le petit hiboux | owls gone wild

Predictably, I stopped writing here as soon as the semester started. This is because I am busier than I have ever been. Serving as Graduate Assistant to one of my favorite professors has been a godsend, if only because I am too busy Tuesday through Thursday to spend much time feeling sorry for myself. I am dressing like a grown-up and going in to work and impressing the pants off my professors and all I can think is, this is what I was supposed to be doing. I was supposed to be this busy, this studious, this excited about school. So my dad wasn't supposed to die in the middle of it, fair enough, but at least I am doing what I was supposed to do.

Only, the sad thing is, all I can do is what I was already doing. I feel crippled, hobbled, when I think about doing anything - passing any landmark of time - that will be the first thing my dad doesn't know I'm doing. The big slam of the bell will signal that this was the first time I made a decision without him and for all the strength I thought I had, I don't have enough yet for that.

I have just enough strength, it seems, to recognize that tomorrow is his birthday so I should go out to dinner with my closest friends at his favorite pizzeria and be grateful that I'm still his daughter and I still love pizza. I also have just enough strength - but only just - to know that I'll get stronger.

I saw a friend last night who's already ridden this particular carnival ride and she asked how it was going and I said, I don't know, it's going whether I want it to or not, and she said, sucks, doesn't it, and I said yeah, would not recommend, would not purchase from again, and we started laughing and I realized, this is funny only because it sucks so much harder than you could ever imagine it sucking. And at least it doesn't always suck alone.

So back when I still had a head reasonably screwed on, I nonetheless decided to coincide a trip to Boston for BFFsie's wedding with ALA Midwinter because, apparently, I like a challenge.

I've been dreading it for a week; squirreling my head away from the conference materials sitting on my desk, I simply couldn't bring myself to Plan such a thing as what to do in two days at my First Ever Professional Conference.

Turns out, all you have to do is show up and know you have a few fabulous fellow Pratthattanites to flounce around with. With which to flounce around. Whatever, I'm tired, it was a lot of work, all that flouncing. Not to mention those margaritas with lunch and all that raiding the ARC piles* like a very well-dressed scavenging horde**. Plus, I got to flounce with BDL, a fellow library student and New Yorker who agrees with me on critical issues pertinent to librarianship like "why do I have to order extra cheese with my fajitas?" and "I expected bagels at this event". In my book this makes her top shelf.

Tomorrow I fully expect Al Gore to ask me to check myself before I wreck myself, environmentally speaking. Aw yeah.

*OMG so much bookswag. Tomorrow I will be strict with myself and only visit vendors that offers products about which I want to learn, instead of flinging myself at the Penguin Booth and just licking all the books.

**SO well dressed, was my gang of ladies. And full of brains. Librarian chicks are awesome.

I don't know why time should matter, the marking of one week to the next shouldn't make grief any more or less burdensome, and yet, I had a terrible day yesterday. Only when I was walking home did I remember that yesterday marked two weeks since dad died, and maybe that was part of it. Only, how? Year-long anniversaries, I can understand. But two weeks? Maybe the part of my brain that likes to race to conclusions was struggling with how little time has elapsed and how much has nonetheless changed.

Last night we watched Man on Wire, the documentary about Philippe Petit's highwire walk between the WTC towers. I was thinking about 1974 and whether my father was still working in Rockefeller Center - had they moved to New Rochelle already? - and before I could catch the sneaky little bastard the thought jumped into being, "I should ask him if he remembers it", and that was hard.

It's all these things I had yet to ask that sink my valiant little boat. At least I know that my dad would have thought walking on a tightrope between the tallest buildings in Manhattan was the work of a lunatic idiot. He might even have used a colorful swearword. No doubts there.

I remember thinking when I was in the hospital for my appendectomy, back in 2003, that being sick in a hospital isn't as tragically glamorous up close as I thought it would be. Or really, tragicaly glamorous at all. I didn't relish the concern, or the doting, or even the lovely flowers. I just wanted to be up, and better, and eating cheeseburgers. I don't know quite what it says about my mind that I had assumed any level of tragic glamour. Too many childhood viewings of Shirley Temple's Heidi, maybe?

This is like that. I think I imagined the grief I'd feel over losing my dad and the real enchilada doesn't look much like it. I probably thought I'd cry more, or more around people other than Stuart. I know I thought I'd have been a wreck at the funeral - I wasn't. I remember being terrified at being around his body right after the life tiptoed out of it. I wasn't, funnily, it was still like being around dad. That was still nice.

But when I do cry, when I do feel it, hoo boy I feel it. I said to Stuart that I felt silly now, for any grief I'd ever felt over any of my ex-boyfriends (sorry guys). He asked why, and I said that until This, there wasn't anything that had made me cry harder than lost love. And now it seems quaint, trite, almost adorable.

I had lunch with Simon, who I have dubbed The Wise Man (it says so in my phone when he rings) and we talked about grief and religion, and whether there's any comfort I'm missing out on by not believing. I suppose you can't walk into a bargain with Belief - you make me feel better in exchange for my membership! - but I wanted to know if it helped. I wanted to know whether I'm missing out by putting Life and Death in two distinct, irreconcilable boxes at opposite ends of a room. My favorite thing about Simon is that he thinks he's some sort of curmudgeonly misanthrope while actually having a heart bigger than Texas. A lot like my dad, actually.

Aside from thinking all these deep fucking thoughts, I also had an amazing massage on Thursday, and I had a wisdom tooth removed yesterday. The ridiculous along with the sublime, it seems.

I'm getting to the end of my gracious length of rope - already! Everyone wants to know how I'm doing, and the right answer involves stuff like "he died peacefully" and "he was such a great man" and "we didn't want him to suffer" and "impossible recovery" and "hospice care" and "holding up". I'm tired of all those terms, even though they're absolutely true.

Today I'm feeling more like telling people that I miss the shit out of him already and it's only been a week. How I'd see him there when we exited the train station at New Haven, standing by the car and wearing a plaid shirt and corduroys with the burgundy suspenders, and he'd look so pleased as punch to see me, and I'd be pleased as punch to see him too, and only one hug was enough to say that. How I never got tired of hearing him say "hi, love" down the phone even if it was third time that day. I feel like telling people that anything is better than gone, that even when he was sick and wordless I loved sitting by the hospital bed and just looking at him, how I'd bring a book and never read it because my eyes just wanted to rest on his face, a face I've known my whole life and maybe even a little before.

Last night I dreamed that he came downstairs and we were all so happy to see him even though we knew he'd died, and how he explained very simply that we'd always be able to sit down in my dreams and have dinner together, and that I could tell him what was going on and he'd remember it the next time. I'd like to think my brain is so tired of thinking about Before so now it's finding ways to live in an After.

I guess there's no polite way to say all that when someone asks you how you're doing. They're not asking you whether you're bouncing back. What they mean is, can you carry on? And I guess I can. 

This morning I made a perfect pot of coffee (two tablespoons to six ounces of water, STUART) and ate half of the perfect vanilla cupcake that Lavina sent me home with. Ever have cupcakes for breakfast? You should. I'm thinking of following it up with croutons for lunch.

Noon will mark the point in this day off where I have to decide if I'm going to
a. sit around watching Instant Netflix and eating bon bons
b. tidy my room and do laundry or
c. go to IKEA and look at closet organizing solutions

On the one hand, I think, I should be as lazy as I can because in the next week I'm
a. having a wisdom tooth removed
b. going to boston for a library conference and
c. a wedding and also
d. coming back to start my third semester where I'm in
e. two demanding classes and also
f. serving as graduate assistant to my highly intelligent knowledge org professor.

On the one hand, I'm reluctant to rob myself of the very last bon-bon/netflix chance I have until May. On the other hand, will sitting around eventually lead to depression and malaise? Is there a third hand?

Do you like this new thing where I open a blog window and just yammer on until I come to a reasonable stopping point? It's like 2003 all over again.

Sitting in the dark theater watching a movie helped. Sea salted caramels and emails from friends and shopping for groceries helped. But I'm still swinging wildly between relief that I'm back home and life will proceed whether I will it to or not, and wishing I was sitting with my arms around my knees on a beach somewhere, giving full rein to my grief. Too bad I live in New York and it's January and there are no beaches with the requisite warmth around.

I bought sweet clementines yesterday and the first one brought me joy, which is funny since my dad and I loved sharing a box of clementines you'd think it'd make me cry (it made Stuart cry a little) but I thought to myself, I'm eating this delicious sweet thing! It's not even one-eye! There's no crying in here. I thought about how I sang him the song in the hospice, as he slept, and how I fumbled past all the deathiness of the last two verses. The clementines are still sweet, the sweetest box I've bought in years. Is meaning found, or created?

There's no shortcut. It wouldn't do any justice if there was. So through it, it is.

I took his old pencil case out of his desk, the day he got too sick to fix. It's a tartan fabric, flat and long, with holes in all four corners. It's got leather alongside the zipper. I'm not sure I meant to bring it back to Brooklyn, but then I did. There's a dime in there, it's from 1941, and it's got Hermes on it instead of Kennedy, obviously.

I think he's had it most of my life, the pencil case, since I remember the privilege of borrowing it when I was young. But I'm sitting at our coffee table looking at it, and I realize I don't know where he got it. My mom might know, most likely, because not all the questions I have are unanswerable, but I can't ask him.

I think about how I felt the day he died; fragile but full of light and grace, full of unrealized sorrow, and so hyperaware of all the love around me. I felt so lucky to have known him.

And now I feel so bereft, so heavy, so unable to ask him questions about the pencil case, or whether there's a maximum I can contribute to my IRA this year, or whether we did alright with his funeral. I don't know that I want that lightness back, now that the sorrow has arrived, because I know I have to go through this, I have to put my head down and get through it. I just keep thinking how upset he would get when I cried about anything, and now he's not here to tell me not to cry because everything is going to be fine, even if it will be.

Here are ten things I learned from my dad:
 
1. Never put anything off; make a list and then do it.
2. Always read the instructions.
3. Money really doesn’t grow on trees.
4. If you’re lucky, you have two or three great friends in life.
5. You get what you pay for, unless it’s at Sam’s, then you get it in bulk.
6. A good steak is always medium rare.
7. Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
8. If you don’t know something, look it up.
9. Work hard, pay your dues, and enjoy it.
10. Love is always unconditional.

For as much as these sound like clichés, my dad meant them. He had the wisdom to back up all his experience, and the advice to help you out when you needed it. If there was something my dad understood, he would explain it. If there was something he didn’t understand, he would research it until he did.

My dad touched so many lives in different ways. He was the funny man with our neighbors, Kathleen and Donna, because he shared their sense of humor. He was the family man with the Pappadopoulos and the Corbetts, because he relished those big family gatherings that we’d missed, so many years abroad. He was the long-suffering Republican to so many of us bleeding-heart liberals. He was the guy with the answers for me, for my brothers, for Stuart. He was the hard worker for his colleagues, who considered his honesty and integrity a breath of fresh air. Perhaps most of all, he was the best husband my mother could ask for, and he treated her like the queen that she is.

But to me, he was my dad. He was my friend, one of those great friends we’re all lucky to find. He taught me the value of my intelligence, he taught me to be brave and confident because I am loved, and maybe he taught me some math along the way. I will miss him every day, but I also know I am tougher, kinder, funnier and braver for being his daughter.

Monday, November 16th
Fajardo to Vieques

We woke up to the dismal sound of steady pounding rain on the deck outside. We gritted our teeth and quickly packed up our bags to head downstairs for breakfast. It was all well and good for it to rain on our first day, where there was no beach involved, but we were headed to the sunny, beautiful island of Vieques! It had to stop raining.

Breakfast was set up in the front courtyard of the hotel, since the beautiful deck at the back was a flood zone, and we dutifully ate our oatmeal while the inn owner tsked at the sheets of rain washing out the car park. She predicted dire delays on the ferry. I resisted throwing a breakfast roll at her head. The coffee was weak. But at least there was bacon; Stuart gave me his last bite to cheer me up.



As we arrived at the ferry terminal and parked our little car in the long-term lot - guarded by strays! -  the rain cleared to a high grey cloudy sky; by the time we boarded, it was sunny in Fajardo but we were chasing the rainclouds eastward across the water to Vieques. Again, rain when we arrived and I held back churlish, childish tears. We found a publico to take us to our car rental place and pick up our 4WD for the two days we were on the island. Imagine, we had two rental cars at once! It felt like a distinctly strange luxury.

We took the winding route 201 south from Isabella Segunda, the main port town on the north side of Vieques, down to the south side of the island and Esperanza. Our lodgings were easy to find, two blocks north of the malecon, the seafront esplanade that made up most of Esperanza.

Carmen showed us our little studio room at Mi Pana apartments, with the louvered hurricane windows we'd seen all over Puerto Rico and a cozy table-and-chair set on the walkway outside. The room was rustic but clean. We sat outside for a few minutes, watching the last of the drizzling rain pass, and made friends with the calico cat that wandered the property. We named him (her? we didn't check) Mofongo.

We changed into beachier duds and headed down to the malecon to grab some lunch at Banana's, the local gringo-ish hangout. In fact, as we wandered the malecon, it was pretty clear that all of Esperanza was a gringo-ish hangout. It had that lush life air that must have drawn Hemingway and his ilk to Key West, before the chain dives and the Banana Republic took over Duvall Street and turned Key West into Cancun East. Everyone looked happy and lazy, even the stray dogs. The rain had washed the streets and the buildings clean and the little beachfront sparkled. We had finally arrived at a beach vacation.



After lunch, we drove the 15 minutes back up to Isabella Segunda to use the only ah-teh-atcheh on the island - imagine! - and to get Stuart some new swim trunks, since the ones he brought were ripped. From there we went straight to Playa Media Luna. I got a kick out of driving along the sandy road next to Sun Bay, bouncing through holes and swerving to miss tree stumps. It felt like Africa again, only this time I was the grown-up singing along to the radio and not the kid stuck in the backseat.
 


We found the beach and I think I might actually have run screaming into the water, even though it was still a little cloudy and windy, I was beyond delighted to be in the ocean. After a lazy hour or so, we explored further down the road trying to find Playa Navio, but the indeterminably deep mudholes prevented us from making it all the way down the road. We turned back and headed back to Mi Pana, to relax a little before our evening's adventure.



At five-forty, we drove back to the Sun Bay parking lot and met our guide, Federico, who told us to slather up with baby oil because, as he said, "the mosquitos here are bad, but out on the bay, it's like war". He drove us, and another couple from Maryland, down a bumpy dark road, far past Playas Media Luna and Navio, to Bahia Mosquito. It was already blanketed darkness in the sky as we unloaded the kayaks alongside a couple other tour companies, but our guy moved fast and we were in the water before the rest of them. Stuart sat behind me and told me what to do with my paddle - c'mon, you think I've ever kayaked before? - and we were soon slicing through the water out to the center of the dark, warm bay.

We reached the center, and Federico gave us a torturous ten-minute lecture on the bio-luminscent bay's ecosystem and conservation efforts, all ten minutes of which we were excitedly dipping our hands in the water to see the sparkles there. He told us how the dinoflagellates used their bioluminescence to appear several hundred times their actual size to scare off predators. He explained how the mangrove swamps surrounding Bahia Mosquito decomposed into the bay, filling it with incredibly rich minerals, and how the very narrow opening to the sea created the ideal conditions for an incredibly dense bioluminiscent bay. He talked a bunch of science and ecology, basically, very little of which I retained since I was splashing my oar in the water to watch the sparkles. And then we finally slid out of the kayaks with woops and hollers and into the warm night water.

It was incredible. My arms and legs glowed, dimly, as though someone had shattered a florescent bulb in the water and then smeared the top with vaseline. It was always changing, too, depending on how quickly I moved, or kicked my feet. Stuart was a vaguely star-shaped glow to my left. The light shining upwards showed me the pure wonder on his face. It was one thing to see the sparkling dinoflagellates light up around the kayak's oar; it was an entirely other thing to see them on your arm.

The warm, highly salinated water made floating effortless, so we just floated, trying out dozens of permutations to see cooler and cooler effects in the water. Look! When you skimmed your arm across the surface, they glide over and across like little grains of sand! Look, when you submerge and then come shooting out, you can see them slide down your face! I must have spent ten whole minutes just cupping water in my hands and watching the little lights twinkle in and out.

We spent thirty or forty minutes in the water, long enough to prune our fingers, and only begrudgingly did we fling ourselves back into our kayaks (which gave me a nasty boomerang-shaped bruise on my right leg) and start gliding back towards the shore. We were giddy. I felt twelve years old, like a million bucks, and glowing inside. I didn't even hear the buzzing of the mosquito-packed air, although I did rub myself down with more baby oil when we pulled the kayaks back onto land.

The whole bumpy ride back to Sun Bay, we wittered on about the swim, the lights, the incredible feel of the water. Stuart and I parted ways with our guide and the Maryland couple and drove back to Mi Pana, ecstatic, bubbling, to shower and change and head out to dinner. We walked down to Duffy's, on the malecon, the whole time jonesed and electrified from the experience.



I'm sitting in my chilly Brooklyn apartment right now and thinking, if I could bottle that evening, that warm expansive water, that sense of limitless wonder and incredulity that this teeming, crazy planet had conspired to create this experience and that I have the brain power and the imagination to enjoy and relish it, I wouldn't sell it for the million dollars it'd doubtless be worth. I'd keep it and every time it was cold and harsh outside, or any time I couldn't tell hell from the handbasket, I'd squeak open the seal and breathe it all in again.

We slept like babies that night and I dreamed I was floating effortlessly through warm, inky black water.

These travel diaries are a little late; my father had a mild stroke while we were on vacation and I've spent the last week with my parents in RI helping out and generally being a bit frazzled - none of which I feel like blogging about here at pH. But I really wanted to document each day of our amazing trip so without too much further ado...

Sunday, November 15th
San Juan to Fajardo

We circled over San Juan, which peeked tantalizingly from behind thunderclouds, for almost an hour before we landed in driving rain. Welcome to rainy Puerto Rico! wasn't exactly the mantra I'd been repeating to myself for weeks while I mentally picked outfits for the trip. Stuart began what would become an entire day's worth of assuring me, with varying degrees of patience, that the rain would pass and we'd have our sunny vacation back.

We picked up our rental car - $500 deposit even when I'm paying with a credit card? - and got briefly lost while trying to convince the GPS, who we dubbed Petunia for her gratingly fake English accent, to take us to an ATM. They call them ATH here, pronounced AH TEH ATCHEY! Thus began my trip-long infatuation with saying things in wildly amateur Spanish.

Once we found an ah-teh-atchey!, we decided to get some grub for the road, to stave off the hangries. We ran into a pizzeria e panaderia and found more pana than pizza. Stuart ordered what looked like an apple turnover and some pork chitlins in a bag. I tried to be adventurous and ordered the one called "queso e guayabe", which really just tasted like cream cheese and strawberry jam. So much for staving off the hangries; the coke I bought kept me ticking over until we reached Luquillo.

We outran the rain, eastward on Route 3. On the motor way, our spirits lifted as we parroted back the Spanish on all the road signs, and I got my first kick out of being mistaken for a Boricua when the tollbooth attendant addressed me in Spanish. In Luquillo, we didn't have to wonder where the famous friquitines were; the sign pointed right off the highway for "kioskos" and we could smelled the fry stands from the highway. We parked, marveling at the egret-looking birds that stalked the pinchos stands, and started picking out fried foods from the half-empty stalls.



I tried three different empanadas and some sort of cheesy corn balls; Stuart was more adventurous and ate crab sticks and something with beef and plaintains that he's pretty sure they invented for crazy gringos. We peeked at the famous Luquillo beach and I realized how much the Puerto Rican landscape reminded me of West Africa. Same half-tame packs of stray dogs on the beach, too, mercenaries for your food.

Winding our way past Fajardo, we found the Passion Fruit Bed & Breakfast and our poky little room; it took about 20 minutes for us to decide to venture out for exploration and later, dinner. We took the tiny road down to Las Croabas, and sat on the waterfront in the falling dusk, watching the lightning across the sea in Culebra. Vendors set up nighttime stalls selling more fritas and touristy things, although it wasn't always clear to whom. Men pulled out deck chairs from the backs of trucks and popped open cans of Medalla. We contemplated eating at the waterfront place, which looked busy with both gringos and locals, but decided instead to venture into central Fajardo to try the food at the Fajardo Inn. In retrospect - it was pretty middling hotel food, no matter what the guidebook says - we should have stayed in Las Croabas.
 


We finished off the evening with a few rounds of mancala on the porch of the B&B, as we watched the rain sluice down from the wooden roof, and we were fast asleep in our poky little room - with its incongruously spacious bathroom! - by 11pm. It was still raining.