In which I step right out of the comfort zone...

After sitting on the fence for a couple of weeks, I have finally made a decision about a major change in my life and the life of my son. It's a change that is exciting and scary and thrilling for me... and is making a lot of other people –  virtually everyone close to me – very unhappy. Some are sad, some are hurt.  And one in particular is very angry.  But I'm doing it anyway.

I have accepted a position as writer and editor at the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.  This means, of course, that Grayson and I will be moving there very soon, and it means that I have made a decision that, though I feel it is a good one for me and my son in the long run, impacts many other people negatively.

This is, I think, the first time in my life I have made a decision like this.  Never before have I decided against the wishes of those around me. Always I have chosen the road of least resistance.  Now, at last, I have to decide for Me.  Not for my parents, not for my son, not for my boyfriend or my ex husband, my friends or my workplace.  Just. For. Me.

This is excruciatingly difficult.  I will be leaving behind all my support systems and comfort zones, uprooting Grayson from his home, school, family and friends, creating warlike conditions between his father and me, and all based on a Hope.  A Belief that now is the right time for this change, that I'm ready, that Grayson can handle it, and that when the dust settles it will be a change for the better.  A new beginning. A fresh start.  And for once ... just because I Want It.

I Want this job. I Want to move to Bentonville:  a smallish town amid other smallish towns and surrounded by the beautiful, wild Ozark landscape. I want to start something new, learn new things, figure stuff out, make new friends... all my own, without the taint of memory or failure or bitterness.  I'm excited about this move, despite the fact that all those who love me best are saddened by it. 
It feels unbelievably selfish. But this time I'm not going to cave. I'm not going to shrink away from change and I'm not going to relax into the safety of the status quo.  I've been offered this amazing opportunity, to work as a writer and editor for a major new museum in a beautiful location.  If I turn this down, I'm turning away from living my life for me.

I will begin working at Crystal Bridges on July 25.  In four weeks I will need to find a place to live, pack up our belongings, wrap up my work at my current museum, orchestrate a move and get Grayson enrolled in a new school in a new town. I am, in short, going to be busier than a one-armed paper-hanger.

But somehow the worst is over. After agonizing and agonizing, I made the hard decision and now I can just take my lumps and keep moving until I get through it. On the other side of it all, the life I live will be my own.

Forgetting

Last week while my parents had my son with them at their lake house, I was charged with coming by every couple of days to water the potted plants on the front and pack porches.  On Friday, when I came by their house to pick up my kid, my dad was standing in the front yard with the hose, frantically hosing down the pots of petunias, trying to save the poor shrivelled things.  I'd completely forgotten.

This is not an isolated incident. Last week I had a terrible fight with The X, part of which was centered around the fact that I regularly forget to tell him about upcoming events, activities and important dates in Grayson's calendar. He sees it as deliberately cutting him out of our son's life.  It's not. I just forget.

The X could confirm this by just asking our son.  He'll tell you:  Mom Forgets.  Mom forgets to pack a lunch on field trip day. Mom forgets the time the school party is supposed to start and arrives just as it is ending. Mom forgets to refill his lunch account. Mom forgets the birthday party he was supposed to go to, or forgets to buy a gift.  Mom forgets that it's Scout night, even though every Monday is Scout night, and is surprised when Dad shows up to take him to the meeting. Mom forgets.

I wasn't always this way. I don't know if my forgetfulness is a sign of aging (god, I hope not), a lack of sleep, a failure of attention to detail, or some sort of psychological resistence to the myriad little necessary details of daily life. Sometimes, I simply fail to engage. I'm reading the teacher's note, but I'm not really absorbing all the details;  I'm hearing a coworker ask for information, but I'm not really making a mental note to fulfill the request. By the time I get to my office, the entire conversation is ancient history.

I am, I think... a little spaced out. Lately I just don't seem to be entirely there, wherever I am.  As I'm writing this now,  part of my brain is thinking about a couple of things I need to do today... things I will likely forget before this post is complete. My new absent-mindedness is part of why I have embarked on this Search for the Self. I feel reasonably sure that if I can get a handle on Who I Am... if I can come to terms with myself and be truly comfortable in my own skin, my brain won't be always pulled in two directions at once. Centeredness is the key, I think. I need to pull in all my mental tentacles (heh heh... mental tentacles... that would be a good band name) and focus on the still, calm center of Myself. 

The Buddhists talk about the need to Be Here Now. To practice Presence. It is something I aspire to.  Lately I feel like the cartoon character with the birds tweeting in a circle around her head:  thoughts, ideas, feelings, memories, worries... all circling noisily.  So I forget things, I lose things, I have to ask people to repeat what they've just said, I can't focus on tasks at hand, and I generally feel like my head has grown wings and is fluttering annoyingly just out of reach.

Somebody hand me a net.

Meanwhile, I sent my son off to camp yesterday, and I'm facing another week of being child-free.  This is week two of three in a row I have to do without my son in June.  I miss him, but I know he's happy at camp, where he is in the horseback riding club, and may be this moment saddled up on a horse, joyfully learning to ride.  If he's happy, I'm happy.  Lonely, a bit. But happy.

To keep the loneliness at bay yesterday after he left, I arranged to do a few hours service at Wildcare. I helped to muck out the Duck Inn, where are the little baby ducklings are housed. I fed young owls and hawks bits of chopped up rat at the end of a long set of forceps, and I chopped veggies and fruit for the little possums and raccoons. There are three new baby fawns there this week:  the sweetest, tiniest things, all spindly legs and big ears. They were orphaned, and without their mothers to feed and groom them, they were malnourished and weak, and covered in so many ticks that their eyes were infected and swelled shut.  Now they are tick free, they are bottle fed several times a day and their eyes are being cleaned and treated so that hopefully there will be no permanent damage.  Their poor mothers would be so relieved.

Route 66 with my Boy

I had the opportunity recently to take a roadtrip with my ten-year-old son, Grayson.  It wasn't a long roadtrip:  just four hours.  (My son is taking a couple of seriously long trips later this summer with his dad, whose family is from El Paso, TX, where they will be journeying together.)  We went to northwest Arkansas for just a day and a half.

I wanted to make the trip fun for us, so at the beginning, we started out on historic Route 66.  Oklahoma has the longest unbroken stretch of "The Mother Road" in the country, and it's still peppered with a few nostalgic landmarks.  I wanted him to get an essential Oklahoma experience out of the trip, because being from Oklahoma is a big part of who I am... and of who he is, as well.

"Okies" on Route 66, heading West.

Most people have never been to Oklahoma, and their entire concept of the state begins and ends with the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical of the same name, and/or The Grapes of Wrath.  Those people are very hard to convince that they don't know Jack Shit about Oklahoma.  Mostly because they don't really want to know. It's easier to just feel smug and superior and sneer at us Okies. 




A still pool in the Wichitas.

Oklahomans aren't all that proud.  I don't mean that we don't take pride in our state, I mean that we're not the least bit snotty about it.  You can be snotty about your state (well, you shouldn't be, but you can be) when you're from some glitzy place like California, or if you live in some hotspot of culture like New York City.  But nobody buys it if you're snotty about Oklahoma. Oklahoma is one of those places that most people think of as being somewhere you are from:  as in... you're not there anymore.  But those who know the state – who have lived here or taken the time to get to know us – understand what a good place it is. 

Oklahoma is like the still, certain core of being for me. It's unassuming, diverse, complex, humble, sweeping, humorous, beautiful and true.  It takes a time to get to know her, but she's full of quirks, kindnesses, and comforts.  She's got a big heart, and just wants people to love her.

A stop at Pops

So we hit the Mother Road, and I explained to Grayson why Route 66 was an important piece of American history.  I was afraid it would be hard to explain to a kid who grew up in the age of cell phones and wireless internet how a long strip of asphalt could hold value.  But he seemed to get it.  I think the movie Cars helped.

We made a few stops along the way, to see some of the classic Route 66 landmarks.  We stopped at Pops just outside of Edmond and picked up some funky sodas. We saw the round barn at Arcadia. And best of all, we stopped at the Blue Whale in Catoosa.



Catoosa's Blue Whale. Well loved.  



The whale isn't as old as you might think. It was build in the early 70s, not the 50s. But it has all kinds of nostalgic charm. The homely, rural swimming hole setting, the brightly colored concrete picnic tables and hand-painted signs all say "simpler times."  I shot this photo of G to mimic a photo of me shot in the same place in 1971 or 72, when I was just five or six and the whale was new. I don't really remember the trip, or if I do, it's very hazy.  But I knew my parents would remember the photo, so I made them a new one. 





Grayson seemed to like the whale, though he said it really needed some repairs. And as we left he looked over his shoulder and said he felt bad for the whale, because there was nobody but us there to see it.  I looked back at its big smiling blue face. That whale has been a cultural icon for Oklahoma for nearly 40 years. It has fans all over the world.  It may well be smiling still when I'm dead and gone.  "It knows its loved," I said.

A parable.

I'll be straight up with you... or as straight up as I can be at present.  I'm on the cusp of a potentially major change in my life.  It could be a good change... but it seems there is nothing good without a price.  "You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs," I've heard. I never really found myself in the position to truly understand and appreciate that truth until now.  Every silver lining has its cloud, apparently.

So I wait, to see what happens.  Either way it's good and bad. And in the meantime I neither eat nor sleep properly. I lay awake and turn over in my mind those mental prayer beads of doubt and worry.  It's a long string:  fear, regret, hope, grief, excitement, doubt, love and sorrow... rubbed smooth with handling, but no less painful for that.

What is worse?  Major change in your life, or the anticipation thereof?  I'm rather inclined to think it's the anticipation. At least once the change is a sure thing, you can take action, for good or ill. 

But I've been a bit too good, over the past few years, at taking action.  I tend to keep busy, keep moving to keep the dark at bay. And now... now at last the dark begins to creep up on me.  And my torch is flickering, I've backed myself into the wall, and the only way out is straight up... or else to set my feet and face what's coming toward me... the thing that's been stalking me.

Meanwhile my companions, torn and desperate, are beckoning to me from the adjacent passageway, utterly mystified at my refusal to run. Why would I stay here and face down this monster?  Why do I not run to safety, again?  It's always worked before.  But something tells me this time I have to face what's following me.  I have to turn and touch it, wrestle it down, feel its fragile reality under my boot before I can move on without fear.  Because it's only getting larger in my mind.  And the shadow it casts is much greater than the monster itself.


A rope dangles overhead, just out of reach -- lit by a distant glow of light that may or may not be a way out, but I can't go until I've faced It. And in the meantime, my companions -- their light, heat and warmth, their surety of the way out -- retreat further down the passage... backing toward safety, calling... and soon they will turn and run.  And if the rope doesn't reach, or the light is just an illusion... then, whether the monster is real or not, I will be left alone in the dark.

So I watch. 

Wildcare

I did my Sunday morning shift at Wildcare today.  It's always a bit of a challenge to get out of bed at 8:00 on a Sunday morning to go scrape bird poop off towells and dump waterbowls with possum turds floating in them. But I always feel I am a better person as I'm driving home than I was when I arrived.  It's good to be reminded that I am just an animal among other animals. 

A young hawk with an injured wing
 regards me with hostility. Even tiny and
damaged, it knows it's a predator.

I work primarily in the bird room:  a small space filled with cages of screaming baby birds, all wanting to be fed NOW.  My job is to get all the cages cleaned so they can go outside in the yard and get some fresh air and sunshine. The little birds are fearless, and they jump on your hands, begging for food, as you clean their cages. I love the feel of their warm, soft little bodies in my hands when I need to move them to get the paper in their cage.  I love the feel of their little dinosaur feet holding my finger.  They are so amazingly, astonishingly and wonderfully ALIVE.  And hungry! 

Today there was a whole fresh crop of babies.  Gone were the starlings and woodpeckers and most of the jays. Now the cages were full of blackbirds, grackles, and robins.  Rondi told me you can tell what month it is by what kind of babies you are getting.  All the different species have different seasons.  At home, all five of the little baby finches in the nest on our porch have flown away. 

After the birds, I troop out to the "play yard" to clean the bank of outdoor cages I call "Possum Row."   Usually these are full of either older juvenile possums, starting to get their adult evil-possum attitude, or large litters of babies, all goofy and curious and utterly unaffraid. I enjoy doing this, in spite of the fact that it's hot, smelly, swarming with flies, and a good place to pick up the occasional tick.  The possums are so hilariously, frowsily cute.  Their fur stands out in every direction, they have bright, curious bead eyes, they can grab the cage with their scaly, naked little tails, and their front feet look like hands in little black, fingerless gloves.  ("Thieves' gloves," my friend Michael calls them.) There was a surprise for me, today, however. 

Skunks!

A cage full of the most adorable baby skunks.  They were all piled up together, snoozing. But when I approached, they got all brave and some would charge the front of the cage, tiny tail up and threatening, and stamp their little front feet to warn me off.  I don't know at what age they get their smell... but I was being very careful not to piss them off, I can tell you.

Dawn Chorus

Up early today, with the back door open, listening to the Dawn Chorus as I wait for my coffee to brew.  I'm not naturally a morning person, but there are pleasures special to the pre-dawn hour that I can certainly appreciate.  The Chorus is one of them.  I love hearing the birds gradually wake up and the crickets wind down as the sky lightens.  I wonder what it's like to be a bird and get up every morning Singing:  just calling out your song to the world to greet the day.  That's how I'd like to be.  "Good morning World!"

I'm not, though.  Most mornings I'm groggy and disheveled and slow.  I'm utterly useless until I've had a cup of coffee. I am not, one might say, "getting the worm" at any hour before 8 a.m.  Though mostly my son and my dogs get me up by 7:30 at the latest.

This morning, however, is a different story, and I'm pleased for this opportunity to serve as audience to all my exuberantly wakeful avian neighbors.



It's amazing how many birds there are around us.  We barely notice them half the time, but when you start paying attention you notice:  they're everywhere. In every tree and shrub, bathing in puddles on the roadside, fluttering between the ceiling girders in Walmart, nesting under the overpasses, picking scraps out of the garbage, in a million different incarnations. How in the world is it possible for our world to have been blessed by these little miracles of evolution?  Flying dinosaurs, bright colored and bright eyed, flitting through our sky and we fail, most of the time, to be properly dumbfounded by them.  One look at their scaly little dinosaur feet and their reptilian ancestry is apparent.  They're a great example of what an extra few million years of evolution will get ya.  Wonder what humans will look like in 120 million years?  Oh, yeah, that's right, we'll have driven ourselves extinct long before then.

Well, best enjoy it while we're still on the planet, I suppose.

Kobi sleeps

I mentioned to someone a day or two ago that I wished I could be like my dog, Kobi.  Kobi wakes up joyfully every morning.  She sleeps under my covers, at the foot of my bed, and every morning she burrows her way up to my face and greets me as if I've been away for a week.  She's so glad to see me!  She's so happy to be alive!  And isn't it a beautiful, wonderful morning?  And then, when I ask "do you want to go outside?"  she is ecstatic!  "Oh Boy! Oh Boy!  Outside!  Oh Boy!  Let's go!"  And she runs to the door and eagerly waits for me to open it.  She races into the yard like kids to the icecream van.

When Kobi's not doing something important, like watching the front yard for intruders or playing with her sisters or chewing on something, she's asleep.  Just like that.  Yet when she's sleeping and the situation calls for her to be awake, she is instantly and enthusiastically awake. Bam!  No grogginess, no stumbling around  sleepily. She's awake.

How I would love to just shut my brain down and go to sleep when I'm not doing something!  How I would love the simple joy of living in the moment: Now. Now. Now!  Not endessly worrying over a thousand little troubles.  The word "worry" refers to a compulsive touching, as we do to a sore spot, and also to the vigorous shaking a dog gives a bone or toy or unfortunate prey animal.  It comes from the Old English word for "strangle."  Yeah.  That feels about right.

So I am practicing. Trying to live like Kobi, Here in the moment Now, with no part of my mind off doing its own thing. Trying to just Be who I Am. Celebrating Being, like those birds:  unabashedly, every morning:  "I'm Here!  I'm Here! I'm Here!