When not everything is rosy

Dear dears,

It's All Hallows' Eve and National Novel Writing Month eve to boot (more about that later), and it's now or never (my fingers first typed Now or November) if I want to blog once more in October.

I was thinking a lot about some things I wanted to blog a couple of weeks ago - I went down into a kind of difficult and not so productive, not so happy, place. And it occurred to me that I am usually relentlessly up, upbeat, trying to be productive and better myself, and that everything I do is in the service of that - or at least that is the narrative being produced around here.

And so I really wanted to try to blog from the depths of the (let me not dramatize too much - it can't have been too terrible because I don't even exactly remember it right now, I just remember it because I remember thinking about the blogging) formless, somewhat frustrating place I was in.

Aha, I remember now what it was: I didn't have any editorial work from outside for a couple of weeks. I had been working on some websites with the help of my friend/mentor/consultant Ellen, and I had told her I was going to continue on my own for a while, but that was proving difficult. And so, after I got Felix off to school and went for my (WONDERFUL) morning walk with my ladies, there was no particular shape to my days, no deadlines, nothing exactly and specifically and particularly I had to do just then.

So I puddled and dawdled and overate and futzed around online and was dissatisfied with myself and thought about blogging from that state. But blogging was one more productive and positive thing I wasn't doing!

Here's the Alice in Wonderland part - of course, as soon as I was meeting Ellen again and getting the websites in shape and the editorial work was also coming in and I was feeling happily bustly again and had the energy, the good positive energy, that would have let me happily blog - well then there was NO TIME! (Alice in Wonderland reference in brief: when she's small enough to fit through the door to the garden, she's way too short to reach the key; when she's tall enough to reach the key on the high table, she's way too big to fit through the door.)

So there it is. Tonight I am suspended between one time pressure and the next, and tomorrow a grand new adventure begins, so I wanted to send out word before I went sweeping down into it. Tomorrow is November, and with it begins NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, so wish me luck please as I am about to go try to write 50,000 words in 30 days again like I did last year (except hopefully better!).

And tomorrow is also the beginning of the month in which I am going to visit my parents in California for 10 days, and belatedly celebrate my father's 80th birthday (happy belated birthday again, Daddy!), and stop in on friends in Berkeley.

And tomorrow also starts the month when I'm on jury duty for a week.

So the good news is - there's lots to do and not so much time to go wallowing in any doldrums. Bad news is - not quite enough time maybe for all there is to do. The ankle I twisted six days ago now is healing well, the many pounds I gained in the first four days of not walking on it I am trying to embrace for now and get ready to send back out into the world again, this morning I worked for a couple of hours on plans for the November novel and I'm ready, I'm ready!

I still don't know how, necessarily, to write from the doldrums. Maybe next time they come around I can grab the downbeat moment and wrest some words from it. There has to be a way, I was going to say a trick but I don't even really mean a trick, just a way to do that without it being about asking for pity. But I don't know that way just yet.

Still juicily awaiting the future, such topics as:

- balancing sociability and aloneness (thank you Beth for many wonderful conversations and modeling on this topic)

- writing as a mood-altering process and therefore how can you write about a mood? (see above)

For now, it's Halloween. Slowly outside the light is getting darker and the clumps of trick-or-treaters are getting more frequent - little groups of two to five tinies with two to five grownups, and candles and flashlights and treat bags. This year we're hiding out and hoping against hope they don't come here, since we're going out a couple of different directions but haven't left yet. The porch light isn't on, the Jack o'Lantern isn't out, and the walkway is absolutely covered and smothered in thick loads of brown crackly leaves, and so far everyone has crossed the street and gone over to sociable hospitable Jenny and Michael across the street instead - we haven't had to turn off all the inside lights and hide in the basement the way we thought we might, but that may still come.

Happy Halloween all, and happy November!

The people in Hamburg

I just wanted to add - thinking about Kim's birthday - what did we DO all those days and hours and months together in Hamburg?

And I realized - it was so all about the people. Sabine and Florian, and Anja and Alexander, and Klaus and Bettina. Parties late at night, and hours sitting around a pizza or a big pot of Persian rice, and plans that fell through because Michel had to make yet another one-minute video for Luxemburg TV. And more parties.

Sabine, if you're reading this, here's a poem I've been meaning to show you for years and years and years. (The you in the poem is not you, or Kim for that matter, but that becomes obvious I guess. And Sabine, you're living in a different shape these days! Those were other times.)

Nights, that Year

The streets came together in half-circles, no-car

zones with potted palms, Italian ice cream,

gardens strung with car-lot Christmas lights and people talking

German low in busted armchairs with their bottoms

almost to the sidewalk. We would go arm-in-arm when the time

zones and the Northern angles kept the night balmy late.

I tried stiletto heels, fraying the points.

I tried a sip of red wine. I kept trying to marry you.

I tried dressing you in my clothes, tried

riding barefoot on the train from Berlin. I tried

everything. We kept going back to the place with the busted armchairs.

We ate corn salad at one in the morning.

We slept on the floor and played pingpong in the bedroom.

We watched Sabine sink giddy into her pink pear shape. Our parties

were famous. We still have the pictures. I don't think

you remember it this way.

Kim in Hamburg, a birthday slipping past

Here in Bloomington, Indiana, it is still Kim's birthday, but Kim is in Hamburg, where her birthday was yesterday already. Happy birthday, most faithful reader of all! 'Twas wonderful to see you in Berlin in the springtime.

Memories: the bank in St. Pauli where we met, you thinking my darkling German boyfriend was the loud American among us, anyway we were talking English and you recognized him from a university class in Berlin / hours, hours, hours, just sitting and talking, walking and talking, both of us a little at sea in Hamburg with our German boyfriends, what we were doing there? underemployed, undercommitted . . . so much time to talk.

hours in the choir under Johannes's direction, hours in the pub playing Kutscherskat and Klabberjas.

Your stories: meeting Christian in Paris, moving in together the day you met, ten years later when I met you were still together and you'd followed him to Hamburg, living a life amid the windy streets and little-old-lady hole-in-the-wall shops and high-ceilinged rooms.

Your apartment: the funny things on your walls, little sculptures/paintings/self-made things that went in three-dimensional directions, all of it impressed me with its self-assuredness.

The cafe around the corner from your place on Stresemannstrasse where we spent eternities - was it called Unter den Linden? Ordering the little bowls of tricolor ice cream, and lemon juice drinks, and discussing whatever there was to discuss under the sun. Off to the movies on the subway in the middle of the night with Michel and Christian, watching some weird strange thing - did we all fall asleep except Michel? Or all stayed awake except Michel? Anyway, I do remember it was even farther into the middle of the night at Hoheluftbrücke when we had to come sleepily home. I know you remember that night too, you mentioned it recently.

The American women's club of Hamburg - those ridiculous meetings we went to, you and I so did not belong but we went anyway, and it turned out some of the other people didn't really belong either. We went to a Tupperware party - it felt surreal.

Suddenly you had a baby. And suddenly you and the baby were gone, Chernobyl had happened and you wanted to take him to the States for a while where things were maybe not quite as contaminated. I think you and Martin were actually out of the country during most of the anti-nuclear demonstrations we spent our last few months in. And by the time you came back we were gone.

Now twenty-five more years have gone by, there you and Christian still are, three boys grown up and going/gone, you making a bilingual home for yourselves and for so many English-speaking women/mothers who've moved into and away from Hamburg. Always there for me/us to touch base with when we come to Germany. You thinking your thoughts, going through your own internal revolutions, reading and watching and thinking.

Showed a friend our wedding album night before last, there was a beautiful close-up of your face, glowing and beaming. Standing right next to my big sister, in fact, also glowing and beaming, and you looked so much alike! And you always were a little big-sister-like to me.

Happy birthday, dear Kim!

The big black chair and the little white book

I wanted to write about this book I was reading, I've been wanting to write about it for a while now. Today was the day but first I had to find a place to sit. You'd think in a house there would be a place to sit. But in my own house, in which there are, among other things, a kitchen, a bedroom, a lovely large office all my own, and the world's most enormous living room, I don't have a place I'm so happy to sit because my big black chair has been moved out of the living room for no reason other than its unintentional crime of being unsightly. Poor big black chair, and even more so, given that the big black chair really has no feelings: poor me!

For several weeks, the chair was positioned in my office in such a way that I couldn't really lean back in it, defeating 9/10ths of its purpose. About a week ago, I did reposition it to lean back, and I can see out both windows now (green turning to yellow, reflected overhead light in the one windowpane, wonderful snatches of cold silver cloud-sky dancing/peeking through the shifting leaf canopy, dripping wetness residue) - but it's just very hemmed-in feeling, compared to sitting in this chair as if on a throne surveying the endless landscape, the way I used to in the living room. So I'm in mourning for my previous seating. And maybe I'll manage to get it restored.

In the meantime: The elegance of the hedgehog! Or, perhaps more pertinently: L'élégance du hérisson. Because I think probably at least 9/10ths (there's that same fraction again! a pattern in the universe?) of the pleasure I had in reading it was because I was reading it in French. After my year in Berlin immersed in German (when I wasn't, in fact, around English speakers, and you can guess what fraction of the time *that* was!), what a pleasure to find I can easily read a novel in French (depending on the novel, not so easy in German - I might know all the individual words but it's unconscionable the order they put the darn things in, so twisty-turny it takes forever to read).

Book group is this Sunday and I'll compare notes with my friends who have read it in English. I already know, because hubby read it in English and got stuck on page 100, and I myself peeked at the English sometimes when I got stuck on a word in the French (which I did frequently, more about that later), that the English is a little stiff and wooden.

And the weird thing is: for all I know, the French might be too! I somehow don't think so, but it's not like I read in French that often and so it's hard to compare. It was just so much fun to sit here and read. There were things that brought me up short - OK, right about now I guess I need to say what the deal is with this story.

There's a concierge who lives in a big building of rich people, and the concierge herself, though poor, is tremendously intelligent and very very well-read, but she feels she has to hide that from the other people in the house. (This was the first thing that brought me up short: that seemed very unmotivated, the fact that she had to hide her intelligence and erudition. But it turned out that was an important thing that got explained later.) Meanwhile, upstairs, there lives a little rich girl, 12 years old, who is also tremendously smart, and lives with her smart family but they're all smart in the wrong way or about the wrong things and don't understand her nor she them, and she feels there is no meaning and she's just going to grow up to live an idiotic life, so she has decided to kill herself on her 13th birthday.

That's the premise. There you go.

And I read it very happily.

The thing is that I was brought up short on every single page with long complicated or just unfamiliar words I didn't understand at all, or at least didn't undersand at first.

I tried gliding past them.

I tried looking them up.

I tried rereading the passage, sometimes many times over, to make it out and understand the troublesome words from context.

I tried, later on, going to read the same passage in the English translation (as I said: kind of wooden - really made me feel like going back and attempting my own translation, or at least my own edit of the English - but realistically - is that going to happen?)

All of the above worked at various times, and I got more and more hooked. Weirdly, this book has a smallish element of people who are into Anna Karenina and name animals after characters - and we just read Anna Karenina last month in book group.

After I'd read a few pages, I decided to go back and write down some of the things I'd had a hard time with. Here they are, just from the very first pages:

éructation

que par hoquets propres et sans vices

un diable qui s'appelle CGT

je marmonne (I wrote: "murmure"? - that turned out to be right)

scindé (I wrote: "probably 'divided' ")

grassouillette

les oignons aux pieds

auto-incommodants

rouages ("gears"? I wondered)

revêches ("something negative")

velléitaires

ces relents plébéiens

mon cabas à filet (I figured out: "string shopping bag")

Finally, all of the above I either, as I said, looked up, figured out, or glided past - and now I have forgotten again what at least half of them mean but I got enough of the meaning in the moment to keep moving through.

Funnily, sometimes when I went to look at the matching English sentence or passage, which I did towards the end of the book more, the English often used a word I didn't know either! So it wasn't my French exactly.

I do want to try to say why I enjoyed reading this book so much and I feel like I'm not quite getting at it. It's understated. I think I liked that. It didn't feel like it was working too hard to please me, and the pleasures it afforded were really in the individual sentences, and the characters I ended up caring about somewhat and the plot that unfolded kind of came on me unawares while I was untangling the sentences - not at all how I usually read.

So that's pretty much it. Now I'm reading the book she wrote before this one (sorry, I didn't say who "she" is: Muriel Barbery). The book before this one is called Une gourmandise and the two are connected - Une gourmandise is all about the rich snobby food critic who lives upstairs in the concierge's building and actually, in the central turning point of L'élégance du hérisson, dies, in order to make possible new and interesting changes in people's lives and relationships. In Une gourmandise the death is also the central event but the whole book I guess is about the 24 hours leading up to the death (I've only just started the book).

So here I am sitting in my big black chair with my striped blue toe socks on, feet in the air in front of me, both of the little white books now next to me (because I just went and got Une gourmandise a moment ago to remind myself of the exact name) and as I intimated before, it's a wet day out, but the threatened floods have not quite hit us yet, so I will get a little editorial work done.

Ladies' walking continues to be a wonderful anchor, this morning four of us, in shifting groups of three, eventually found each other in the neighborhood in spite of the threatening rain. Yesterday a Rumanian German author got the Nobel literature prize and this morning Barack Obama got the Nobel peace prize, so there's all of that to think about and sort through, and indeed so much more.

Odds and ends - the thirty-minute post

So in the spring I tried the fifteen-minute post occasionally but I think today that's too restrictive - for one thing I still have the lopped-off finger (I'm exaggerating and dramatizing, but it really is painful to type with it) slowing me down. I alternate between using it anyway (half the time the letter doesn't express itself and I have to redo anyway) and trying to type those keys (they are r, t, f, g, v, and b, for the record) with other fingers, such as the middle finger of my left hand. Tricky, tricky, tricky.

So here they are, the odds and ends of my sometimes-way-too-busy, sometimes-dangerously-idle mind:

- this morning I was making a list of things to do before taking myself off to the library to work there for the day on some web sites, and I made this list:

1. newspaper

2. smoothie

3. make lunch

4. pay German bills

and suddenly I was overcome by the thought that I should make a list item that said "drink poison". Why????? I have no desire whatsoever to actually drink any poison, it just seemed like the very right thing to put next on the list.

And indeed, I did put it on the list. The list now reads

1. newspaper

2. smoothie

3. make lunch

4. pay German bills

5. drink poison

6. write [hubby] re credit card

7. pack up

8. go

and numbers 1-4 and 6 are checked off, no. 5 is crossed out, I have a little "1100" in a circle at the top right and "1200" a little lower down, both of those indicating numbers of steps I wish to get to, and they are both checked off as well. I was going to blog from the library too but decided to do it at home with the timer.

But still - I was thinking - what was that list item about? Is it like standing at the viewing windows of the Empire State Building and concentrating really hard on not jumping, or thinking: thank God I am not holding a baby or small child because I would surely lose my concentration briefly and toss it out? Seems related but not identical.

- yesterday morning was super foggy, I was trying to get tons of steps on the pedometer before I ever even left the house for ladies' morning walk, and so I went downstairs to be Felix's walking snooze alarm multiple times, and went outside early for the Herald Times knowing I'd have to go out again a little later for the New York Times (and while inside the house I walked in place constantly in the kitchen while making Felix's breakfast and lunch and my own oatmeal - ended up with 3500 steps before I went off to ladies' walk). Anyway, both outings to the end of the walkway for the newspapers ended up funny/magical. Outing #1 for the H-T netted me the H-T itself in its usual bright orange plastic bag, but there was something shiny on the sidewalk a little further out. So I went over - thought it was some kind of plastic shining there. And no- it was an enormous shiny, glittering star. Turned out to be a little group of leaves connected by twigs/stems/whatever you might call the little things that hold little groups of leaves together, and they were indeed arranged in a perfect star pattern, covered in dew, and reflecting the street lights that were cutting through the fog. Glorious! // And then when I went back for outing #2 for the NYT, the little star thingy was still there but I was smarter now and knew I didn't have to go right up to it, but still I walked around a little - NYT where? (In the past it has been found in the branches of the Japanese burning bush or whatever it was hubby planted at the end of the walk, but also at various places up and down the sidewalk.) Putting steps on the pedometer while looking for the paper, love that multitasking, you know I do. And finding it nowhere, so I looked down the street to where headlights were just then emerging out of the fog, such unusual thick fog for us of a seven a.m., and briefly thinking, that could be the NYT delivery man, but no, the car was coming on way too fast, but I stood there because I was there and I hadn't decided to go back inside yet, takes me a while to decide things.

I also thought this couldn't be the NYT delivery man because in the past, a lot of our neighbors got the NYT too and he would have been stopping at all their houses. But no, he came zooming up and slowed right at my house, obviously him at that foggy hour of the morning, no other cars anywhere and slowing right by me, so I raised my hand to thank him and he hesitated I guess, and called out "dont want to hit you!" - pulled up a little further yet, tossed the paper (in its trademark blue plastic bag) out the window and roared off on his way. I hollered "thanks!", collected my paper and stepped back into the house, very pleased with the magical morning.

Oh, and when I got to Weight Watchers yesterday morning, not having been for two weeks (I was all primed to go last week and have great results but then I sliced off the tip of my finger the night before, which kind of interrupted things), I had lost 2.6 pounds on their scales since the previous weigh-in. Two pounds to go before I don't have to pay as a lifetime member.

So ladies' morning walk continues to be fabulous. This morning we talked about connections and boundaries between us and our nieces and nephews (hi, Amani! - I actually didn't mean you this time!), and helping family members talk about things that get worse with isolation - and then Ellen told us about a book she's very excited about called The Belly Fat Diet and Beth and I are both rushing off to get it today. [Correction: this afternoon now, written from the library - I knew there was something wrong with that title. When I got to the library I asked for the Fat Belly Diet. That was wrong too. It's The Flat Belly Diet. Whatever!]

But meanwhile I'm still on the Step Diet, or rather I bought the book, read part of it, and am tracking steps and upping them every week and doing some of the things the book says to do, and of course I'm a Weight Watcher as always. So I guess I'm layering the oomphs that come from each of these places.

Night before last hubby spontaneously said: you look skinny! Now when does that ever happen?! (I was wearing my yellow sarong with the black salamanders all over it [my first sarong of the many I now have (purple with yellow and green frogs, blue with yellow butterflies, red with black geometries, and black with big splashy dragonflies, sadly ripped but I wear it anyway) and in fact the one that was given to me by hubby and the boys], tucked up around over my chestiness and falling down straight from there [the pedometer was clipped over my right breast because where else was I going to put it? - and I had to be getting those steps, you manage what you measure and all that] and so now I think: can I recreate that look in an item of clothing that won't be falling off every three point five minutes the way that tucked sarong does? Alex????)

Honey bunnies, the timer is ticking super fast towards zero, and it was lovely to hear back from some of you (you know who you are, Sabine and Annette and Kim and Lisa!), and I'm going to put a couple more people on the automatic-e-mail send-out thing now that I know how to do it.

Crazy thought (another one) of today: fussing in the kitchen, remembering this morning's walk where we were united in the interest in the belly-fat-busting diet, I resurrected an idea I've had in the past: since there doesn't seem to be a Weight Watcher restaurant anywhere I can just go to, how's about *I* make food here every day for me and all my friends and they come here to eat good wonderful Weight Watchery food, all fresh and yummy and handmade and point-labeled and nutritionally balanced.

(This thought, in case you didn't know, is crazy a. because I can barely cook for the people who's here already [although a lot of that is because their eating needs/desires are at odds with mine] and b. there is no time - and yet still, still, somehow I'm wondering/wishing.)

The timer has not only dinged now, which it usually does with a minute to spare, but actually also wound down its ticking and stopped making noise entirely, so I'm going to say hasta la vista and start going for items 7 and 8 on the checklist. Maybe I can also get to 1300 steps before I leave the house.

Grounded and Injured

I haven't blogged in over a month - nothing to be done about that now, it's onward and looking forward now. I have all sorts of blogs-in-my-head that roll by, and all sorts of reasons not to go writing them down / typing them up - first it was that they were silly little spurts of things and I had some people down to get e-mail automatically when I posted, and I decided I didn't want to have their in boxes so spluttered and cluttered.

Then it was that I had tooooo much to write.

And now?! - now I have a big white clump of gauze on my left index finger and it's surprisingly in the way - not quite as bad as yesterday and the day before, when I had a very large multi-layer wrapping with a big fat immovable blue thing as the outer layer - not only could I not use the finger to type, but it also kept getting in the way and hitting other keys, and keeping it off the keyboard meant I couldn't quite reach the keys . . .

Ah well. The injury itself is minor, I was cutting a medium-sized cucumber with a very large knife and my smallish finger got in the way. So let's talk about more interesting things.

I wanted to write about being grounded in Bloomington and what grounds me, and even though I've been thinking about this for over a week, it is only this morning, as I sit here and type this, that I realize not only am I grounded here but that in my worst times in Berlin, grounded is exactly what I was not, and that when I was doing better, and then so very much better, I had just managed to ground myself there.

Here it seemed so easy and obvious from day one. On a very literal and immediate level, for one: leaving the house to walk outside is just a matter of opening the front door and walking out. Then I am on the ground, on the walkway, on the sidewalk, under the trees, in hailing distance of my neighbors, ready to hit the pavement for a walk or a jog. In Berlin it was just that much farther from inside the apartment to out on the street - via air-walkway, stairs, multiple doors, more stairs, walkways and high walls to, finally, a pretty narrow sidewalk. I grew to love it but this is just EASIER.

What is grounding, besides that? Well, my fellow middle-aged ladies, gathering daily at 7:45 at the corner of tree- and aqueduct-lined Southdowns and the park. Three to seven of us five days a week, some arriving on bikes, some on cars, some on foot, and as I walk down Southdowns towards the park in my twenty-pound vest I strain to see who's already there and generally can't see anybody, but miraculously as I arrive thinking OK, today's the day when there's nobody, suddenly - there comes Alex from the left from the parking lot, and there comes Sue in her trademark red sweater emerging from around the corner, from behind the trees, on her bike - and there comes Ellen on the right emerging from behind a post where she was stretching - and that was just today (in truth, Susan was with me so I knew I wasn't going to be alone, but Susan also had to leave right afterwards). Other days, Beth then drives up alongside me and slows down and waves and then goes to park and hurry over to meet us; and sometimes Jenny, if she hasn't been outside when I left my house with gorgeous black Maggie the dog, shows up as we all converge on the corner, at a run. And then the only problem is - how do we maneuver around town, so many of us, walking and talking - and how many conversations can we juggle, are we all in one, do we break into several, am I missing something over there, can we reconfigure? And we do, we manage, and by 9 a.m. we're generally all home again, having been out in the sunshine and air, having talked about kids and work and worries and enemies and e-mail and friends, about our bodies (oh, did I ever write once before about the fun we had walking around the campus of Indiana University talking loudly about middle-aged sex and feeling righteous about educating the student body???) - having seen the wind chimes and crystals hung from the trees along Southdowns (today it was a lone leaf hanging in absolute midair - the implied spider's thread was completely invisible) and baby Maksim out for his morning stroll on Papa Kon's chest and the apples available for the plucking just over the wall from Fritz and Leela's house, and the bright red chili peppers that appeared one day in a beautiful cluster out somebody's walkway and the next day the sign: help yourselves. (Just down the street from the U-pick'em herbs.)

That's grounding. Also video chats with my parents, Daddy stroking his long and ever-growing white beard with great pleasure, Mommy chipper in the middle of her miraculously short and relatively-easy-on-the-body post-lumpectomy therapy. And the occasional phone conversation with my busy but cheerful sister. And having the large boy home for a week between Berkeley and college, and sorting out decades' worth of games from the games cupboard, carrying furniture up and down the stairs, carrying books hither and yon, driving carloads full of things at a time to Goodwill, moving around in this house which is ours and despairing at the state of it but also feeling ready to change everything around.

I think I got off the track a little but these things really *are* grounding, when I lose my way (I did that yesterday for a while - no editorial work; hard to type; Max didn't need me when I was ready to help him and just as I was about to start on a project of my own he did; I was just off my rhythm and flustered and flummoxed and frustrated) - when I lose my way, it comes back down to: feet on the ground, move around, walk. I'm working the pedometer double time, I've got a book called the Step Diet that is both infuriatingly complex and incomprehensible and at the same time stunningly simple in a way, but mostly it's just given me the new push - I need to walk and walk I do.

More later, but it is grounding to write this. Imagining: maybe Erika or Anja will read it in Berlin, or Irene, or Kim, in Hamburg - or Ellen in Bloomington, maybe even Lisa in Toronto if she hasn't given up on me, surely Ruthy in Austin eventually. Love and greetings to you all - more shoutouts next time. Susanne and Sabine, Annette and Bianca - my Berlin walking and talking and play-reading buddies - hello to you! I'm keeping it set up that this goes out to you automatically for now, hope that works and hope it's OK. If I start blogging more like daily that might get annoying!

bits and pieces and layers of life

Monday, August 17th:

I spent large parts of this morning putting clothes on the line outside. I knew there was a 40% chance of thunderstorms but the sun was shining rather insistently.

Then I was doing some things online, including pieces of blog posts I'd started writing and one of which I'd actually meant to post days ago but quite apparently it never went out. (Thank you, dear Lou, for making this clear to me!)

And on top of the beat of the classic radio station and the whir and rush of the rotating fan I started to hear something else, some other louder whir and rush - I was literally outside 10 minutes ago looking at what might already be dry, taking those things down, and putting up the second load of laundry - so as I was sitting here fussing with the blog and hearing the rush and whir I thought no, that can't be rain - looked out the window ahead of me and the sun was just as bright but there was something about that noise, so I went outside for a second and sure enough, it was raining and everything was soaked all over again. I started to try to pull it inside but I was getting soaked myself and the clothes, I thought, would do better outside when it got dry again - and in the time it took me to write this paragraph, though my shoulders and arms are still wet from my seconds outside, it has completely stopped raining again and the sun is shining!

I can't tell everything that's happened so here are bits and pieces:

we've been back in Bloomington 2 weeks. Forgot a piece of luggage in our building the day we left, hubby went back in a taxi rushing home and back while Felix and I waited nervously after checking in at the airport. Flew from Berlin to Newark uneventfully, in Newark we waited forever to find out our flight to Indianapolis was canceled, so we spent an absolutely delightful day in New York and flew home a day later.

Got home late Monday night, dear neighbors Jenny and Michael met us and drove us home and what a wonderful welcome that was, also flowers and balloons and edible goodies in the house from four different sets of neighbors, then the next morning more friends and neighbors visiting, and promptly at 12:30 midday Tuesday, 12 hours after we'd gotten to our house, a thunderstorm started, lasted only minutes I think but our power went out and stayed off for 21 hours. What a welcome!

Since then:

Felix has started school, is enjoying 7th grade, he's taking French and going to play percussion in the band, he has some good teachers and he's enjoying seeing all the old friends again, the schoolbus leaves from 2 corners down at 7:27 in the morning and brings him back around 3:15 p.m., a big difference for him and me from last year. Also in school, instead of multiple breaks with lots of running around, they have NO breaks for running around, 30 minutes for lunch, one 45-minute physical education period of which they are changing in and out of their clothes for probably at least 15 or 20 minutes of it I would guess. Hmph. But he's doing fine so far. Has two dog-walking jobs this week, and looking forward to soon buying the computer he's been saving up for.

And I? I'm walking with my ladies of my ladies' book group, so happy to be doing that. We're meeting every weekday morning at 7:45 and we walk for about an hour and it's wonderful. Catching up on everything, talking about everything, starting the day with friendly faces and funny stories and other people's family woes to add to our own or put ours in perspective. 

Haven't got my editorial work up to speed, my clients have to get used to the fact that I'm back and working, but I've been talking to a lot of friends and neighbors and consulting more formally with my buddy and blogspiration Ellen about the idea of pushing my coaching work harder - the writing coach work but also starting up weight-loss coaching with some clients locally and maybe farther away. It's keeping my mind busy thinking about what might work.

Went to a wonderful concert Saturday night, our neighbor and friend Jason Fickel telling hilarious stories about growing up in Kansas in between folksy/bluesy (I'm not so good on genres) songs he wrote and that he sings and plays with a number of other wonderful local musicians, including our very good old friend Boo on trombone with a plunger making it go woo-woo-woo. Lots of friends and neighbors there.

As I told niece Fanny in a little blog just for her: the fridge here is huge! I mean, it was our fridge before we left, and I do recognize it, but the fridge we had in Berlin, and three more just like it, could fit, I'm pretty sure, into the fridge part - and then there's the whole freezer part below. In fact if you rearranged the shape of the fridge we had in Berlin but kept it the same size, I think it could fit into the door pockets of this fridge here. I'm just saying.

And I've been to three, no four at least, grocery stores since we got back, and a few days ago I was at the least funky-organic-sophisticated and most down-home-Indiana one of the ones I ever go to, and the shopping carts were an outrageous size. And I was pushing it around and I wanted to get maybe ten things but I kept feeling like I should put more things in the cart. So the last few days I've been going to the natural food co-op instead more, where the baskets are a more reasonable size and the food is more local and organic.

And I'm sorry, I got kind of offended when people in Berlin said "oh, everybody in the States is fat" but when I look around here in Bloomington it is pretty striking how different the body shapes are here. 

So those are some impressions. It's nice to be back, though, and I do feel anchored. 

I'm wearing my twenty-pound weight vest for ladies' morning walk. We start the day talking and walking and, as Jenny said, she goes off to work with a smile on her face when we start like that. It's not always the same group of us but four or five or six of us cycle through - there have always so far been at least three of us. I'm loving it, and my ladies tell me I got them up and running (OK, walking) again, so it's good to feel that I can do that.

I've gone over many, many pages of rules and instructions from Felix's different teachers that we had to sign, and sheets of information to fill out for the school administration, most of which I had already filled out. They now have multiple phone numbers for us and our address and e-mail addresses, and the names and phone numbers of half our neighbors, in about 8 different places.

Not finding any small offices to rent downtown this year - turns out in this economy everyone who used to have big offices is downsizing to the small kind I was always wanting and having. So we're going to reconfigure things in the house for me to work at home again for a while.

Oh, and Annette, Bianca, Susanne, and Sabine, I am putting you down to get automatic e-mail with this blog when I write it because it seemed like accessing the blog was not necessarily so easy for you. If you'd rather not get it please do let me know! I miss you and our walks and play-readings! And there is NOwhere in Bloomington to go swimming with fish and ducks and herons and no clothes. 

And oh, sorry, one last thing: we *are* going to start a play-reading group here in Bloomington - in German!