You Shall Not Pass

It seems the universe vacilates on its opinion of me.

First I'm soaring:  receiving the bounty of a new job, a fresh start.  I lose a house and gain a house, I serendipitously meet people who shine a positive light into my life. I feel like Everything is Meant to Be...

Then I'm snatched down as if by the flaming whiplash of the Balrog:  sucked childishly into acrimonious conflict with the X. Blazing into petty sniping with the boyfriend. Circling my office like an anxiety-ridden tiger in a cage, distracted to paralysis by the enormity of my To Do list.  Snapping at my son.  Yesterday my car wouldn't start. My camera stopped working. The external hard drive I purchased to transfer all my photos onto wouldn't format for the computer I'm using.



Today is my next to last day at work.  I have at least three more days worth of stuff to accomplish, and a doctor's appointment this morning to eat up a good hour of the day. 


What gives?  Did I get too cocky?  Too confident? Has the universe turned its back on me?


And as the chaos begins to wind itself up to the point at which I either overcome it or run howling mad through the streets... I have something of an epiphany. Eventually – and sooner rather than later – I will have to give up on getting everything done and just go....  Go.  Throw everything up in the air and run out from under it. Balrog or no Balrog.

"Fly, you fools."

Descending the maelstrom

Tuesday after the holiday weekend, I got up and hit the road by 7 a.m. to drive back to Bentonville and find a place to live. 

Again.

As I needed to be back in Oklahoma City by 6:30 to pick up my son, I had to leave Bentonville by 3 p.m., which means I had approximately 4 hours in town to seek out and secure a place for us to live.  Amazingly enough, I managed it. I stumbled across a house for rent by the owner that we had somehow managed to miss the first time around.  I called the very nice woman who owns it, who just happened to have left her twin baby girls at Mothers Day Out that day, so was able to accommodate my request for an instant showing.

The house was perfect. It's toward the end of a dead-end street, so no zipping through-traffic.  It has a six foot cedar fence all the way around, lots of trees in the back, a big master bedroom with a bow window, a kitchen I could roller skate in (which about all I do in the kitchen, anyway), a big open living room and a gas fireplace. I said "I'll take it."

She hesitated, but I charmed and cajoled, and she said "I just have a good feeling about you.  I'll go ahead and let you have it now. I know you need to get back to Norman."

She just had a good feeling about me.  I just happened to see the sign.  She told me later, as I was handing over the money order for the deposit, that she had told her husband she had a feeling that this time they would rent the house to a single mom.  Me.

Remember when I said that the nice lady with a radio station to God had told me that something good was coming for me? Well, she called yesterday, and told me she had heard I was moving, was happy for my new position, and she knew I'd be happy in it, and she was sure God had blessed me.  I wasn't at all sure that it wasn't HER who had blessed me.  Her faith and goodness seem to rub off on me every time I talk with her, even though I'm not Christian and I don't even really know her very well.  Maybe she truly is tapped into something old and deep.  I don't know.  But she called it.  I hope she keeps me in her prayers on that broadband.

In general I find that this move has shown me the best of people.  It has brought forward kind words from the most seemingly unlikely quarters, and I've been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and congratulations from my colleagues and friends and acquaintances and acquaintances of acquaintances.  My dear friend, Jin, had a party for me on Saturday, and everyone was so nice and asked so many flattering questions about the new job that I began to feel sort of bad for talking about myself. "Yes, it's a beautiful new museum!  Yes, I'm so excited to be going!  Yes, it's wonderful to have been chosen from the many who must have applied!"  Me, me, me...  I began to worry that everyone must think me a terrible conceited ass.  But the whole experience has been one of positive reinforcement and harmonic convergence.  I truly think that I'm experiencing one of those manifestations we read about in the hippy dippy literature.  "Open yourself to the Universe and change will come for you."  I know that when this blog was born of the ashes of Scrawlspace in May, there was no such place – in my experience, anyway – as Bentonville, Arkansas. 

As my last day at the Sam draws near, however, things get pressurized, and my choices get fuzzier.  There is so much to do and I want to do it right – to leave things in proper order, to tie up the loose ends. I know there's no way I'll get it all tied down, but I'm scrambling to try to do so.  Scrambling at home, too, trying to juggle packing and organizing and feeling bad about the time I don't have to spend with family or my boyfriend or friends... arguing by email and text message with the X... and through all of it trying to save up a little special time with Grayson. This is his last week at home before he goes to spend a week and a half with his grandparents in New Mexico and El Paso.  It's his last week in this home, as well, and I'm painfully aware that he's aware that our time here is drawing to a close... that after Friday, the next time we see each other will be in Arkansas.  I'm doing what I can to make the transition as painless as possible, but I'm also under a lot of pressure, and sometimes I'm short tempered or grouchy or unreasonable. 

Yesterday I snapped at him because he was picking at me to help him synch his Nintendo DS with the Wii. Of course, I know nothing about it, plus the wifi is wonky the last few days, and then when I nearly erased his game, he snatched the controller out of my hand and I snapped.  I felt terrible about it instantly, but I made him cry, and I just couldn't apologize enough.  How do you explain grown-up stress to a kid?  There are so many complicated factors to my stew of emotions, I don't fully understand it myself.  I'm excited and fearful. Exhausted and exhilarated. Anxious and ebulient.  As usual, my boy was preternaturally perceptive and kind.  In fact, he was so gentle and solicitous with me all evening that I felt even more guilty about my waspish, un-mom-like behavior. When will I start being the mother I should be and want to be, and stop being this overgrown kid who's in over her head?

In the final days, I just have to keep my head down and keep moving. I know that I asked the Universe for this chance, and now it's up to me to reach out and take it.  Chaos, as I said at the beginning of this blog, is my patron saint.  Out of chaos are all things born. So I just grope my way forward through the maelstrom and have faith I'll come safely – and sanely – through the other side. 

Back to the Drawing Board...

Maybe I jinxed the house, after all.  I got a call from the realtor yesterday that I'd been mysteriously misquoted on the rent.  It was $100 more than my limit.  Sigh.  I could feel the house slipping through my fingers.

Back to the drawing board, then.  There were two other houses we looked at that I could afford.  The best of the two was missing part of a fence along one side, so I volunteered my dad and I to build that fence, if the owner would let us deduct materials from the first month's rent.  Haven't heard about that proposal.  Plan C is a smaller house on a slightly busier street, but if the answer is no on the Fence House, then I'll call the Plan C house and see if it's still available. If it isn't... guess what?  I'm driving back to Bentonville tomorrow morning and truly starting the search over.

Meanwhile, I'm packing my belongings to move them.... somewhere.  I spent almost all day yesterday packing books and closets.  I can't even look in Grayson's room.  When he gets home Tuesday night we have to spend some serious time together, culling things from his vast collection. I told him he could keep the money from any of his stuff he sold in the Garage Sale on Saturday, hoping to motivate the boy to let go of more stuff.  He's got toys he hasn't touched in over a year, plus bins and boxes of what I call "junk" – just random bits of things: Happy meal toys, prizes from birthday parties and Chuck E Cheese, plastic animals, things made of Sculpey, a million high-bounce balls, souvenirs from zoos and museums, trinkets and JUNK.  I'm tempted to pour it all into a big cardboard box and put a "25 cents each" sign on it.  But there will certainly be some treasure in there he can't bear to part with, so we'll have to go through it together.

For my part, I culled my books down to 16 boxes, not counting the three or four boxes of picture books and children's books that were already in the garage.  It wasn't the cut I intended, but culling books is always so hard! Some books I've had for twenty years and, though I really have no reason to keep them... I've had them for twenty years!  How can I part with them now?

 I know, for example, that I have not opened my giant, onion-skin paged two-volume Anthology of American Literature from grad school since the 1990s.  But in it went.  Sigh.  I saw my notes on Robert Frost penciled in the margin and it just felt like betrayal to let it go.

I wonder about the trees...

Speaking of Frost. There's a Frost poem that has been running through my head these last few days.  I've quoted it before, here or elsewhere.  It speaks to me.  It's called The Sound of Trees. 
In it, Frost says

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay.

It always reminded me of myself:  dreaming and talking about going off somewhere, making a change. But I never did. I never followed through on it. Until now.

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

Home Sweet (Almost) Home

I spent the last few days in Bentonville, looking for a rental house with my mom.  It's become a sort of tradition.  When I went away for Grad school to Chapel Hill, NC, my mom went with me the first time, to find a place to live.  We had many adventures, and many good times, driving around the town together, trying to get our bearings.  To tell the truth, she remembers more of it than I do... or maybe she just remembers different parts.  But whether or not we remember the same things, it's an important memory we share together, and an important milestone in my life that she was there to help shepherd me through.

My dad is always there, too, I have to say.  Not physically, but very much in spirit, calling to check up on us, asking questions, worrying over us.  I'm not sure, frankly, why it's been my mom that goes and my dad that stays, but that's the way it is.

This time was reminiscent of the last.  I drove, so I'd benefit from the kinetic memory of the town that you get from physically driving it.  My mom navigated.  Unless I was turned around.  Or the map was turned around. Or we were all turned around.  I managed NOT to run over the woodchuck that scampered across the road in front of us on the first day, but I very nearly drove us into the front of a large construction truck while looking for a street address (thereby inspiring the ire of the driver, who was NOT amused when we crossed paths again a few blocks later and I was backing up in the middle of an intersection to correct a missed turn).  In the first hour I was so distracted, anxious and excited that I drove over a curb, stopped in the middle of more than one intersection, and was sneered at by a handful of truck drivers before I finally got my bearings.

The first day was spent just driving around, getting familiar with neighborhoods.  Bentonville, as the headquarters of Walmart, is a small town that grew very quickly.  So it has a charming town square and old center, with beautiful old homes on wooded lots, surrounded by modern suburbs that have developed in the past 20 years... and many in the past 10.  It's a strange juxtaposition of old and new, with very little transitional architecture.  In most towns you can see the old homes from the 1920s to 1940s, then the WWII homes, thrown up quickly to accommodate the GIs coming home. Then the groovy 60s and 70s homes, with their split levels, flat roofs, berms, guy-wires and groovy cast-iron railings... and then the 80s mcMansions, huge roofs, enormous overblown porticos, brick and faux stone... and finally the more most 90s starter homes, mass-produced by some low-budget developer expressly for new couples and people like me, starting over:  all made out of ticky-tacky and all looking just the same.

In Bentonville, you go straight from 1920 to 1980 with no steps in between.  That's an overstatement, of course.  But its clear from the layout and architecture of the place that the town was mostly stable through the 60s and 70s and exploded from the 80s on.  It's actually several towns melded together:  Bentonville, Centerton, Rogers, Little Flock, Bella Vista... all small towns closely spaced originally, now all one metro area with burbs and chain establishments in between.  A new dynamic for me.  Norman was founded on the Land Run and has grown steadily outward ever since. I'm sure if you plotted its architecture and growth, it would resemble tree rings.  Not so Bentonville.  It's like bamboo:  Ka Blam!

I'm rambling.  The point, and I do have one, is that once I came to terms with this fact of architecture, I was able to look for a new home there with a fresh perspective. I had imagined myself living in the city center, near the town square, in the old section.  Well, that's for when I've paid my debts and can buy one of the gorgeous old historic homes down there.  For now:  call me Suburbia.

The upshot is that I have turned in an application for a four-bedroom house with a walk-in closet the size of an airplane hangar, and I'm anxiously waiting the results.  I can't think of any reason why my application would be rejected, but the sheer fact of having to apply for the house presumes the possibility of rejection. So we wait.  By 5:00 last night they hadn't gotten the credit check back yet.

(Possibly) my new dwelling place in AR

The house is really great. Way nicer than anywhere I have ever lived, with the exception of the wonderful old house the X and I bought together a few years before the divorce.  This one has the edge even on that house because it's new, with things like modern plumbing and closet space, and without things like knob and tube electrical wiring.

I think I would have taken it for the walk-in closet alone, which is a luxury I have never had.

I will hold off on talking too much about the house here, for fear of jinxing it somehow.

Today  my mom and I are going to go walk the trails to the museum construction overlook so she can get a look at my future job site.  Then we'll wander around the farmers market downtown and then I suppose we'll head back to Oklahoma, whether or not we've heard about the house. I really don't want to drive back without a lease, but there's not much else I can do until I get confirmation or denial.

Wish me luck