, not the least of which was the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. Not that the people at the March happened to be cat ladies (or even female for that matter). But if they were female, they all had one thing in common: a need to express years— centuries, even—of pent-up rage against continuing patriarchal injustice. The knitted, pointy-eared caps they wore were just a uniting symbol that, along with its feline connotations, also happened to be one that had a long association with femaleness and femininity.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

My first personal encounter with pussyhats came a year after they first appeared. On January 20, 2018, demonstrators in Austin staged a protest—one of many that had continued to take place all over the United States and world—against #45 and the ever-changing cast of shady characters that constituted his administration. Perhaps I had heard about the Austin protest; I don’t remember. What I do recall was that it was a Saturday, that I had errands to run and that when I got off the bus to do them, I was immediately caught in a massive swirl of people, noise and energy.

At the time and despite my profound distaste for #45, I still dared to call myself mostly apolitical. His female opponent, Hillary Clinton, had also alienated me. Yes, she was a woman and a feminist. But I wasn’t automatically with HER just because of these things. I well knew she had done more in her fifteen years as a politician than her (mostly male) colleagues had done in a lifetime. But a troubling trail of scandals dogged her, made me feel I just couldn’t trust HER enough to exercise my nineteenth amendment voting rights. The same ones I took for granted enough to ignore out of disgust with a two-party system that didn’t offer much beyond empty promises for working people and the middle class, political gridlock and entrenched neo-liberal corruption.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

But something in my attitude began to change that day. The people-swirl eventually pushed me toward large contingent of pussyhatted women carrying signs with slogans like stop regulating my body and women pay the price for decisions made by men. Suddenly, my errands—whatever they may have been—didn’t matter. An election had been stolen; rights were in jeopardy. Mesmerized by the colorful anarchy I saw around me and the unabashed fierceness of the female protestors, I cast off my complacency and followed the crowd from the 3rd Street bus stop to down to the waterfront, where I watched marchers make their towards Congress Street then up to the green mall of the Texas State Capitol.

Eventually the demonstrations stopped, not just in Austin, but around the country. Pussyhats got put away (though the anger festered) and a good, decent man defeated #45. But what the decent man couldn’t undo was the damage #45 had done to things like the Supreme Court, which eventually did the unthinkable and overturned more than 50 years of progress in laws protecting civil and reproductive freedoms. And damage to an already broken political system and to #45’s own party, which he transformed into a bastion of white supremacist, christo-fascist cult that deified him and worshipped the capitalist excesses he represented.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

Even now, as a presidential nominee, #45 continues his reign of chaos alongside a running mate who spews as much hateful and ill-considered rhetoric as he does. Where women are concerned, both seem unaware that women—and cat ladies—have long memories. And they will always find ways—like the pussyhat—to communicate their displeasure. The brainchild of two California women, pussyhats began as a project that was both practical and political. The pair wanted to help keep heads warm during the notorious cold of January inauguration. But they also wanted to use a traditional—and maligned—“feminine” color (pink) along with “feminine” crafts (knitting and crocheting) to make a statement about the power of collective female action.  

They were, in other words, doing far more than cat lady cos-play. Pussyhat protestors were putting the Usurper-in -Chief on cheerful pink notice: we know who you are, we know what you’ve done, and we won’t let you forget. The hats—which were as unique and individual as the thousands of women who made them—transformed them into avengers of female sexuality, while transforming the pussies #45 had once gloated were his to grab-because he was rich, because he was famous, because he was a man—into sites of public contestation.

It was a contemporary version of an old fight. Fifty years before, second wave feminists had done something similar when they followed the advice of the groundbreaking 1972 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective guide, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and used mirrors to inspect their own vulvas. If the book reminded women that you are your body and you are not obscene, pussyhats reminded the world them that female bodies deserved respect.

As hand-made symbols of women’s autonomy, pussyhats also served a secondary purpose of critiquing the hypermasculinist homogeneity implied by mass-produced MAGA hats. The pink of compassion contrasted with the red of violence, as much a component of the MAGA brand as post-truth lunatic idiocy. And the crude triangular ears of every pussyhat remembered cats, and whether consciously or not, the long history that bound women and felines together in companionship and even magic.

I like to think that pussyhats, though apparently “tame” in looks, also quietly channel an energy that is less domesticated cat and more untamed puma or panther. Millennial pop icon Taylor Swift, who was recently drawn into the cat lady controversy by virtue of being a single, cat-owning female and self-made billionaire, exemplifies that powerful independence. In 2023, and as Time magazine’s person of the year, she posed for a cover-shoot that featured her and one of her beloved felines. By celebrating who she was, she was also suggesting, through her black leotard and tights and a hand curved into something like a cat’s claw, that she was powerful. A cat lady who remembered the indomitable Cat Woman, a single female who owned and wielded her sexuality without fear or shame. And without apology for not choosing to have children.

Taylor Swift certainly does not exemplify any kind of “cat lady misery” that I can see. As an entertainer, she brings joy and optimism to a young global audience burdened by more than its fair share of pessimism about everything from politics and the economy to climate change. She has freely chosen and embraced her path as a single, childless person as have countless other females. Regardless of whether or not we have cats.

But if we do, so much the better. Felines tie us to so much, like memories of resistance and the magic collective action can spark. Unlike Taylor Swift, we cat ladies may be mostly invisible. But we are legion and wield far more influence on the collective female psyche than people realize. Uninformed—and frankly misbegotten—public figures may imply that our choices leave us without a stake in America’s future. What they forget that we have do have a stake. And that together, we have the power to drive that stake straight through the twisted hearts of those who try to oppress us. Because we have claws and we have teeth.

And we grab back.

The Serendipity of Sarah McLachlan

My immersion in Sarah McLachlan’s music began with her 1993 album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I don’t remember anymore exactly when I bought the CD; only that it was sometime the late 1990s and probably around 1998. I was still young then and living on the West Coast, fumbling towards wherever I was supposed to be— whenever that was supposed to happen.

When I went to the record store, I only knew Sarah McLachlan’s name, likely because I’d heard the hit “Adia” and gotten obsessed with it, clueless that the song came from her 1997 album, Surfacing. The first thing I did was ask the record store clerk where I could find all the Sarah McLachlan albums. He immediately told me about Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and that this was the record you bought if you really wanted to get to know Sarah McLachlan. I took his advice and a week later, after looping the album on endless repeat, I’d memorized all thirteen songs. Her soprano voice—clear, powerful and true—had become my new favorite high.

Not long afterwards, I learned that Fumbling was her third record and the one that brought her fame outside her native Canada, where she had been part of the music scene since 1988. But it wouldn’t be until days before her July 2024 Austin concert that I’d discover that my twenty-five-year-old musical obsession marked me as a “fumbler”: a hardcore fan of an album that stayed in the American top 50 for just one week in 1994 (Surfacing would remain in the top 50 for 86 weeks). Nevertheless, it would go on to become her best-loved work. I had been the Gen X rough draft of a Swiftie and never known it.

And really, what was there not to love, especially for a literati like me? Moody and lyrical, the album had a title that came straight from the lines of WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s  “Dulce et Decorum Est”: Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,/But someone still was yelling out and stumbling/And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. The singer had taken the theme of war and woven it into songs about losses on the battlefield of love. No romantic, I was still mesmerized by the album’s super-charged depth of feeling. Fumbling sounded like melancholy and I was hooked. Melancholy was what fueled me then, because I was a 30-something on the cusp of things I couldn’t yet see.

The serendipity that led me to her so many years ago led me to her again last March. Somewhere online and exactly when I wasn’t looking for her, I saw that Sarah McLachlan was coming to town. The very woman who pulled me inside emotion like the moon drawing tides to shore. No longer the young melancholic, I was navigating adult uncertainties that had come about through a forced reckoning with the unexpected. When I bought the ticket to see her show I was still reeling from the news I needed a painfully invasive biopsy and one week away from getting a life-complicating diagnosis.

In the consultations that followed, doctors only told me what to expect over the short-term because they needed tests and labs to make recommendations. I guessed I’d be post-operative by the concert because doctors don’t wait around to get people with diagnoses like mine on the table. What I didn’t know was where I’d be with the preventive treatment they would give me afterward. Or how I would respond or even if I’d have the energy to see Sarah McLachlan, the woman whose songs I’d been singing and loving for most of my adult life.

A hairdresser I used to see told me last fall that her musician husband, a man with a diagnosis similar to mine, was in surgery days before a concert he had to see. A magnificent concert, as it would turn out, because I had been there to see it, too. The hairdresser bought her husband a cane because he could barely walk without falling. She’d also called friends who were going and asked them to watch over him. The man was still medicated and in pain the night of the concert; but leaning on his cane and his friends, he’d seen the show he absolutely could not miss.

Imagining the man fumbling for balance in my mind’s eye kept me from selling my ticket and staying home. Sarah’s concert wasn’t just about 90s nostalgia: now, it was about pushing back against fear and what I couldn’t control and taking chances. Thinking of the people that had helped this hairdresser’s husband, I went online to a forum for the people who live in my neighborhood. There were a few thousand people in it; maybe someone else was going, someone I could go with, someone who might be there if I was unable to help myself.

That night on the forum I got lucky. Within an hour of my post, someone who didn’t have a photo to identify her, said she’d come along. She’d wanted to go, she’d thought about it. But she hadn’t bought the ticket. I did not know this person, but I accepted this chance act of generosity and trusted. She sent me a picture of the ticket she bought and said to keep in touch. She would be there, she would help. I didn’t think to ask why; I was just glad to have found someone who would help me see Sarah. I finally saw her face—pretty and kind, framed by a sweep of wavy silver hair—the night of the concert.

I lucked out again at the end of June, my doctors told me they wanted to start treatment the Monday after July 4th, which was also the Monday after the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy concert. Not only would have a concert companion who had sung Sarah McLachlan songs a cappella in college and dedicated “Hold On” —a song about love and illness from Fumbling—to a hospitalized friend. I would also have enough energy to see the concert itself, unimpeded by treatment side effects. I wouldn’t even need my hairdresser’s cane, which she had offered to me if I needed it. The night of the concert I left my back row seat and drifted as close as I dared to the stage where for almost an hour, I stood in stunned, wet-eyed gratitude.

On the drive home, chatting with my companion, I thought about how both of us had come to Fumbling as younger people: she in her 20s, I in my early 30s. Sarah McLachlan had been just 25 when the album first came out; and at the concert, she had called it the album of her youth, the one that had come before everything else: marriage in 1997, her mother’s death and first daughter’s birth four years later; the birth of her second child in 2007 and divorce in 2008; then her father’s death in 2010. In a 2023 CBC interview, she would also say this: [t]here’s a lot of emotional energy attached to this record for a lot of people. Fumbling had been about transitions from innocence to experience and about opening up to beginnings and endings on the journey forward.

There was more. In the days before the concert, I learned that both of Sarah’s parents had died of the same disease that had found me; and that the singer had cared for her father from his diagnosis to his death; and that she’d performed at benefits  to raise awareness and money for the disease. My companion did not know this either. But when she had accepted to come to see Sarah with me, she had done not only because she wanted to see the concert but also because she understood my predicament. Her father had gone through the same treatment I was about to undergo. He was well now, despite the fatigue and malaise, and she was happy he was well. One day you’ll get there, too. And when I did, I would marvel, more than I do now, at the people and things that had led me to the other side.

Anatomy Lessons

Two female doctors remade my breasts—both of them—at the end of May; it was my first time attended by two surgeons but my second time on the operating table in six months. The first time was for elective surgery in November, four months after a dermatologist had identified the lump under my left shoulder blade as a benign fatty tissue growth. I’d felt its gradual spread with curious fingers, occasionally despairing at what the mirror showed me: a small, uncomfortable hill of flesh that made me feel like Quasimodo.

The second time was to remove a cancer tumor lodged north of my right nipple, a growth so small it had yet to make its presence known as a lump. The surgeon went over the procedure with me. One breast would be opened and cleared and the other reduced to match the mate that radiation would shrink. The result may not be exact, but we do our best. Then, on a diagram of the female torso, she showed me exactly where she and her colleague would make their incisions. Her pen traced an upside-down question mark on the right nipple that ended a short way up my chest and then a round keyhole attached via a thin curved line to an under-breast anchor on the left.

Later, on the day of surgery, she took a black marker and ruler and draw lines and circles on my chest that she would use to guide her, just as surgeon who removed the lipoma had taken his pen and gathered the tumor on my shoulder within the boundaries of a single oval I could not see.

Twice my body had been cut open, twice my flesh had temporarily become the canvas for a surgeon’s marker and knife. Back side first then front, the geometry of surgeons. In the span of six months, two separate pathologies had transformed my body into a living art project.

*****

The Broken Column (1944)

Painter Frida Kahlo knew what it was like to live in a healthy body until she contracted polio at age six. She recovered after spending almost one year in bed. But one leg, the right one, became thinner and shorter than the left and would cause her pain—and not a little embarrassment—for the rest of her life. Kahlo learned to hide the deformity under the long dresses and eventually, the colorful skirts that became her trademark.

Twelve years later, when Kahlo was 18 and preparing to study medicine, a trolley car rammed into the bus she was riding. A steel handrail impaled her through her hip, piercing her uterus and fracturing her spine and pelvis. Multiple surgeries followed; after that, Kahlo was forced to wear plaster corsets to support her back and keep her body straight for the rest of her life. She turned to drawing—an activity she had always loved— for solace and for a brief time considered becoming a medical illustrator.

Until she realized that art could help her express her feelings about the beautiful, broken body that surgeons would remake over and over again for the next thirty years.

*****

Health did not become a focus for me until a faulty endocrine system I’d tried to mask with hormone-balancing pills through part of my 20s and most of my 30s rejected them not once, but twice, the second time causing a clot in my right leg. The clot resolved in five months because I was young and otherwise healthy. But it took more than a decade for my swollen right leg to look more or less like the left and the pain to ease and sometimes, on good days, disappear long enough to temporarily forget any of that—the hospital visits, the blood thinners, the weekly blood draws—ever happened to me.

I could never take those pills again. When doctors told me five years later that the raging menstrual cycles the pills had once controlled had made me dangerously anemic, I had no choice but to go under the knife. This was my first surgery and one that would not leave scars. Not at first, anyway.

After midlife weight temporarily rounded out my belly, keloid tendrils, pink and unruly, blossomed out of my navel, surprising me. I tightened up my diet, lost most of the weight and the tendrils retreated but only a little. I asked a dermatologist to inject what remained with silicone to shrink the keloids and flatten them until they turned silvery-white.

They are fading, slowly, the scars. But sometimes, in full rebellion against ugliness, I contemplate getting a tattoo around my navel. Something elegant, floral and baroque.

*****

Flowers meant the world to Kahlo. Behind the walls of her Casa Azul studio in Mexico City, she grew all kinds: roses, marigolds, fuchsias, oleanders and more. Bougainvilleas were among her favorites. Very often, she created elaborate headpieces that, like her skirts, became a personal trademark. She did this not just because she loved flowers, bright colors and her Mexican heritage. But also because flowers represented the fertility a random accident had stolen from her. She wanted children; but she miscarried them or was forced to abort the embryos that could not grow inside a destroyed uterus. If she could not give birth, she would wear living things on her body, transforming grief into an occasion for the joy she refused to surrender to misfortune.

*****

Sometimes, my right leg still aches. When I am able to swim at our neighborhood pools or go long-distance bicycling or hiking, endorphins and the rush of moving blood through leg veins that have lost elasticity from clot damage make the pain disappear. These days I feel the ache more because I cannot swim, cannot sweat too hard from bicycling and hiking. Not yet, anyway, not with an upper body still tender from surgery.

Looking into a mirror, I see my silhouette is slimmer now, almost adolescent, as though the weight of adult womanhood has been lifted from me along with the cancer. There’s nothing maternal in those breasts. No roundness, no softness. Now they pair well with the empty space between my ovaries, created by the surgeon who put scar-flowers in my navel. When I am cleared to don my neon-colored sports clothes to swim and bike and hike and sweat again, I will feel a new lightness. Not quite a bird, I will glide through my days with fewer of the things that marked my body—my beautiful, imperfect body—as female.

*****

A failed bone graft surgery meant to correct spine issues caused gangrene to settled in Kahlo’s shorter, much-weakened right leg. Doctors amputated it and Kahlo wore a prosthetic leg she dressed in an embroidered red boot she designed herself. Kahlo died of a morphine overdose six months after this last surgery. But not before she made a pen-and-ink sketch of that lost leg and signed the image, not with her name, but with words every bit as defiant as her red boot.

“Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar - Feet, why would I want them when I have wings to fly.”

Sketch (1953)

A View from the Edge

Simply put, cancer is chaos.

There’s the havoc it wreaks in the days and weeks after diagnosis as your oncologists—because now you have to work with specialists rather than a PCP—scramble to get a full picture of what you have and what needs to be done. Then there’s the loss of control you feel as you watch your calendar fill up with appointments for difficult conversations, more examinations (some of them damned uncomfortable) and more tests. Get through that and the shock, the outrage and despair and one day, quite suddenly, you’ll surrender out of sheer exhaustion. And in that surrender you begin to accept—uneasily—that you’ve moved from the upheaval of ground zero to the relative quiet of the edge where you can observe. Because until that nasty inconvenience in your body is removed, your focus must be on fighting the disease and not yourself.

Some days will pass more easily than others. That’s the way of all journeys, though, including this strange one your disease has compelled you to take. There are days that feel like a slip-and-slide; there are others that feel like a forced march. Gradually the fear lessens when it becomes clear that the cancer in your body is slow-growing, low-grade and contained. But there’s the fear you get from others when you tell them what you have, which makes you mindful of how you speak about your condition if you speak about it at all. You realize it’s the randomness of the disease that frightens them the way it frightened you.

But there’s more to it than that. No matter how mainstream cancer and cancer-awareness have become, it’s still a disease that triggers primal—even irrational—responses in people you know. You, and in particular, what is in your body, represent the mortality they refuse believe is coming for them. Not me. Never me. You can’t really blame them because once you were just as immersed in and blinded by the mundane dramas of your own life. Still, it’s hard when those people, who know your diagnosis quietly dismiss themselves from your life as if what you have is something they could catch like some new strain of COVID.

Living things die and are reborn, microscopically and every day, through cellular death and regeneration. With cancer, that process gets disrupted when the DNA commands that regulate cellular activity becomes unintelligible to a cell. This happens when genetic codes stored inside the DNA helix develop defects, as can happen when (for example) those codes get exposed to toxic levels of substances like nicotine, pesticides and hormones. By the time cancer develops, the cells carrying the disease have gone rogue. Rather than move through the normal process of maturation and death, “outlaw” cells mutate and overproduce themselves. And do what cancers do best: spread, blindly, randomly.

Looking at your own diagnosis, you see that the complications don’t stop with DNA malfunction. The tumor in your body, at just 8 millimeters, is actually comprised of two cancers. One, a ductal carcinoma in situ, is a pre-cancer; the other, an invasive carcinoma, is newly-formed enough that it is still be confined to one location. This is one of the many reasons your disease is so frightening, though the doctor tells you that your cancer will only require a short course of radiation after it has been removed. Part of a tumor may respond to one treatment while another part may not respond at all and require other forms of therapy.

You begin to understand the war metaphors associated with your disease. You don’t simply have it like you have the flu; you battle it. Cancer is the enemy: wily, unrelenting, unpredictable. In stealth it gathers strength then emerges out of nowhere, with the terrifying ability to replicate and mutate and the power to not only ravage but completely annihilate entire systems. In this war, you and your doctors are soldiers. But there’s no equality here. They are the generals who give the orders while you, the patient, are the butt-kicked boot camp private masquerading as the down-for-anything kick-ass warrior.

Still, your oncologists are encouraging. You’re lucky, you know. Very lucky. One in particular, the surgeon who will cut the tiny cancer cluster out of your body, called the tumor well-behaved. That almost sounds affectionate, like something you might say about a cat or a dog, though you know better than to call your disease a pet. It’s far too destructive for that, enough so that you resist the temptation to name it. Instead you think of it as a slow and patient thing that you’ve carried with you like a secret and that you now purge like darkness for light.

Sisterhood of the Titanium Breast Clip

I am a marked woman. Inside my right breast is a titanium clip the size of a sesame seed that doctors deposited after a recent biopsy. It’s there to show doctors what area was tested after a mammogram came back showing a tiny speck that shouldn’t have been there. But I like to think of it as what links me to the many other women—and we are legion—who have had to go through the same procedure.

My body dislikes the clip. I am sensitive enough to feel something foreign and inorganic is there, taking up space, irritating soft tissue and causing phantom pain all around the breast and even into my armpit. And because it’s close to the surface, my fingertips can just detect it. But one day soon that clip will be removed along with the abnormality and the strange itchiness I feel will cease.

Then I will join another group of women who identify themselves with banners, badges, t-shirts and ribbons done in a color I detest almost as much as the clip. It’s one that reminds me of the impossibly proportioned Barbie and her disease-immune, nipple-free hard plastic breast cones rather than the power of collective female strength. Contrarian to the core, I am and will always be the big-boned blue-green girl, but one grateful to join forces with that sisterhood regardless of how it identifies itself.

The diagnosis I received that gained me entry into that group is one I never expected. I am a vegetarian who exercises regularly, doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and goes to bed early as a monk. I’m prone to stress, but even that is something I constantly work to mitigate on a daily basis with meditation, occasional yoga and very physical activities like swimming, biking or hiking. Indeed, there’s no history of any other such diagnosis in my family: I am the unicorn.

What I do know I’ve always had—an eternal issue with estrogen dominance—is perhaps what caused the abnormality. Too much estrogen has caused other conditions, like the severe endometriosis that plagued me through most of my reproductive years. But I don’t think too much about that these days. A fellow sister of the Barbiehood warned me to not go tearing down rabbit holes for answers I’d never find. What I have can happen randomly. Which is part of why the condition in general causes so much fear. Unless there is a definite genetic connection—and in my case there was not— there will never be complete certainty why abnormalities happen, especially in otherwise healthy people.

There’s one small speculation I do allow myself. if I had not been as careful as I am, had not avoided processed foods and drinks, had not rid my diet of excess sugar a year-and-a-half ago—would the tiny bloom doctors saw on my mammograms have turned into something more insidious than the tiny in situ thing that it is? My suspicion is yes: the sugar I love but no longer eat in quantities larger than a few teaspoonfuls a day and only in its most natural forms, produces fat cells…which produce estrogen.

I try not to speculate. It’s much easier to just work on preparing my body for the journey ahead. Fortunately, there won’t be too many lifestyle changes I’ll have to make apart from those that are necessary for treatment…which, much as I don’t want it to, will simply take up time: first to heal from surgery, then to rest from any prophylactic therapy I receive. But from here forward, I’ll not have the luxury of thinking that 2 + 2 always equals 4 just because it always has.

The body has its own rhythms, its own logic, its own reasons. It will do as it will, even when we believe we are giving it the best care. Besides which my particular body is older. The vitality and vigor are still there most of the time. But this vessel of mine has long passed the age when I can simply leave it to its own devices and expect all will function well and without occasional intervention. Many—if not most—women who actually get the disease are over 55 and/or post-menopausal. Check and check.

A clean family medical history had lulled me into complacency. I almost decided to skip the mammogram that caught the abnormality, especially since my blood panel had come back cleaner than it had in years. I hated all the tests and wanted to run screaming from the radiologist after the biopsy. I am very wary of doctors and the medical profession in general, both of which tend to treat symptoms (the more drugs the merrier) rather than try holistic approaches (which take more time) first.

Sometimes, though…sometimes they actually get it right. And sometimes, they actually do care. When I didn’t immediately respond to the request for a follow-up—the denial was intense, this can’t be real, surely there must be some mistake—the radiology lab tracked me down like a target. With phone calls first, then letters. There was wrongness in my mammogram, a wrongness that took me almost two months and a distance of an out-of-town trip to finally acknowledge.

They saved me, not from the dark bloom in my breast but from my own damn self with the hard medicine of truth I didn’t want to swallow. Early detection means less demanding and life-disruptive treatments. I was marked, yes, and by a tiny dot of the unthinkable. But I will be able to get back to normal sooner and with less worry of recurrence than might otherwise have been the case…and live to tell the tale.

Mile High & Away

Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, 1988

When I was still in college, a friend took me to Yosemite, a place he called "the cathedral.” He was an atheist so the phrase was an odd one for him to use. Yet seeing the park—the tall green conifers, cedars and sequoias, the rushing waterfalls and majestic granite cliffs—and walking some of its trails quickly made me realize why. The infinite and eternal had conspired to create Yosemite, endowing it with sacredness; and though I considered myself an atheist-leaning agnostic, the park still made me want to offer thanks at every turn to the forces that had created it, forces that I refused to equate with the God of organized religion for fear of tainting the cosmic immediacy of my experience.

My beliefs have not changed since then. I still go into nature to feel connected to something greater than myself and escape the chaos of the world. One recent getaway took me to Boulder, Colorado, my wishes were much simpler: what I wanted was to see snow. Not the accidental kind that sometimes falls in central Texas. But real high country snow that chilled your lungs, fogged your breath and made your muscles work and burn with every step you took.

View from the Bluebell-Baird Trail, Boulder, 2024

I’d never much cared for snow; yet the desire was powerful enough to upend plans for a spring trip. Maybe it was talk about an overheating planet with melting polar icecaps that compelled me to go in the dead of winter. Perhaps there would come a time when the kind of snow I wanted to see wouldn’t be there the way I wanted it: in soft heavy blankets that covered everything in glittering whiteness. Snow felt…precious. Necessary, somehow, even urgent.

I did not think to understand what else snow could actually mean: purification, a cleansing of soul and self: all things I knew at some level were as necessary as the physicality I craved to make up for hours of sitting cramped and colorless office cubicle. I wanted to go for long forest walks, breathe fresh air, test my strength against the bigness of the mountains, feel my body work against the resistance of snow.

I told friends that Colorado was my getaway, my escape. It was easier than telling them what it really represented: a spiritual retreat that I did not know would start with an act of grace. A snowstorm had settled over Denver by the time I left Austin: that was the risk you took flying into the Rockies during the winter. For almost two hours, my plane circled the city in the clear blue space above black storm clouds before air traffic control at Denver International cleared us to land. My Airbnb hosts, two hippie elders who’d found their way to Boulder from other places before finding each other in their late 60s, later remarked that I had been lucky. Hundreds of other flights had been cancelled or re-routed.

My hippie hosts lived in a home in the rural north of the city. They deliberately kept it unlocked because they were trusting and because they wanted nothing to do with the fear that characterized the locked-door lifestyles to which urbanites like me were accustomed. Their only demand was that I did not wear shoes inside their house. Designed and built to resemble a two-story ship, the house felt like a sanctuary and a metaphor. I was the voyager and Boulder the end and the beginning of a winter pilgrimage.

Off the Flatiron Vista Trail, Boulder, 2024

For the next three days, I did nothing else but wander the mesas, hills and mountains around the city in hiking boots I’d fitted with new steel ice cleats. My skull throbbed with an on-again, off-again altitude headache. When that dissipated, I found that higher elevation trails that took me into less oxygenated zones at times left me with the split-second feeling that my head had separated from a body I could not control.

No day was the same as the next. And though I’d determined in advance exactly which trails I would hike, nothing went to plan. The first day out, I took a Lyft to the to the easy-walking Marshall Mesa Trail and discovered the trailhead gate was locked. Not knowing that trail closures were routine after snowstorms, I asked the driver to take me to the nearby Flatiron Vista Trail. That too, was closed.

Frustrated, I hopped over the log fence behind the empty ranger’s shack and started hiking up a snow- and deer track-covered hill. The peace astonished me enough to dispense with the music headphones I used to help me forget the headache that raged in my skull. For a moment I imagined I’d come to the ends of the earth and that I was the last human alive. I only came back to reality at the Airbnb where I learned from Internet research—and with some satisfaction—that had my adventures on closed trails could have landed me in jail and left me one thousand dollars poorer.

My hosts delighted in the story of my law-breaking escapade and told me they would have gladly fed me during my days of incarceration. Nevertheless, they still suggested I try trails they knew were officially open. Try the one at Wonderland Lake—it’s just a mile from where we live. The next day I did exactly that. Though mostly flat, one section of the trail took hikers to increasingly higher elevations in lazy switchbacks that ended at a paragliding platform near the top. Snow still clung to the land, but only in patches. The higher I climbed, the browner and scrubbier the landscape became. My hosts had told me that this was the way of snow in the Rockies, that it vanished quickly in the warmth of sun that shown 300 days a year.

View from the Bluebell-Baird Trail, Boulder, 2024

The final day, I found myself chasing snow straight up shaded canyon trails that took me near the summits of Flatiron One/Two on Green Mountain. Everything was melting; I had barely begun to enjoy the snow I’d come to see. Some climbers I passed came dressed in parkas and winter leggings. But others, like the high school students who joked with each other about falling down icy slopes, had come in shorts and sneakers.

Cautiously tapping my way up icy trails and in ice cleats that sometimes gripped more mud than snow, I heard the students laugh. See you at the top, they said scrambling past me. Stopping, I remembered my collegiate self. The one who’d hiked Yosemite in old jeans and worn out tennis shoes with no tread and looked at safety warning signs posted on steep trails and also laughed. Listening to the chatter of the students, I smiled while my head lifted off my shoulders like a balloon. Snowstorms, snow melts, closures, headaches, changes of plan and all, my imperfect days of repose had been pure divinity.

Tempus Fugit

In April 2018, I made a video of myself reciting e. e. cummings’ “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond” that looks (and sounds) like the awkward offspring of a dramatic performance and an academic lecture. Yet for all the imperfections—or perhaps because of them—I refuse to delete it. And so it has accompanied me for the last six years, a capsule of time that contains one minute and forty-three seconds of my past.

Looking at it now, I want to say to my younger self for God’s sake, woman, get a comb and do something with that rat’s nest on your head. Not that she would have paid attention: the more punk-looking and unruly, the better. My hair was a statement of defiance, not just against gender norms that invalidated non-binary forms of self-presentation but also against the inconvenient encroachments of middle age. If e. e. cummings could flout conventions of form and grammar in his poetry, I could do the same with the elements of my own life.

I could get away with a hair rebellion because the silver wasn’t coming in as fast as it is now and the lines have begun to score my face had not yet surfaced on skin that was still as oily as a teenager’s. Hair that had barely begun to gray and occasional bouts of acne were enough to convince me that I could still pass for much younger than 52. That youthfulness is only heightened by the old hoodie I’m wearing and the place I’m standing: a tiny 600 square-foot studio apartment that I’d called home for five years.

Most of my neighbors were students or young people just starting their working lives. For a long time that didn’t bother me. I was a teacher and scholar, a faithful acolyte to the gods of literature who cared little for material things. But in much the same way I swing the camera to and fro as I speak, change had begun to swirl around my life. The college where I was teaching had announced plans to downsize the following fall; and adjuncts like me used to living on three-course contracts per term were no longer guaranteed even one class. If I didn’t leave, I would become as extinct as my adjunct professorship.

The imperative to evolve (or die) felt almost Darwinian. My income could not keep pace with the increasing cost of living in Austin. And the noisiness of both my neighbors and the heavily trafficked street nearby threatened my sanity. I could have ignored those signs; but the one thing I could not ignore was the older woman with dyed hair and shapeless bus driver clothes who moved into a studio cater-corner from mine.

I guessed she was sixty or more—unimaginably ancient to someone who half-believed she was still a student. Just before or after I made the video, I reported her to apartment managers for letting the dog she rarely walked use her patio as a bathroom. The poetry of my scholar’s solitude felt threatened, and not just by the odor that occasionally wafted through my kitchen window. I had words that helped me find solace in beauty; but the woman, who never received visitors, had nothing but a dog that pooped all over a (very public) veranda she never cleaned. What else had loneliness done to her?

Perhaps that’s part of the reason I made this video; as a memento mori to the life I knew I had to leave behind. Three months later, I was in a real-world job that forced me out of suspended animation. Another six months and I was in a one-bedroom apartment; two years after that, I was in a house of my own. I’d grown up, reluctantly. The new life that felt like an ending was really a beginning. Perhaps that why I come back to it now, as I move from one life I thought had finally taken root to another that will not (yet) allow me to discern its shape.

Past is prologue because everything about us, from our bodies to our lives, is cyclical. Our lives only appear to move in straight lines when the reality is that they move in cycles that incidentally exist on the continuum of time. Much as I did in my adjunct days and for the better part of one year, I have lived from contract to contract. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, living in the untethered way I thought I left behind with the students, the noise and the hapless patio-shitting dog. Yet oddly, it makes a kind of sense, especially when I look at things through the lens of cummings’ poem.

In completing another cycle of seasons, I have returned to the edge of a new spring, of the kind suggested by the flower imagery cummings uses. Something larger and greater has brought me here; and I understand that something even less than the speaker understands the beloved “you” he addresses in the poem. The speaker is in love and I am not. Yet both of us have become subject to the will (or force) of something greater than ourselves. With small hands, the speaker’s lover transforms him just as life “opens” me with its “hands,” changing me not because I wanted it to be that way. But because life exists in time which in its relentless movement forward, brings—or forces—change.

The speaker travels into the unknown with gladness while I travel into my unknown with doubt, of the kind that assailed me six years ago. Perhaps that is why I chose this poem then and why I return to it now. Like the video on my iPhone, it remains an unchanging comfort that eases passage into the unknown of “beyond” with, if not gladness, then something like acceptance.

Painted City

Tau Ceti (2018)

A decade ago, I arrived in Austin with the gratitude of a prison escapee. Dallas had almost crushed me with its fast-paced bigness and self-devouring culture of more, more, more. Low-rise and modest by comparison, Austin lured me southward with promises of an offbeat culture its musicians and artists had helped to create. The vibrant exuberance I found here intoxicated me like a drug. Sadly, that high didn’t last.

The tech boom that had preceded me by several years was quickly changing Austin. Within five years of my move to Central Texas, the musicians and artists who’d left their imprint on the city mostly fled. They had to: well-to-do legions who worked for the multi-billion dollar companies now in Austin had displaced them with money they didn’t have. The new downtown high rise buildings said it all: the sky’s the limit. What happened below—to the artists and people forced to find cheaper digs outside Austin, to the homeless people living on city benches—was another matter entirely.

Austintacious (1973)

But look closely and you’ll also see vestiges of the artist-friendly city Austin once was in that adorn everything from walls to utility boxes, softening the edges of what has since become a tech-inflected, quasi-Gilded Age wasteland. Most of the murals I first saw— like the wildly cheerful Austintacious—are located on the University of Texas campus. An early 1970s product of three daring UT art students, Austintacious went on to become the city’s first official mural, a whimsical snapshot of what now seems like a far simpler and more certain time. There’s no sign of tech anywhere; just quirky, fish-eyed renderings of everyday life in an eccentric Texas town.

Jeremiah the Innocent (1993)

Two blocks down from on a section of Guadalupe Street that students call “The Drag,” you’ll find another landmark mural, Jeremiah the Innocent. In it, a goggle-eyed frog looks out at passersby and offers a greeting: “Hi How Are You?” Austin musician Daniel Johnston painted this beloved image in 1993 to advertise his album of the same name. Even Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would wear a t-shirt emblazoned with the frog’s image as an homage to Johnston’s music. Building-mad developers spared the mural from the wrecking ball last year. But the message in that act of mercy was clear. No longer content to be and be weird like Jeremiah, Austin was becoming another beast entirely. One that thrived on self-commodification and would devour almost everything—including the musicians who made it into what it was—that stood in the way of its metamorphosis.

6th Street Austin mural (2012)

I thought about all of this the day I visited the now 12-year-old 6th Street Austin mural last December. Big and bold, it made an unequivocal statement of the city’s existence to all who drove past it on nearby I-35: 6th Street, Austin. Live Music Capital of the World. I posed in front of that wall—which marked the gateway to one of the city’s major tourist areas—chiding myself for every shot I took. My photos, and especially the ones I posted on social media, were free advertising for the city. Much as I hated to admit it, they were as much a part of the machine that helped to build the skyscrapers I detested as big tech.

Still, I snapped away. Weeks earlier, that same desire to interact with public art had drawn me to a 2nd Street parking structure and the rainbow glory of Tau Ceti. One hundred and three feet from bottom to top, this mural featured a single Isosceles triangle that, on days when the sun struck it in just the right way, seemed to glow from within. Named after a sun 12 light-years from earth, the mural reminded viewers about diversity; that white light contained every color that existed. But the mural spoke to me of other things, like the ambitions Austin had for itself. Once a laid-back college town, it now aimed to create a bigger, more exaggerated version of itself because this was Texas. And because it was a capital city that yearned for worldly attention.

The Beauty of Liberty and Equality (2020)

For all its hyper-capitalist aspirations, Austin is more complex than its painted surfaces suggest, especially where politics are concerned. A few blocks west of Tau Ceti is another mural, The Beauty of Liberty and Equality that celebrates, through the central image of a chain-breaking Wonder Woman, the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage. Its eleven-story high idealism and liberality are as inspiring as they are devastating. Just two years after it was painted in early 2020, Roe v. Wade would be overturned, allowing Texas to step in with a near-total ban on abortion. Whenever I see that mural, the irony bites hard enough to make me weep. Austin remains a proud blue speck in a sea of red. But the mural meant to uplift now seems—at best—like the reminder of another loss and—at worst—a cruel joke.

If Beauty came into existence at the start of a year that would also mark the first of the pandemic, the Be Well murals—which cover 10,000 square feet of the Lamar Street underpass wall—came about as a direct response to COVID crisis. A local arts organization, Raasin in the Sun, curated the artwork, which was produced by several muralists who worked on it from the end of 2020 into 2021. They had been among the lucky few selected not just for their talent and interest in mental health and wellness. But for how much the pandemic had impacted them.

Detail from Lamar Street Underpass wellness murals (2021)

Strolling next to the walls the day after New Year’s, I let the bright messages about the importance of self-care wash over me. No one had escaped COVID; not even people like me who had never gotten sick. The outbreak still took a psychological toll on survivors: we could only stand by, powerless to do more than watch the destruction around us. Peace came from the stillness of rest. And these artists seemed to suggest, from the act of creating beauty and sharing it with others.

The space for artists in a city obsessed with money had shrunk; I wondered how much smaller that space might become. I looked at swirling designs again, this time against the backdrop of buildings that continued to rise and multiply. There really wasn’t any certainty anymore. Perhaps that had been as much an optical illusion as the rainbow triangle of Tau Ceti. Maybe all we could really count on was contradiction. And the consolations of art to help us walk the ever-shifting line between the chaos change and everything else we had ever known.

Different Shades of Brain: High Sensitivity & Neurodivergence

No two brains, not even those belonging to identical twins, are alike. Every single one follows a unique path of development because no two sets of embodied, in-the-world experiences are ever the same. Which is why, in 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer coined the word “neurodivergent” to call attention to differences in how brains form.

Singer’s term does, however, beg another, more complicated question: where does a “normal” brain end and an atypical one begin? My own experiences with brain difference began about 11 or 12 years ago when a friend quietly admitted in a Twitter post that an online test for autism showed him to be “within range.” It would be the first and last time he would ever say this. Social awkwardness that included an aversion to hugging, emotional outbursts and an obsession with details others found inconsequential told the rest of the story, but only to those who observed carefully enough.

As hard as it increasingly became to be around him—because the symptoms of autism (or Asperger’s, its milder form) became more pronounced as my friend grew older and because he never sought help for it—there was always a part of me that understood him. He was bright, very bright; just different. Someone who couldn’t fit in. That quirkiness, along with the terrible isolation he suffered (and for which I always felt the profoundest sympathy), were enough to keep me around for a very long time.

It took me many years to understand that friendship and the powerful bond we shared. If he was the irritable child who grew into an even more irritable bear, I was the anxious child who cried all the time and jumped out of her skin whenever someone tried to tickle her. As an adult, I learned to control my emotions, and to a more limited extent, my physical reactions to touch. No one knew what I was thinking and no one, except to the few who got close enough to me, knew my physical sensitivities. My friend was mostly like that, too, though the grouchiness did seem to worsen as he got older.

But my story was more complicated than that. My friend told me he had always been the odd one out. I, however, had had a gift, up until kindergarten, for making friends with children I didn’t know at the local beach. They could be cruel to me; but in the end, they accepted me. My mother told me that after I started school, after things between her and my father ended, I turned inward and dove headlong into books. That sounded about right. Unlike my parents—and especially my mother—they didn’t yell, scream, hit or threaten. They let me alone to breathe and just be.

Introversion followed and stuck because it, like solitude, felt like natural states. What wouldn’t know until I went into therapy as an adult is that the sensitivities that made me crave solitude were perhaps not all inborn; that some can develop in the aftermath of psychological, physical and/or emotional traumas. And that regardless of whether sensitivities are inherent or created by environmental factors, they can be indicative of neurodivergence. The one difference being that where an inherent sensitivity may be genetically wired into the brain, one acquired through trauma can change the brain by changing how it functions.

There was one other thing I wouldn’t know until curiosity pushed me to explore the topic. Eight years years before the lexical emergence of “neurodivergent,” psychologist Elaine A. Aron was starting her now-landmark study on high sensitivity in humans. Her work eventually led her to theorize that 15 to 20% of the population shared the ability to process external and internal stimuli, including sound, light, pain and hunger, at deeper levels than those without that trait. And that the ability itself arose out of a combination of genetic and environmental factors.

I first heard the term Aron used to refer to these individuals around 2016 while talking to a librarian friend. At that point I was at the last college where I would ever teach and being an adjunct had begun to feel overwhelming. I could not understand why; and the librarian heard more than an earful of my rants. One day she offered an insight that initially made me balk. Have you ever thought that maybe you’re an HSP: a highly sensitive person? She grabbed a book from her office shelf and handed it to me. It’s is a real, documented thing. I’m that way myself.

The book, Making Work Work for the Highly Sensitive Person, made me understand everything about her that had seemed peripheral, from the quiet, uncluttered office to the door she sometimes kept closed. What she had was what many HSPs not only prefer but need: a space apart, dedicated alone time and the ability to limit interaction with others. Too much stimulation and like turtles, we duck into our shells. She also did work that allowed her to help others and feel appreciated for her efforts. I loved teaching; but being a disposable cog in the higher education machine had drained the job of meaning.

Labels made me wary. But everything the book said made sense. I wasn’t just shy or someone who preferred my own company; I had a brain that processed the world around me in ways the majority of brains did not. The more reading and research I did, the more everything made sense, including the closeness I had once felt to my Aspergian friend. Like autism, high sensitivity existed on a spectrum that measured levels of intensity associated with emotional and sensory processing issues. Where autism was different—and more complex—was in how it also involved cognitive issues that did not usually affect HSPs.

Later, I took Aron’s HSPScale test and scored 21 out of 27 points, with 14 being the threshold for HSP. The test has been criticized as too general to be accurate; but by that point, the results had broken down the last of my resistance. I wasn’t just the one who secretly cried at sad movies. I was also the one who rarely left the house without sunglasses to filter out the glare that sometimes gave me headaches and a headset to block out street noises that could scrape across my nerves like nails across a chalkboard. It was good to have names—HSP, neurodivergent—to describe a temperament and brain that I knew were different. And to recognize what an old friendship had been trying to tell me about who I really was.

Call of an Ancient Inland Sea

As a child I dreamed of sea lions. Sometimes I saw them sunning on rocks or swimming off the Southern California coast. I wanted to be one, I think. They were the closest thing to the mythical half-human, half-fish mermaids who dwelt in the depths of the ocean. Living landlocked as I do now, there was once a time when I would remember those dreams and feel like a stranded mermaid. Sometimes, I still do.

Two white noise machines in my house, one in my bedroom, the other in my living room, are set to the sound of crashing waves. And an empty aquarium I never bothered to disconnect after the last fish died continues to drip water back into the tank from the filter uptake system. I listen to my white noise machines and my aquarium and can’t forget the sea; I don’t want to. So when I stumbled across online images—green, peaceful and utterly ancient—of the Hamilton Pool Preserve last May, I took it as a sign. I was being summoned back to water in the middle of Texas.

Located an hour west of Austin, the pool was formed millennia ago when a limestone land dome covering an underground river collapsed. In wet years a 50-foot waterfall tumbles from the top of a stalactite-filled grotto and into the pool. But the heat—its endlessness over two years and more—has taken a toll: what remains is a shimmering fringe of droplets. The sound is still hypnotic despite the lack of visual drama; ghostly, even, like the fading drumbeat of an era passing out of existence.

As it happened, though, I would have to wait five months to see the place. Advance reservations were necessary since the park only admitted 30 to 35 people per twice-daily three-hour visiting periods and almost all available slots had been booked from June to October. The habitat surrounding the pool was fragile. In the years before restrictions, too many people had overrun the place and destroyed the vegetation. Things were better now and the park wanted to keep it that way.

A rocky half-mile trail took me into the small canyon. Once at the pool, I hesitated to take my boots off. The shore was hard and pebbly—torture for bare feet. The water was chilly: 68 degrees, if not less. My inner mermaid didn’t care but I did. Twenty minutes would pass before I could stop cursing the cold and let the mermaid kick out for a swim. Apart from a few other bathers, the place was empty. A slow-moving brigade of catfish patrolled the pool as if to remind us we were their guests. Tottering up the rocky beach, I saw shells, hundreds of them. A park ranger watching over the pool told me they came from freshwater mussels. There are fossils here, too. I bent down and found a small piece of limestone imprinted with what looked like the fin of an ancient fish. Though reluctant at first, the ranger let me keep it along with a small handful of shells.

Holding the fossil in my hand, I closed my eyes and saw a wide blue expanse of water. My Pacific. My beautiful Pacific. Then I remembered something someone had told me about Texas having once been submerged under a prehistoric ocean. My eyes flew open. Was that what I had seen in my mind’s eye? When I returned home that night, I learned that hundreds of millions of years ago, a large body of water called the Western Interior Seaway had covered Texas and most of the Midwest. Bounded by the emergent Rocky Mountain chain to the west and the Appalachians to the east, the seaway stretched south from the Arctic Sea to what would later become the Gulf of Mexico.

It didn’t matter what ocean I had seen. I’d been near water: and that water had worked the calming magic I didn’t know I’d needed. It had been a year of too much. Too much in the world, too much in my own life. Heading down another trail that followed a small creek that branched west from the pool to the Perdernales River, I stabbed my trekking poles hard into the earth and cursed the jagged stones that made me trip and lose my balance. Sometimes I surprised myself by the sharpness and the rage that seeped out. That too much—the wars, the heat, the chaos, the sheer immensity of human evil and stupidity—all of it had taken residence within and battered me.

Halfway to the river, I heard a rustling sound. A pile of dead juniper branches and oak leaves moved nearby. Suddenly a small armadillo came into view and blinked. He didn’t see me because armadillos have notoriously poor vision. But I have no doubt he could detect my scent because armadillos could smell just as well as dogs. For as long as hunger drove him; and he could care less that a human had caught him rooting around the underbrush for beetles, grubs and cockroaches.

With his silver armor and clawed feet, he looked like he belonged to the same prehistoric era which gave rise to the Western Interior Seaway. Yet his strangeness also made feel close to him. The armadillo may not have come from the ocean or know it the way I did. But like all armadillos, he could swim and hold his breath underwater. Even walk on the bottom of creeks and rivers if the occasion demanded it. He was solitary, too, and I understood that, just as I understood his need to burrow in quiet places. We were fellow aliens, the armadillo and I: he with his anteater-like nose and armored body and I with my two legs and mermaid dreams of the sea.

And then I realized it. A creature of the ocean, I’d also grown invisible armadillo claws that kept me digging, digging, digging, rooting for answers to satiate a weary restlessness. A smile spread across my face. In the greenness of a small forest growing at the bottom of an ancient sea, I had eased the existential aches that gnawed from within by feeding the anxious restlessness in my soul.

Helen Mirren & the Self-Loving Art of Swagger

I’m madly in love with Helen Mirren. it’s definitely not a lesbian thing; if it were, I’d be only too pleased to say so: my taste in females is fabulous, thank you very much. What I feel is more a woman-crush that unites us in a self-loving sisterhood of age, gender and body positivity.

At 78, Mirren is both an acting legend and role model for legions of admiring women like me. A former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she started her film career playing skin-baring vixens then moved into more significant—and more fully clothed—roles that included Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994) and both Elizabeths in the British TV mini-series Elizabeth I (2005) and the film The Queen (2006). All while never quite losing the habit of exposing—or these days, just outlining the still-enviable contours of—a body she once disliked for what she saw as its big-breasted short-leggedness.

I’m not exactly sure when I graduated into full-fledged fandom. My awareness of her began in adolescence with arthouse films like Caligula (1979), Excalibur (1981) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). All showed Mirren involved in highly stylized, often feral nude/sex scenes that I watched with breathless fascination and not a little fear. As I moved through the vagaries of adult life that ended my innocence (and sometimes my faith in justice), Mirren evolved as well, stepping away the sex object she’d been and toward the mission-driven woman she really was She took to television to play a female detective chief inspector combating crime and police force misogyny in Prime Suspect (1991-2006); then did voice-overs for movies and animated features while pursuing unlikely roles in action films like F9: The Fast Saga (2021) and superhero sagas like Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023).

What I do know is that just before I turned 50, Helen Mirren suddenly mattered. Unlike most female actors who, coming up against film industry sexism, tend to fade away after 40 or 50, she endured, taking on projects that seemed to go against the grain of who she was and succeeding. Self-reinvention clearly didn’t faze her; if anything it only added to her appeal, especially to ordinary midlife women like me facing similar challenges related to social and/or professional erasure. Because of our age, because of our experience, because of our changing bodies. Unwilling to be dismissed for her age or typecast as a stage actor, sexpot, film icon or anything else for that matter, she pushed—and crossed—boundaries instead. And in the process made herself a kind of moving target that refused to be held down or contained.

Best of all she looked good doing it. In 2008 a now-notorious paparazzi photograph of her in a red bikini began circulating in the media and online. The image showed a fit and trim sexagenarian woman who went on to win the 2011 Body of the Year award for women (then 36-year-old soccer star David Beckham took the honors for men). I was so impressed with the photo that I told a 50-something male friend about it.Without a shred of irony, he later admitted the picture had officially turned Helen Mirren into the GILF of his dreams and put her at the top of his fantasy date hit list.

More than a decade later, Helen Mirren is still challenging outdated ideas about women and aging. In a fall 2023 fashion runway appearance in Paris for L’Oréal, a white-haired, supremely self-confident Mirren toured the catwalk with women more than 50 years younger than she was. Glowing with the “swagger” that informs her views on beauty and life. It’s not about physical perfection or fitting into narrowly defined ideals of how women should look. It’s about how to move in the world with grace and self-appreciation.

That’s the lesson I love best from the many Helen Mirren has offered. Age isn’t some terrifying thing. Rather, it—or rather, the self-knowledge and calm it brings—is the prize gained from having survived the disorienting. world-shaking ups and downs of life. Young people believe in control, that everything progresses—or should progress—in a straight line and balk at every twist and turn. Older people know better. Control (of systems in which you live or the body into which you are born) is an illusion. The only power we have is the power to accept the things we cannot change—like my graying hair and the crow’s feet that grow deeper with every year that passes—and own who we are.

There’s a two-minute video on YouTube called “Lessons in Worth” encapsulates everything the actress stands for. Her face beautifully lined beneath impeccable but not overdone make-up, Mirren speaks on behalf of L’Oréal, a company that has used the phrase “because I’m worth it” to influence women to buy their products for fifty years. She is of the system that manipulates women and from which she has also benefited. Yet she also manages to stand outside it through the authenticity that underlies the spokeswoman-persona she adopts.

Blue eyes blazing, she remembers the rage she felt in her youth at learning that women who believed they had value beyond youth or sexuality were “mad or bad or sad or all of those things put together.” She is too poised to elaborate on the particular challenges she has faced so she lets the authenticity speak for her. Buy L’Oreal if you like, she seems to say in the silent undercurrent that connects her to the viewer. But even if you don’t you’re still worth it no matter who you are and no matter the choices you make.

Rockin' the Wall

A mathematician I knew used to scare his long-suffering girlfriend half to death whenever he announced was going rock climbing. Everything, he told her, was in preparation for Aconcagua. The man, who often climbed barefoot, didn’t think small. Straddling the border between Argentina and Chile, the mathematician's 22,837-foot mountain dream is the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most challenging climbs in the world.

I remembered that man—and the girlfriend who married him despite her misgivings—when I found my way to pro climber Alex Honnold’s 2018 book, Alone on the Wall. He never finished the civil engineering degree he started at Berkeley because by the time he turned 19, rock climbing had become his full-time job. I must admit the lifestyle he described—dirtbagging it all around California and the West in a Ford Econoline E-150 van in search of the next great climb—sounded as über-cool as you could possibly get.

Honnold’s specialty is free-soloing, a form of climbing that uses no ropes, helmets or other protective gear except for hand chalk and the climbing shoes my mathematician friend rarely wore. It’s a stripped down extreme sport that requires both upper and lower body strength, flexibility, focus and endurance. A good dose of the crazy that helped Honnold scale the 3,000-foot vertical face of Yosemite’s El Capitan doesn’t hurt either. Bouldering, the more suburban version of free-soloing, involves scaling 15-25-foot walls that can be either manmade or naturally occurring. If you do it indoors, the walls will be set at different angles to the ground and outfitted with a variety of colorful toe and finger holds—which have their own unique names—meant to simulate the kind found on real rocks. Crash pads cushion climbers when they're ready to drop back to earth.

His name didn't immediately come to mind when I decided to go Saturday bouldering with a friend. After picking up a pair of soft-soled climbing shoes at the front desk, a gym monitor explained that each climb on the bright yellow walls around us had been graded using an 8-level animal system. The easiest climbs were tagged with sloth faces. Successively harder ones were marked with panda, koala, raccoon, squirrel, goat, bear or chimpanzee faces. The less appealing or "cute" the animal, the more difficult the climb. Let your arms hang slack at each hand hold and don’t try the bear or chimpanzee climbs just yet, our guide said with a wink.

Tess, a former novice-level trapeze aerialist, lost no time hopping up onto a koala climb staked out on a wall that bent in at a slightly acute angle. Soft, fuzzy and easy, I thought, eagerly awaiting my chance to climb to the top. Tess started to struggle halfway up and dropped to the cushion. Clinging to the hand grips with tensed arms that could not hold my body weight, I didn’t get past the first set of wall holds. Soft and fuzzy my ass. I tried again trying to keep my arms loose as our guide had suggested but fell back onto the crash pad where I let loose a torrent of expletives and rubbed at the sudden soreness in my upper arms. Tess gave me a mocking look. Remember there are children are here. Scowling, I sucked the curses under my breath then tried a panda climb that only infuriated me more. The children Tess had cautioned me about were shimmying up similar climbs powered only by giggles and instinct.

We resigned ourselves to seeking out sloth climbs which were more straightforward, almost like climbing a 90-degree ladder. I grinned and hooted like a maniac as soon as I reached the top. I dropped to the crash pad and Tess scrambled up even more quickly and took the accomplishment in the measured stride I had not. Reveling in the feeling of accomplishment, we went in search of other climbs.

An ungraded wall containing a chaotic assortment of climbing holds—called jugs if they offered a secure handhold, pinches if they offered shallow finger holds and crimps if they could only be used for fingertip gripping -- caught our attention. Even the most advanced climbers doing bear and monkey climbs seemed unwilling to try it. I quickly understood why: here there was no route to follow to the top. You decided which holds to use and when.

The old chess player in me smiled as I examined the wall more closely. Bouldering was physical but it was also about strategy. Wall angles tested physical strength while the placement of foot and handholds tested both flexibility and problem-solving skills. If I put my foot on one climbing hold, where (and what) would I need to grab to steady and/or reorient my body for the next step up? And would that step up put me in position to locate another hand—or finger—hold to continue up a route?

We ended our visit by trying another route marked out in giant round climbing holds—called slopers—that had rough surfaces but no edges to grip. This one was graded panda; but as far as my firend and I were concerned, it could have been graded bear or monkey. We turned in our shoes and the young man who had been our guide smiled at our frustration. That route had vexed many others as well. The secret, he said, was to wrap open palms on each sloper and hug the wall with the whole body. I raised my eyebrows. And you call that a panda climb? Tess just laughed.

As we picked up our gym bags and left for the day, something Alex Honnold said about his early climbing experiences surfaced from memory. His skills had been good but unremarkable; what transformed him had been grit, determination, an unadulterated love of the sport and years of practice. Still, I could not stop imagining what it might be like to suddenly be gifted with his Spiderman-like talents. If only I could find Peter Parker’s radioactive spider and get it to bite me, too…

Portland NXNW

There’d been no plan to return to the West Coast after my March trip to Washington. Then an Oregon friend—and fellow grad school hell survivor—posed a question that changed everything: When are you coming to Portland? Margaret had seen the enthusiastic Facebook commentaries I’d posted about Seattle and wanted to make conversation. Instead her question started a chain reaction. The flight over the trees and mountains of Washington, the days in Seattle spent breathing saltiness into a body starved of sea air had made me fall in love with the Pacific Northwest. Now I wanted to go back.

I’m thinking of flying up in August, I told Margaret the next day. Are you game? She was and without thinking twice I swooped in on a ticket and bought it. In the aftermath all I could say was that what I did felt right. That one act of spontaneity, it turned out, would end up saving a wild beast of summer that started with a sudden job loss followed by an equally sudden-—and disorienting—recovery. Then evolved into a record-breaking scorch-fest for Texas and for the great phalanx of states bordering it to the north, east and west.

Portland itself had been burning its own hole on my travel radar for years. Immersing myself in the plaid-surreal world of Portlandia during my one official week of unemployment only stoked the fire. The satiric depictions of tattooed tribalism and vegan radical feminist anti-vivisectionist eco-progressivism made me want to stand up and cheer. So much so that I often found myself singing lines from the show’s defining song loudly enough that anyone nearby—on the bus, in the street, at the office—would flash me questioning looks: “The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland/[Where] the tattoo ink never runs dry/Sleep ‘til eleven, you’ll be in heaven/The dream is alive in Portland/The dream is alive…”

My dreams were more immediate, like basking in cooler weather and hunkering down in a gem of an Airbnb near the freak preserve of southeast Portland. But triple-digit heat followed me from Austin while financial uncertainty pushed me to accept Margaret’s offer to stay with her in the upscale orderliness of nearby Beaverton. I’d miss communing with the funk and weirdness I craved; but I would never regret saying yes to my friend. The universe had spoken through Margaret and job loss or not, this was my time to visit.

When I arrived, the city was in partial shut-down; even the Max train I took to meet Margaret had given up taking fares for the day. It was a state of affairs I found disturbing but that would have made real heat-inured Texans roll their eyes. That didn’t stop me from wanting to do a bicycle tour of downtown mural art until my friend told me that overheated concrete would leave us sunburned and senseless. Instead she suggested we seek refuge by the water. Armed with at least six different varieties of sun-screen between us, we made our way to Sand Island on the edge of the Columbia River the following morning.

Too much sun had caused water levels to plummet. Margaret and I sloshed in ankle-deep water for more than ten minutes before finding a place deep enough for us to float. My friend shook her head. I’ve never seen the levels this low. Then she relaxed into the river. But cold water squeamishness, coupled with my inability to trust the plastic cell phone security pouch strapped around my waist, made me swear up a storm. 

Meanwhile Margaret cackled. Her own cell phone stashed in the pouch she wore around her neck, she gently began instructing me in the art of foolproof packing. Test it for yourself, she said, dipping her bag and then mine in the water. Grumbling, I finally stopped struggling and forced myself to believe in the protective power of plastic. Her job done, she stretched out in bliss while I launched into a fast-moving breast stroke. My friend howled in righteous protest the further I got from her. What about the current? she yelled. Still she followed me while I dodged the occasional jet-ski and power boat and wondered how I might avoid encounters with the occasional river barges that also used the waterway. 

The cloudless blue sky, the cool water, the warm air, the gentle waves had all lulled me into a false sense of security; so had the rhythmic pulsing of my arms and legs. I wasn’t thinking and didn’t want to. Not then, as Margaret and I crossed the river to the rocky, unpopulated shores of Washington state. And not when we found ourselves making no headway mid-way through the swim back. And not even when Margaret noted we had been pushed more than half a mile west of where we had started and had passed the orange-flagged buoy that marked the end of the river bathing safety zone.

If I was the engine that drove our swim across the Columbia, Margaret was the emergency brake. The one with enough survival sense—hard-wired into her by persecution-wary Ashkenazi Jewish forbears—to practice the vigilance I would not. Throwing one pained hand out of the water, she flagged down a passing speedboat. Later on she’d say the men on the boat would not have stopped at all if not for her pleas to dredge us out of the water and take us back to Sand Island.

Back on the beach, Margaret chastised me soundly, only to join me in lunatic gallows laughter that lasted for the next several hours. We’d lived a magnificent—and magnificently reckless—story. Native Portlanders who heard our story bugged their eyes in disbelief. Nobody does that. Ever. More than likely I wouldn’t have either if I had known about the 4 and 5 mile-an-hour, slow-but-deadly currents under the placid surface of the water. Currents which had swept unwary bathers, swimmers and kayakers to watery graves in the Pacific.

None of that bothered me. Not that day, or the next, which I spent on a brief tour of downtown with another friend. But like the current, the foolhardiness of what Margaret and I had done silently ran through me, shaking loose primordial fears of the unknown. I wouldn’t know that, though, until the day my friend took us on an 11 1/2-mile hike through Silver Falls State Park. There were waterfalls we had to see: ten total with nine active ones, all of which—as we were to find out—had lost water to the heat just as the Columbia had.

The changes in plan only continued. We were supposed to have left in the morning but started for park in the early afternoon. Ever the sturdy sherpa, Margaret reassured me that she knew her way around. The trail was 9 miles, she insisted. Not counting the occasional double-backs we had to do to ensure we were on the right path. The trip tested my patience and stamina and when, about one hour away from the main gate, we hiked along a darkened forest path, my ability to remain calm. I’ve done this many times before; we’re safe.

Giant Douglas firs and cedars loomed over us. in the dark; the night felt oppressive, smothering. Bogeymen lurked everywhere, ready to spring on two female hikers following the glow of the headlamp strapped on Margaret’s forehead. A headlamp I realized with dismay that she had almost forgotten to take. Exhaustion and electrolyte depletion had reduced my even hiker’s stride to a shambling gait. Roles had reversed and now I huffed and growled like a cornered bear. The woman who had nonchalantly dodged speed boats and jet skis while her friend fretted and wailed was wrestling with fear while the friend moved with Zen-like trust. I couldn’t stand it; I wanted to give up. But I kept going, knowing that if Margaret, a woman with fibromyalgia, could manage a two-plus mile open water swim that had nearly killed us and then an even longer hike without complaint, so could I.

It was only on the way back to Beaverton, my body exhausted and in pain, my ears shrinking from the tango music Margaret needed to stay awake while driving that I realized it. Everything about this trip had been about living in the moment, knowing everything was not only changing, but surging with volatility. I’d come with Portlandia-inflected visions of prowling southeast Portland And watching, with the wry smugness of a Gen X elder, millennial hipsters ironize everything from the fashions to the values of a mid-twentieth century steeped in its own certainty. Then I’d met with a less scripted reality far more challenging—and satisfying for what it showed me—than anything I could have ever imagined.

Let’s do this again sometime, I mumbled as I fell asleep.

I, Not Robot

Essay published in Poetry Flash, April 2024

When ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, I lifted one world-weary eyebrow then returned to the business of my life. This was, after all, the post-human age; AI and robots formed the backbone of an emergent reality of the kind visionary twentieth century science fiction writers Isaac Asimov—and predecessors like Victorian novelist Samuel Butler—had been exploring for 150 years. Surprise, like resistance to Borg assimilation on Star Trek, was futile.

 It took me exactly two months after that to set up an account and another few weeks after that to secure a spot on OpenAI’s exuberantly overcrowded platform. The catalyst had been a ChatGPT anecdote my novelist friend Sara had posted on her Facebook page. For one hour, she had fed the chatbot a series of random creative tasks:. Write a descriptive paragraph about stepping on toes. Write a love sonnet about pickles. Write a manifesto against green beans. Sara then asked for a poem that referenced everything the bot had produced for her. She shared the result along with this bemused comment: What a totally weird time this is to be a human being.

I’d indulged in enough online doom-scrolling to understand that human civilization was officially under siege. Robots and other AI were taking over the planet and as they did, the flesh-and-bone beings who created them would lose the capacity to think and do for themselves and become even more enslaved to electronics than they already were. Humanity was becoming the obsolete dream of another age. But before ChatGPT, the AI apocalypse was still far enough away that I could still manage to live in perfect harmony with my computer, the devices that controlled my home heating and cooling system and the smart home apps that monitored everything from pipe leaks to when and how often my front door and garage opened and closed. Now the jig was up. AI had finally infiltrated the world of words I inhabited as a writer.

For days afterward, I felt the mortifying weight of my own post-humanness. I compose on computer but still do idea-sprawls on legal pads, usually with my favorite fountain pen in hand. In its early stages of trial and error, writing is an act that takes time: hours, days, months, and sometimes, years. Perhaps this need for pen and paper is a generational vestige. I was still writing by hand then using a self-correcting Smith Corona to type out final copies of class essays—and the occasional poem I squirreled away at the bottom of my desk drawer—in college. Of necessity, I learned how to write on a box-style Macintosh my first semester of graduate school. But it would be another semester before I stopped treating my computer like my old Smith-Corona and more like the ferociously efficient word processor it was.

I took my first turn on ChatGPT three months later, on a cold February evening. Cracking my knuckles, I typed my first command. Write a two-sentence summary of War and Peace. The cursor blinked once then race across my computer screen to return a textbook perfect reply: War and Peace is a historical fiction novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The book explores the lives of five aristocratic families in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. I half-smiled. Good boy, girl, whatever? You get an A. The bot had access to the vast knowledge bases available online; my brain and everything—every book, lesson and webpage—had absorbed into it more than fifty years of living felt incomparably small.

I grew bolder. My fingers tripping across the keyboard, I decided to test ChatGPT’s design limits. Do you believe AI has a soul? This time, the cursor blinked twice before responding: As an artificial intelligence model, I do not have the ability to believe or have opinions, as these are characteristics of human consciousness. I thought about the Siri AI assistant on my iPhone. That, at least, could answer the sarcasm underlying my inquiries—tell me a bedtime story, please—with pre-programmed snark. In the great green dimension, there was an iPhone and a red balloon… So far, ChatGPT showed no signs of either imagination or a sense of humor.

Amused, I set the next task—a human experience-based question. Write a descriptive essay about sex. The bot did not indulge me. I apologize, but as an AI language model, I cannot generate inappropriate or explicit content. It is important to maintain a professional and respectful conversation. I tried again, this time with similar question that didn’t verge on the libidinous and would allow it to demonstrate its knowledge of literary form. Write an Imagist poem about love. The bot speedily obliged:

Love, a bud blooming in early Spring,

Fresh and fragile on a gentle breeze,

Opening slowly as the birds sing,

Tender petals unfurl with ease.

Dew drops glisten in the morning light,

As love's fragrance fills the air.

A kaleidoscope of colors bright,

As two hearts beat without a care…

The bot had maintained the clarity and simplicity demanded of Imagist language. At the same time, the actual images and metaphors used lacked idiosyncratic uniqueness while the end-rhymed lines demonstrated total insensibility to the rhythmic possibilities of free verse. I snickered; for now at least, we lumbering humans still had the upper hand when it came to craft and artistry. But I could also not deny that ChatGPT had also managed to produce a complete, multi-line poem in under five seconds—far more than I or any other human could do in the same amount of time.

Still determined to see how far I could push this machine, I entered one final command. Write about love & sex with humor and in verse. This one, I hoped, would bypass the propriety restrictions embedded into ChatGPT coding. Two blinks later the cursor leapt into action:

Love and sex, they go hand in hand,

Like peanut butter and jelly on bread.

Some say love is blind, but I disagree,

It's more like love is horny, can't you see?

One moment you're whispering sweet nothings,

The next thing you know, you're bumping and grinding.

Sometimes things get crazy, and that's okay,

Just make sure you don't end up in a Fifty Shades of Grey….

Nonplussed, I laughed. Perhaps that was the attitude I needed to take towards this new technology. As much as it could entertain and amuse, it was—for now, anyway—only just an interfacing tool. A disembodied electronic mind able to summon information from the vastness of the Internet and reorganize according to the whims of its human users. My own mind was embodied; and because of it, able to filter organic information/experiences unavailable to ChatGPT. I may have been the turtle to the chatbot’s hare but I could enjoy my peanut butter and jelly on bread in ways it would never understand.

Signing out of my OpenAI account, a memory from years ago surfaced, a memory of another writer, Alice Walker, speaking to an audience in Oakland about her work as a writer. It was 1995 or maybe 1996; my mind is an imperfect, memory-muddling machine. Of the many things she said that night, about her books, her activism, her politics, one point stayed with me. She too, preferred to write by hand. But her reasons were far more poetic than mine. From the heart straight down to the pen, she said.

Stripper Pole Tango

Recently I renewed my membership with AARP, an organization the ever-cheeky humorist Lori Notaro has called a “death cult.” Then I turned right around and signed up for my first stripper pole class. This wasn’t some sex-for-death Freudian reflex; I was simply indulging my own blessed contrariness. AARP suggested respectability, the dignity of social elderhood. But pole dancing suggested the louche and provocative, both of which were pure catnip to my f*you Gen X sensibilities. What I was doing was offering the world a joyfully defiant proclamation that it was never too late to try something outrageous. Even—and especially—if it seemed out of character.

I looked to Gloria Steinem—her spirited ballsiness—for inspiration. In the spring of 1963, the feminist icon donned a Bunny costume to work undercover at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club for two weeks. She did it to understand Bunny culture and expose the dark side of what women endured for poor pay: invasive “required” blood tests and gynecological exams; aching feet and bodies trapped in tight costumes; drunk and leering male patrons, a tiny fraction of whom Steinem recalled looked at Bunnies “as if [they] might [actually] be human beings.”

Steinem was just 29 when she trussed up Bunny-style in the name of investigative journalism. My ends were nowhere near as noble. I was taking up stripper poling at nearly twice her age in the name of curiosity and fitness. I needed to tone a body that had become gravity’s sad plaything with more vigorous exercise than I had been able to manage on my own. Not that I knew what pole dancing could do when I realized this. That would take the serendipity of a dinner question posed to my adventurous late thirty-something friend Anjoli about a Facebook post of her in a leopard-print leotard, thighs clamped midway up a stripper pole, one arm thrown back exuberantly behind her head.

Gravity wasn’t entirely to blame; neither was age. At least some of the sag had come from having lost 25 pounds and succumbing to the lure of a sedentary life. Swimming two to three miles a week and doing daily dumbbell lifts. That was helping. But a trip to Portland was coming, a trip that would include treks all around Mt. St. Helens and Rooster Rock Park. None of the trails I wanted to hike were marked as less than moderate in difficulty. And unless I took my fitness more seriously, those trails would more than likely defeat me.

Brazenly energized, I did an online search for a place that offered pole dancing near me and landed on Brass Ovaries. It was a  gym owned and operated by women that also offered classes in twerking and high-heeled cardio to anyone, male, female or non-binary. That openness stopped me from passing righteous feminist judgement. This was a space to work out in creatively sexy ways. That the activities incorporated elements (women’s heels) and movements (female butt thrusting) fetishized by patriarchal culture was so much beside the point as to render it moot. No Playboy Club, the gym made it clear on its website that it offered safe-space protection to anyone in crisis. When I got there, I also saw that the gym also shielded student pole dancers in the front room practice area from the voyeuristic gaze of passersby with a heavy turquoise curtain.

Anjoli told me to wear shorts or a bathing suit. The more skin I could expose, the better my body’s ability to grip the pole that would be my silent dance partner. Dressed grunge-refugee style in a Nirvana t-shirt and Levi cut-offs, I took the bus to a sketchy part of northeast Austin and walked through an area full of neighborhood watch signs. The ambience was absolutely perfect for the cool, underground thing I was about to do. So was the teacher who introduced me to some basic Pole I moves. With dark hair that cascaded halfway down her back, she was a heavily tatted former stripper who had also studied everything from ballet to hip-hop dance. Eyeing us beginners—some of whom had made the mistake of wearing leggings—she repeated Anjoli’s advice. It’s OK to strip down: it’s all about skin contact with the pole. She smiled and stepped out of her spandex exercise pants. The more you do this, the less you’ll wear.

The teacher took us through warmup moves and vigorous yoga stretches that not only revealed just how stiff I had become but made me sweat so much my hands kept sliding down the pole. Even the liquid chalk she’d given us couldn’t absorb the moisture pouring out of me. Tossing her hair, she showed us beginner moves on the pole: the skater, move that forced us to use upper body strength to balance vertically, one leg on the pole, the other bent back in the air, a foot above the ground. The crucifix, a sitting move that forced us to use inner thigh muscles to “sit” on the pole hands arms extended at either side. And the one and only move I could do: a trust fall that spiraled my body down to the floor. I struggled, cursing not just at my weak arm and core muscles. But at the luck of practicing behind a trim woman thin as poles we worked and young enough to remind me that I was the oldest person in the room. Old enough, in fact, to be the class mother.

I went home sore and exhausted, but strangely exhilarated. Done well, stripper poling could be a glorious display of athleticism and camp. But the teacher warned us it might be a while before we could go back and she was right. Recovery took almost a week. My wrist, arm and shoulder muscles ached from all the grabbing and hanging while painful bruises appeared on my calves. Not that I could really use any part of my leg to do much anyway: I’d also crunched my sputtering knees and overstretched the inner thigh muscles enough that on a good day, I could just manage a passable shuffle. But out of the steaming hot mess my body had temporarily become, a steely—if slightly masochistic—resolve emerged. I would master that damn pole if it was the last thing I ever did.

Anjoli told me that the next class would be better. And when I went back three weeks later, it was. But by then I had also intensified my regular swimming/weight-lifting regimen. This time, I could sit on the pole, do more tango twists and dips around it. And even, on occasion, earn clapping accolades from my classmates, all while keeping my innards relatively intact. Dressed in a high-cut Jane Fonda leotard and surrounded by women stripped down to bras and booty shorts, I felt less like an object-in-training and more like a female athlete from ancient Sparta who trained unselfconsciously in thigh-exposing tunics. Or nothing but her own skin. Snaking our bodies around steel poles to the beat of bump-heavy music, we were in it for the sweat and the self-expression. I’d been all wrong about Gloria Steinem. Her courage, like ours, came not from ballsiness but from difference. From what the women in that room might have called ovaries made of brass.

Bat City Blues

I booked a boat tour to see the Congress Avenue Bridge bats in April because I’m a planner. But when it comes to Texas weather forecasts, you plan and God laughs. Spring could mean blue skies, soaring temperatures, high winds, storms and hail, sometimes all in a single day. So I kept an eye on my iPhone weather app. A week before boarding, the sun icons all disappeared under a row of gray thunderclouds and I began to worry. The bats wouldn’t come out from under bridge unless it was totally dry.

The day of the tour, I carried my umbrella like a talisman to Lady Bird Lake, muttering expletives like spells to bring back the sun. Two hours before the bats’ emergence the skies cleared. The sudden clearing felt frankly supernatural, a little like the bats themselves. Known as Mexican free-tails, they fly north from cave roosts in Mexico and Central America. It’s only the females who migrate, though: no bigger than two thumbs joined side by side, the bats arrive pregnant with one pup each. The free-tails form one glorious, chattering girl’s-only club until they give birth. After that the colony doubles in size from 750,000 to 1.5 million and includes a minority population of juvenile males.

Free-tail migration existed long before there was ever a Texas. And the bats didn’t gather in Austin in such concentrated numbers until after the Congress Avenue Bridge was renovated in 1980. At that time, engineers installed a deck support system scored by a series of horizontal slits. The bats discovered the darkness and safety the slits provided and their numbers exploded. They now constitute the world’s largest urban bat colony, though I prefer the term “bat cauldron.” It’s nothing short of uncanny that female bats found a home under a bridge that also happens to be named after Anne Richards, the only woman governor in Texas history. If witchery—and the power and magic it implies—has a gender, it most certainly must be female.

These days residents and tourists have nothing but love for the tiny flying mammals that transformed Austin into the bat capital of the world. The story was far different when the creatures transformed the bridge into a roost in the early 80s. Many Austinites called for extermination because they believed bats attacked humans. Media sensationalism didn’t help. One Austin American-Statesman headline from September 1984 read “Bat Colony Sinks Teeth Into City.” Dracula’s minions had arrived.

Biologist Merlin Tuttle knew better. A crusader for the rights of the Congress Avenue Bridge bats, he made it his business to educate people that free-tails had no intention of draining the life blood of innocent Austinites. Bats, he pointed out, consumed pests like beetles, moths and mosquitos; they also served a crucial ecological role as pollinators. Slowly, people listened; and the irrational fear that had overtaken the city turned to ash like a vampire caught at sunrise.

People who’ve seen the spectacle have told me that all you have to do is stand at the Congress Avenue Bridge railing and wait until five minutes after sunset for the bats. They never mentioned how bodies—too many of them—crowded for viewing spots that could be dodgy, especially during the smaller spring emergences. Common sense told me differently: get on the river, the view’s bound to be better from there. I was right: bats emerge from under the bridge, chattering as they spiral down from each of what our tour guide called “neighborhoods” before heading east towards the greenbelt zones. None of this is especially easy to observe at night from the top of the bridge. On the water I could savor the pleasure of free-tails pouring into the night like smoke, engaged and awed by a spectacle our pilot enhanced with infrared lighting.

Ten minutes later our boat headed for the dock. My brain whirred; I needed to make sense of what I had seen. What it all meant for me. Native Americans believe bats, with their echolocation abilities, are guides through darkness and symbols of death/rebirth. I didn’t need guidance through any dark night of the soul; I’d had my midlife crisis years ago. But in the span of a few short years, a great deal had changed for me. I’d left one profession for another. Moved house. And much as I didn’t want to admit it, begun to age.

The bats and I were female. But they possessed a fertility I no longer had and a vigor made me aware of how much I enjoyed taking my time. Cosmic esoterica only reinforced the emblems that came with living into a sixth decade. I was in my second Saturn return, give or take a few degrees. That transition was about wisdom. Initiation into elderhood. Just as some people take their coffee black, I take my truths unvarnished. I was getting old, dammit. And there was nothing I could do to change it.

A sudden sadness descended, whispering don’t worry, it’s all downhill from here. I would have listened had it not been for one small detail. Thanks to membranous wings shaped like multi-jointed human hands, bats possessed exceptional maneuvering skills that exceeded those of their avian cousins. I thought of the chaotic grace with which they had moved under and around the bridge and into the trees. Maybe I was getting old. But age and experience had taught me flexibility, the art of pivoting around obstacles, adjusting to change. Catching sight of the lighted dock ahead, I breathed in the night air and breathed out the blue gloom that roosted in my mind. Whatever happened next, I’d manage. Just like the bats.

One Love & the Rites of Spring

One Love: it’s an expression Rastafarians first used to remember Jamaican political firebrand Marcus Garvey. His speeches always ended with the phrase and it became Garvey’s shorthand for the bonds of global unity he believed blacks needed to forge. One hundred years later, reggae and hip hop subcultures have popularized One Love to mean just this: goodbye. My inner hippie adores the phrase almost as much as the sweet, sweet Bob Marley song of the same name. The one that transformed an early black power phrase into one communicating universal respect and compassion for all people in all places.

I think of this phrase now in the afterglow of my favorite every-few-years rite of spring: the Austin Reggae Festival. Since 1994, ARF has promoted contemporary reggae from North America and Jamaica and donated a portion of the proceeds from every ticket purchased to the Central Texas Food Bank. When CTFB president Sari Vatske took to the mike the Saturday I attended, she announced with not a little pride that in its twenty-nine years of existence, the Festival has collected one million dollars to combat hunger in Texas. The amount may seem infinitesimal when billions are the baseline in current conversations about money. But it’s still made a difference to thousands in a state not especially known for its willingness to help the poor and marginalized.

Kumar and the Original Fyah

The one-day pass I bought this year was special. ARF came back last year; and much as I wanted to go, I stayed home, too afraid that prolonged exposure would be the doom of a respiratory system I could not risk infecting. But it really was safer now. To mingle closely with others, touch them, hug them, was no longer a game of Russian roulette. Not with vaccines and I was quintuple vaxxed. I’d proven that much to myself going to Seattle, the American COVID ground zero, a month before and coming home virus-free.

All of this I knew despite my anxiety threatening otherwise. And I was eager, so eager to hear the slow and spacious backbeat-heavy grooves of reggae. To deep-inhale the earthy acrid smell of incense and the cannabis Jamaicans call herb or ganja. And move the body that cannot resist rhythms of any kind, cuddling my shoulders in the Rockaway, circle-cycling my arms in the Bogo, rolling my hips to floor in the Wine. Reggae dancehall moves like these were freeform, joyfully contravening every uptight, straight-backed lesson I ever learned in ballroom dancing.

My love of reggae started long before the sickness of this era—the 1980s, to be exact. A time that could almost pass for some distant gold age if you squint your eyes long enough and ignore things like a Ronald Reagan presidency and the Cold War. I am white and middle class so it’s no surprise I came to it via the (mostly) white British reggae band UB40 that sang about pop-sugar love. Then, as my need for meaning evolved, through Bob Marley, the mixed-race son of an English overseer whose crooning voice belied steely convictions about social injustice. Thanks to my graduate work in Caribbean studies, I explored the music of Marley’s band two mates Bunny Wailer, who used reggae to celebrate Rastafarianism, and Peter Tosh, who used it to proclaim that I am not a politician… only [one who] suffer[s] the consequences. Silver-tenored Jimmy Cliff, an artist I admired for his soulfulness, came after them. These musicians weren’t all things reggae. But they opened my mind to a sound, a culture and a way of life and that was enough.

I discovered ARF in 2015 when a crowd of dreadlocked people in Bob Marley t-shirts packed a bus I was riding. We’re going to the Marley Fest, they said. A year later I went, too. What better way to welcome the springs I loved with the reverence of a pagan than with festivities that included everything from light saber twirling to juggling and hula hooping? And enjoy the satisfaction of an event that celebrated Rasta culture’s veneration of herb? I later learned that the festival unofficially goes by the name 4/20 Fest to honor a group of high school students who met every day at 4:20PM to “smoke trees.” Every year MC Jah Ray shamelessly encourages patrons to eschew cigarettes in favor of the sacred herb. Go outside the grounds, though, and the protection ends. Yes, it’s Austin. But it’s also not the 60s or 70s and possession of any amount of cannabis is still punishable by fines and jail time.

This year marked my third return to the Festival. But I couldn’t just go. There’d been a devastating pandemic that had changed everything and I felt an urgent need to celebrate. A bright crown of flowers seemed the just the thing to do it. I watched experts on YouTube effortlessly make crowns in under twenty, very edited minutes and bought the wire and sticky florist tape they recommended. Then, on the day before the festival, I went to the market to buy roses, goldenrods and leaves that would sit on the frame I had yet to fashion.

Through the colors I chose—red, yellow, green—I paid homage to the Rastafarian community and to its Zion of Ethiopia. And through the crown itself to the Greco-Roman pagans who wore flowered headgear to religious festivals. The crown was the perfect thing to wear not just because it would let me honor One Love and the season of renewal. But also because it would allow me to proclaim victory—of the kind signified by laurel wreath crowns—over niggling anxieties about taking infected air into my lungs.

That victory didn’t come easily. The wire had a mind of its own and the tape tore like paper in my fumbling fingers. The project took more than two hours to do excluding the time it took to tape together and bend a proper circular frame. My living room was a green garden of a mess afterward, nothing like the immaculate work spaces I’d seen on YouTube.

But the result, imperfect as was, surprised me; so did the effect the crown had on those who saw it. Late in the afternoon of concert day, a pretty African girl with long braids saw me in the crowd and rushed over to me, mouth open. You’re so beautiful. She hadn’t seen the gray hair under the hat, the light-sensitive eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, or the wilted flowers on a crown made of mistakes. Instead she’d seen me with the eyes of One Love that looked at intention and heart and ignored the rest.

The modern world makes us all aware of the vulnerability of being human every day we live. But feeling irie-good comes down to one thing: seeking where we are connected. Rastafarians know this; it’s why they often say I and I to mean “we.” And why the concept of One Love they adopted for themselves but that one reggae musician refined to include all people—is such a powerful tonic in this, our post-pandemic age of division and distrust.

Seattle Memory Underground

Memory is a layered thing built from accretions of time. I was reminded of this on a recent conference trip to Seattle, a place I had long wanted to visit. A writer friend who knew the city educated me about it over dinner one evening during my stay. What we saw rising around us on steeply angled hills had been a build-over. An older Seattle she encouraged me to see existed, invisible as a ghost, beneath our feet.

There had been a fire, she said, the Great Fire of 1889 . In its aftermath city officials had decided to rebuild, but not before raising the city floor between twelve and twenty-four feet depending on location. The fire had been a blessing in disguise, one that allowed engineers to tackle a more entrenched problem: periodic flooding from Elliott Bay. While a new city emerged, an old one was transformed into a shady underground warren almost immediately colonized by opium parlors, pre-Prohibition bars and homeless people seeking refuge from the wet, the cold and the gray.

Seattle, it seemed, sat on den of memories, an urban unconscious. In the days that followed my dinner, I would remember what my friend told me as I processed my experiences, some of which astonished me for their strangeness. I did not know Seattle; nothing and no one tied me to it in any way. Yet from the day I arrived, memories rose up from the depths of my mind and washed over me like ocean tides.  

It began with the appearance of a girl at the budget digs I’d found off Pike’s Place and First Avenue. Climbing up entrance stairs that inclined at a knee-cracking forty-five degrees, suitcases in tow, a shadow flickered on the edge of my vision. I paused and looked up. A girl tripped past me, carrying no baggage at all, her long brown hair hanging loosely around her shoulders. The wire-framed glasses perched on her nose caught the light and glittered. Welcome to your past, the wry smile on her face seemed to say. Enjoy it.

The girl was me; and—so I thought—a product of travel fatigue and disorientation. Years before, during the restlessness of early adulthood that took me on two railway tours of Western Europe, I had been the girl with long brown hair, one young hosteler among many. Now, her older counterpart had taken to the hosteling scene again, a middle-aged outlier among the twenty and thirty-somethings around her. Practicality had dictated lodging choice. But that choice had also catapulted that older woman back in time.

I checked in and climbed another flight of stairs to the room where I would be sharing with five strangers. Small and stuffy with padlocked locked cubbies instead of closets, sheets that slid off plastic-covered mattresses and curtained beds that felt like train couchettes, the room smelled of closeness and human contact. There was no curfew; people seeped in from clubs and pubs at all hours of the night and shambled up bunk bed ladders, regardless of whether you were trying to sleep or not. It felt like college. 

If the first day jarred with its strangeness, the second day shocked through its sense of utter normality. Though I was a tourist in a new city as much as I was also one in a space of youth. Sprawling on my bed between panel sessions and book fair crawls, I listened to the street musician under my window picking chords on an electric guitar and thought of street musicians who played for passers-by in my old college town. Chatting with my young suite mates—most of whom were also MFA student conference goers—I realized that once upon a time, they could have been the young people I used to teach. As physically uncomfortable as my accommodations were, they also spoke to a part of me that recognized them as iterations of my own history.

As I mused on my experiences, I realized that the interplay of past and present infused almost everything. The old friends I had come to see at this conference had come from different phases in my life: the mentor who knew me when all I had were fragmented narratives and more words than I knew what to do with; the poet who knew me when we were both struggling to towards new professional identities in the aftermath of academia. Even the setting, though new, called to mind a time and place when I lived by the sea. The ocean was itself a memory, one that contained everything and everyone I had ever known growing up in California.

By the third day of my visit, I could feel the flood of it all overwhelm me. I loved the city, loved  being around people who loved words and craft as much as I did. But I needed time away from the things and people I had invited into my life. To reflect. Digest. Incorporate. And so it I ventured east of the city to sit alone in the green of Viretta Park—this time, deliberately so—with more recollections of youth. Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s memorial bench was there; and I wanted to be there, too, filling my lungs with frigid air and remembering music that had actually spoken to me.

The park surprised me with its stillness, its smallness. I took out the candle I’d brought with me, lit it and slowly circled the bench, humming bars from “Come as You Are.” And I remembered the girl with long brown hair. Once she had followed arrows spray painted on tombs in the Père Lachaise Cemetery to Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris. She listened to his music on the radio and like it well enough. But the visit was all surface gesture, a morbidly romantic way to celebrate a rebel musician from a generation she could only admire from a distance.

Now the girl had become me, the older woman who moved with purpose. Everything, right down to  candle in her hand, had been planned. Once I had worshipped Nirvana’s Nevermind album by lying on the floor of my apartment, the better to feel the crash and scream of guitars shiver my spine. Three years after that, Cobain overdosed one month before he took a shotgun to his head and died. I was just 28; still innocent, but on the verge of real adulthood. In the decades that followed, I saw things, did things, felt things—very dark things—the girl with long brown hair could never have imagined. But unlike the musician whose life I had come to celebrate, I survived mostly intact, but never quite the same.

Sitting in that park afterward, alone save for the occasional passing car or jogger, it came to me that nothing could ever be a blank slate for anyone who lived long enough. Everything had history; but the older I got, the more things followed rules of cause and effect I could not always see or understand. I was in Seattle because of a conference, because of friends, because I loved of words. And while there, was making new memories to coexist simultaneously with old ones Just the way the invisible underground labyrinths my friend had described co-existed with beauty my eyes could see and the wonder my heart could feel.