places i remember

This week my roommate’s mother suddenly became very sick and was hospitalized. She and her husband were planning to move to Brussels and serve a church mission working with the young single adults in Europe. One day her mom was healthy, and the next day my roommate was on a plane to Utah to be with her family. One day she was studying French with the other missionaries, and the next day she was in surgery.

In college, my friends and I were in a car accident. We were driving back from San Francisco in the middle of a blizzard at night. Our friends who were driving in front of us were passing a semi – the only other vehicle on the road – and their car got sucked underneath. We saw them in front of us under the semi and panicked. The driver of our car slammed on the brakes and we started spinning out of control. We were all yelling different unhelpful suggestions and heading straight for a pole which divided us from the median. I remember that suddenly I became calm. I closed my eyes and thought, “This is it. This is the moment when I find out whether or not I am prepared to die.” And then the car flipped end over end – a complete rotation – until we landed back on the wheels. We were in an SUV and although the roof was crushed, we were not. I never found out if I was ready to face God.

The fact is that kids get killed on the road in car accidents every year coming back to school from their various vacations. We weren’t. I don’t know why we were spared, but I just know that sometimes there is a miracle. A few years ago, my friend Jeff was diagnosed with cancer. Out of nowhere, an otherwise active and healthy 28 year old guy somehow got cancer. He went through chemo treatments and was actually sick enough that he agreed to watch the whole season of American Idol with me. The treatments worked and now he is healthy again. About twenty years ago, my friend Melissa was also diagnosed with cancer. She was an otherwise perfectly healthy 10 year old girl, but she didn’t make it. Why Melissa and not Jeff? Why those other kids, but not me? Sometimes there is a miracle and I don’t know why.

When the jeep landed I opened my eyes and realized that not only were we not dead, but that only one friend had even a scratch. The radio was still working and Alanis Morisette was loudly singing “Ironic” – a song which I have never been able to listen to again. Three out of the five of us were not wearing seat belts. We immediately bowed our heads and prayed to thank God for sparing our lives. As we were praying the friends who were in the other car ran up and started pounding on the windows. Apparently they had hit the back tire of the semi which dislodged them from underneath and sent them spinning back onto the freeway just in time to see us flip. All ten of us were safe. Almost immediately a man drove up with an oversized-SUV and offered to drive all of us back to Winnemucca.

Once we arrived and checked into the hotel in Winnemucca we all called our parents to tell them that we were okay. It was humbling as one by one we found out that at some point during the day, all of our mothers had felt prompted to drop to their knees and pray for our safety. Maybe we were saved by their prayers. I don’t know. Sometimes prayers work and sometimes they don’t. Tonight we are all praying for Julie’s mom, because sometimes there is a miracle.

I am getting older. In April, when I had my last birthday, I started panicking. I was at a church activity with these beautiful older women who had silver white hair and kind smiles and saggy necks, and I had to walk outside to clear my head. I don’t think I would have noticed their necks – I never had before –  but my mother had recently told me about a book called I Feel Bad About My Neck which is a collection of essays on what it is like being over 60. The book describes that no matter how beautiful a woman is, you can always tell her age by her neck. This neck situation had never come to my attention before, but with the birthday and the book and the older women at church, it all came together in the same week to make me face up to my mortality:

I will some day have a saggy neck. And there is nothing I can do about it.

I didn’t know what to do and I was nervous that my good years had been wasted studying on Saturdays and trying to shop on a budget. So I turned to the source of all knowledge for comfort and instruction. Late one night shortly after the neck realization, I googled “women physical prime” and found out that a a woman does not actually reach her physical prime until she is between 32-35 years old.

Even though all the signs seem to point to the fact that my body is already deteriorating (forgetting things, slower recovery time, sore all the time, not as smart as I was in high school) here, right in front of me, on the internet it said that I still had several good years left to go. I rejoiced in this knowledge. Here was redemption through WikiAnswers! I made a vow right then that I would see what this body could really do.

I started running the next morning and have been going slow and steady since April. This morning I ran 6 miles. The furthest I’ve ever run in my life except for the one time I got lost on a run in Saratoga, CA. It turns out that this body after so many years of pretending to have bad knees and being out of shape, can run 6 miles. I am very proud that I am right on schedule to reach my physical peak.

* This is a picture of my cool roommate Julie who inspired me to become a runner (of 6 miles). She ran the National Marathon last year and we all came to watch. This year I am going to try an do the half marathon. Why? I don’t know. It sounds miserable. But in April, running 6 miles sounded horrible too, and it turns out it wasn’t that bad.

Last night my roommate had the following dream:

“All the roommates are at my aunt’s mountain house. Bruce Willis shows up and starts shooting like crazy. I don’t have enough arm strength to cock the shot gun so I drop it, dive out of the way of the shower of bullets and hide behind a car. Leanna shows up and doesn’t even try to dodge the bullets, picks up the shot gun that I dropped, cocks it and Bruce stops shooting. Leanna and Bruce look at each other. I look up from the car to see what’s going on cause I don’t hear any shooting. Leanna and Bruce have this stare down and then she shoots him. I get up from behind the car and Leanna says, ‘Now we can go inside so I can finish making my salad'”.

This is interesting on many levels because a couple years ago I had a dream that I actually was Bruce Willis. Specifically, I dreamed I was Bruce Willis alone on the asteroid at the end of Armaggedon. I dreamed I had to sacrifice myself to save earth and all of humanity. As you would expect, the Bruce Willis version of myself blew up the asteroid.

Some people say you can’t die in your dreams, but I did. It is a tragedy that in the dream world, Bruce and I shared such an intimate moment only to have it end a few years later in the drive way with a shot gun and a half-finished salad.

In August this city dies and drags us, the people, along with it. This is not the pleasant death where you quietly slip away and your dead grandma greets you with open arms and floats you to a field of honeysuckle and butterflies. This is the death you hoped you would never have, filled with damnation and fire. Every morning when I walk out my door and the hot wet air hits me like a heavy curtain, I think I see a forked tail whip around the corner.

The lucky ones escape the city before it is too late, but some of us have to stay behind. We stay behind because we have already used our vacation days or we can’t afford to get out or we just forgot (again) about August. And someone needs to greet the tourists who descend with their khaki shorts and white sneakers to come pay homage to our marble founding fathers. They ride in on giant buses and are so excited to soak up patriotism that they don’t realize the rest of us are dead. We don’t even have the will to yell at them as they stand on the left and on the right during rush hour. These visitors don’t recognize that the oppressive air is slowly suffocating us all and that as the humidity climbs, 70, 80, 90% our politics, our fast-walking, and our saving the world are all dying with us. All we can do now is put one hot foot in front of the other.

I wonder what would happen if the humidity ever reached 100%. Would we all just melt and lay there in a puddle? It wouldn’t be much different than how we feel right now and perhaps even better because we, as puddles, wouldn’t have to move or think for the entire month. Our puddle-selves would lie on the side-walk until September when there is the first hint of a breeze and a few leaves start to curl and color, the tourists head out of town, the curtain rises and we remember about the other eleven months. We remember why we live here in spite of August.

On opening night of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” the ticketing machine malfunctioned. For some unknown electronic reason avid fans who had bought tickets weeks in advance for the 7:00 show, were printing out tickets that said “7:45.”

My friends and I arrived at 5:30 so that we could be at the front of the line entering the theater. We had been preparing for this movie for several months and were determined to get good seats. When our tickets printed out as “7:45” we were annoyed and nervous, but were reassured by the young lady at the theater who told us that everything was going to be fine. So we got in line.

Everything was going smoothly. We entered the theater near the front of the line, sat down in the best seats and started passing around our smuggled treats. It quickly became aparent, though, that there were not nearly enough seats in the theater. About 40-50 people were lining the sides of the theater trying to find the non-existent open seats. Around 6:50 a manager made his way through this crowd and stood in the center of the theater:

“Excuse me everyone! Can I have your attention?” He started. “Can everyone please check and see if they have tickets for 7:00 or 7:45? Okay, now could everyone with tickets for 7:45 please raise their hand.”

Two or three hands went up.

“Don’t worry, just raise your hand, everything is going to be okay.”

My friends and I all made eye contact and silently agreed that we had no intention of raising our hands. We were sure that everything was not going to be okay. Kind of like when the Germans invaded Poland and asked everyone who was Jewish to please step forward.

“The only way we can get all these people seated…” as he pointed to the 50 people still hoping a seat would materialize, “Is if everyone who has a 7:45 ticket stands up and moves to the theater next door.”

No one moved.

The standing up crowd started coming to life as they realized that no one was going to surrender their seats. You could barely hear the manager over the roar of the crowd as he asked us politely again to move. His head was barely visible above the people swarming and clawing around him like piranhas.

Five minutes later young movie theater employees were walking up and down the aisle checking every individual ticket to see if it said 7:00 or 7:45. People were going crazy. The couple sitting next to us had been the very first in line. They had homemade “Dumbledore’s Army” t-shirts. The awkward 17 year old employee got to our row…

Employee: “Um, sir, you are going to have to go to the other theater,” he mumbled.

Mr. DA: “There is no way I’m leaving. We got here two hours early! If you can guarantee me these exact seats in the other theater, then I will move.”

Employee: “I can’t guarantee that.”

Mr. DA: “Then I’m not moving!”

One by one he went down our row and one by one we refused to leave our seats. The same thing was going on all throughout the theater. The standing crowd was yelling back, “Get a police escort!” Someone else yelled, “You’ll have to get a police escort! I bought tickets for the *&%^ing 7:00 show too!”

The Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince experience suddenly jumped from PG to PG-13. This would have been unfortunate if there had been any children in the theater. But luckily there weren’t. I don’t think there were even any teenagers in the theater besides the employees. Only adults. Adults who, according to the Motion Picture Association of America are mature enough to hear the f-bomb dropped in a movie, but apparently not mature enough to keep their cool in the face of a disaster. Especially one fought over something as important as where you get to sit the movie theater on opening night.

I listen to music that makes me feel. Whether it is sad or happy or overplayed, I want to feel like my heart is going to burst. I want the lyrics to to be profound and symbolic and I want the music to make me move. I want the two to meld perfectly in rhythm and melody up and down through a transformative instrumental solo and around. I want the bridge to change my life.

I don’t want to clean my house to some background music. I want to listen to music to some background cleaning. When I turn on music on the metro, crowds and heat no longer affect me. Inside I am dancing and spinning and throwing my arms up in the air. I’m shouting the lyrics. This song can save lives! I try to keep it together on the outside, but when the song is over I realize that I’ve been tapping my foot and closing my eyes and mouthing the words to the song. I can’t be sure I haven’t sung  out loud. I notice the other commuters look uncomfortable, but I can’t stop myself and when the next song starts, I don’t care enough to try.

We all do it now and then. Sometimes life is just that bad. We all choose a medium and a moment and off we go. The first time I was really furious with my father, I had to escape. I rollerbladed down to Taco Time and got two rolled chicken tacos. Then I went to the dollar movie and saw Independence Day by myself, in my socks, because rollerblades were not allowed in the theater. Also, it didn’t make me feel any better. It was dark when the movie got out and I was tired. I wanted to call my dad to come pick me up, but I was still angry. That’s the thing with escape. It is not a cure, and a lot of the time it makes you feel worse when you re-enter the real world than you did before you left. You can’t stay escaped forever.

But you can sure try. On particularly bad days I will take the metro down to the movie theater first thing in the morning and stay there for most of the day. I call it “going to the movies.” I see whatever is on that day no matter how bad it is. I just want to live in any other world besides the real one. If I feel like I need to get away from a long term problem, I will bury myself in Harry Potter or watch another season of 24 straight through or try to consecutively beat every level of Free Cell. Those can keep me away for days.

My friend was talking to me the other day about her addiction to prescription medication. She had just gotten out of rehab and I couldn’t understand it. Why? How? What drove my friend to those extremes? They put her in with people addicted to heroin, meth, alcohol and porn.

“It starts with escape,” she said. “You feel bad and you know there is something that can make you feel really good, something to take the pain away, and it’s right in front of you.”

Like the desperate cookie binge. Like the reckless shopping spree at Nordstrom Rack. Like the miles run in the middle of the night hoping physical pain would would be easier to bear.

There is no rehab for the mediums I choose. Sometimes I wish I could walk to a center tucked up somewhere in the woods and admit myself. They would sit me in a room with nothing to distract me. And I would have no choice but to feel it. To let it wash over and through me. To stare at reality for what it is and not try to run away.

And then maybe I would be free of worrying about what I can’t control. I could live my life running side by side with pain and joy, not trying to get away. Realizing that those are threads that make up my life. Both strands are necessary to make it beautiful. So until that day, I will have to learn on my own to take life and face it, head on.

Tonight I have a one-way ticket to the movies. I will do my best to muster the strength to rip it up and not hide away just because things are hard. I will do my best and someday my best will be enough.

When I was 8 my friends and I started a club. It was called Silver View. We had a cheer (1-2-3-Silver View!), a schedule, a treasurer and a president (me.) We were on a very tight schedule of swimming, playing dress-up and making cookies. Our funds were low, but we kept a shoe box under the bed just in case any came in.

One day my little brother (5) approached me and asked if he could be in the club. This was a very exclusive club, but it was hard for me to say no.  I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and look like the “bad guy” so instead I put him through a series of tasks which he had to accomplish in order to be initiated into the club. I was positive that the tasks I had thought up would be too difficult for a young 5-year old such as himself. However, he exceeded my expectations and I was in a very tight spot.

At this point, I knew I was in too deep. I had forced my little brother through a series of ridiculous tasks and I couldn’t possibly look him in the eye and say “just kidding.” On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly go to the girls and tell them that I let a 5 year old boy into Silver View. It was a girls-only club and we did not want a pesky little brother around. I should have been straight with him, but I still thought I could get out of this without looking like “the bad guy.” So I thought up one more task.

I told my brother that if he wanted to be in the club, for his final task, he had to run around the house 500 times in a row. I was positive there was no way his little legs would carry him that far. I was wrong.

The club was having swimming time as we all watched him round the house over and over until he reached 500. It took him all afternoon, but he did it. I was horrified. How could I have let this happen? As he ran up to me panting and proud at the end of the day, I knew I had to think fast. “Good job,” I said, “But there is still one more task. You have to lick the pavement.” He looked at me with frustrated and sad eyes, bent down, and licked the pavement.

And in the end I still had to tell him straight, that it was a club for girls and he wasn’t welcome. Which is what I should have just told him at the beginning.

*This post is dedicated to a friend of a friend (you know who you are). Your excuses are transparent. Don’t make anyone lick the pavement before you tell it to them straight. You are “the bad guy” either way so get over it.

Today I am honored to be a guest blogger on The Apron Stage.

Last weekend I stayed at the Ritz Carlton resort in Montego Bay with three of my roommates. We really had no business being at the Ritz and it was obvious as we rolled into the hotel and crashed the lounge party in our grungy plane clothes. (That night we carefully went over the dress code to see if the clothes we wadded up in our backpacks could possibly comply.)

The last morning, as we were sipping our final pina coladas, we got into a conversation with two experienced resort-goers. They were resort snobs much like I am a food snob and were indifferent towards the quality of the Ritz Jamaica resort. “It pales in comparison to the Ritz Carlton Resort on Maui” they said. I kind of cringed on the inside and secretly hoped I would never become indifferent to staying at a five star resort. However, I also never thought the day would come when I would turn up my nose at a Hint of Lime Tostito because of the partially hydrogenated oils.

It is hard not to be changed by our life experiences, though. When I was a kid, all I wanted out of a hotel was a rollaway bed and a pool. I remember jumping into the HoJo pool next to the freeway in the middle of Kansas and thinking I was the luckiest girl alive.

Later I discovered that some of the nicer hotels had saunas. I started craving the smell of the cedar wood and the hot, dry, air. The pool just didn’t do it for me anymore. It was no use going in if I couldn’t visit the sauna afterward.

The Ritz Jamaica took it one step further with the introduction of the cold plunge. Nothing prepared me for how invigorating it was to go from pool to sauna to an icy plunge. We actually had a serious conversation about the possibility of converting one of our bathtubs into a cold plunge. I’m not sure I’ll ever be satisfied with *just* a sauna again and that is a sorry state of affairs.

I think I can guarantee that I will never become an outward resort snob. I’ll monitor my comments and carefully put on a front of satisfaction with the Holiday Inn, but I can’t make any promises about the inward snobbery. It’s not that I’m used to it, or that I feel entitled, it’s just that I know the same twinge of disappointment I feel when there are only bagged salads at the church potluck will surface again when I see there is no cold plunge on the menu.

More on the Jamaica trip can be found here and here.