Puerto Rico, day three

March 21, 2010 //

It’s been too long, I know. It’s been over four months since this incredible trip and I’ve done it no justice – in my defense, the time between then has done me no justice either. If you’ve forgotten where we were, here’s day one and day two.

Tuesday, November 17th
Vieques

It was bright when we awoke, the sun already warming the small balcony outside our room. Stuart made coffee – we’d smartly bought some at the colmado in Isabella II – while I jumped in the Toyota and drove two minutes down the road to get some breakfast pastries at La Dulce Esperanza. I remember the feeling of the hot seat under my thin beach skirt, the giddiness of knowing that we were only going to get hotter, saltier, and happier as the day took us to the beach. On my way home with my danish haul, I swung by the beach shack on the malecon and rented some flippers and snorkels.

I arrived home to find Stuart showered and relaxing outside the room; we ate our danishes and gulped down coffee and there was something delicious in knowing we didn’t have plans, damnit, we were just going to jump into the car and head to the beach. I pulled on my swimsuit and threw towels and sunscreen and my camera into a tote bag, and away we went.

We took the road heading east out of Esperanza and instead of turning north on 996, we followed on until we got to the Diego gate, which used to mark the line between Vieques and the Navy. This was the reason to beach on Vieques – completely undeveloped, completely unspoiled. After two miles or so of road, we struck out off the road, southward, where we suspected the sign had once pointed towards Playa Caracas. We parked in the shade and (after a judicious car-side application of sunscreen) I ran shrieking towards the surf.

creepers

There were crawling vines all along the sand, with trumpet-shaped magenta flowers turned towards the sun. There were big lazy pieces of driftwood, floating shoreward and surfward, all afternoon. We laid out, we splashed into the pristine waters, we ate ham sandwiches and drank tons of water. I took photos. After two or three hours – who knew? who had a watch? – we decided to investigate the other beaches along the Navy road, and ended up spending the last of the afternoon at Orchid Beach. I snorkeled across the entire length of the wide, shallow bay, just relishing the power of my flipper-kicking feet.

The sun gave us a good going-over, us cave-dwelling New Yorkers, but we didn’t care. As we drove back westward into the lowering sun, we bounced in our seats and let our arms dangle out the car windows and grinned, grinned like fools, at our matching sunburns.

afternoon

We gingerly removed our swimming duds and marveled at the angry red lines as we got ready for dinner. We had some time to kill in the lazy late afternoon so we got back in the car and drove along the lonely, hilly roads of the west side of the island, up route 995 to the north coast. We found a little half-moon of sandy beach near an abandoned church that’d been commandeered as a manure den, far as we could tell, and we wandered down to the shore only to get chased back by a disturbingly well-organized flank of mosquitoes.

abandoned iglesia

Across the water in the dusk, we could see the clouds forming over the mainland. Back in the car, we swatted at errant mosquitoes as we pointed ourselves back to Esperanza. I remember we were quiet, on the drive back, and spent twenty minutes watching the lights come on in the few houses we passed, listening to the nighttime critters get louder as the sun left Vieques for the day.

We’d been hoping to eat at El Quenepo, on the malecon, but they were still closed for low season, so we had a satisfying meal at Trade Winds, leaning back into wide comfortable chairs, splitting a bottle of wine, giggling at how the alcohol rushed to our fried little brains. We were happy, glowing pink in the candlelight, listening to the surf rush at the sand a few feet away.

[The rest of the photos live here.]

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Categories puerto rico

help wanted: expert repairs for bedraggled little sail

March 5, 2010 //

I’m starting to notice this pattern. Fridays are impossible. Something
about the amount of wind my sails can hold, I don’t know, only gets me
until Thursday night at 10pm. Then I wake up on Friday and I know the
only thing I have to do is go to work. Compared to the rest of my week
where it’s usually work-school, or other-work/work, or school-school
… you’d think Fridays would be a breeze. But my little sail refuses
to lift. It’s waterlogged. I wake up and all I fantasize about, roughly, with violent
intent, is staying under the covers until Monday.

So I get up late and put on clothes – usually clothes I look crappy in, because somehow by Friday I can no longer be bothered to bother – and I usually forget or can’t be bothered with breakfast. I give the dog a terrible walk, poor dog, and I go to work. And I’m usually pretty productive, if I can forget how tired and waterlogged I am. But all I can think is, it’s not really Friday. I’ve got class on Saturday morning, surely that defies the very Fridayness of a Friday. All this non-Friday is going to be the end of me.

What is there that is sunny: well, there’s been some sun this week, for one. (Look at my tattered rags of repartee, reduced to scraps of weather.) On an unexpectedly beautiful walk on Thursday morning, I curved around to the sweeping harbor views of Sunset Park to find just the mildest hint of mild on the wind, a lack perhaps of cold more than a breath of warmth. I was gulping it in, giddy with the idea that Spring is coming, and surely this great inky black spider weaving its little dirgy ditty in my chest will be banished when Spring comes.

Maybe all I need is a cookie.

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Categories grief

damn the torpedoes

February 20, 2010 //

This morning something occurred to me, as I fought the impulse to stay home instead of dragging my weary bag of bones to yet another Saturday class (it’s never as bad when I get here as I imagine it’s going to be) … it occurred to me that it would have been enough to proceed with work, just work, under this stupid inky umbrella of grief. Work would have been plenty. But school, well, there are moments when I just don’t feel tough enough to do any justice to school.

Who am I kidding! There are moments when I don’t feel tough enough to peel a banana. For the first time in my adult life I am a delicate fucking snowflake. I suppose if I had been someone already given to a fair amount of hand-wringing and hyperbole, all this grief would be a practiced flourish, perhaps? As it is, all I can do is look back on the happy, centered and rational person I feel quite sure I was through November 18, 2009, and miss the stuffing out of her. I particularly miss her when I find myself throwing tantrums over what kind of taco I ordered, or crying because the train is late, or snapping at Nano because he isn’t walking fast enough. Honestly! Who is this drama queen! And by drama queen, I mean me.

I have a song (I’ve become someone with a song!) that I put on my iPod when I’m really just tired of pushing past the stupid feelings I’m feeling all over the place, and just want to stand in place (last night it was in the middle of Union Square Park) and just feel the damn feelings already. It’s the Rolling Creekdippers’ cover of Gram Parson’s In my Hour of Darkness. It even has a dramatic title! But I suppose it reminds me that even though I don’t believe, I can still plead with the Universe to cut me some slack already. And by Universe, I mean me.

Then there was an old man,
kind and wise with age
he read me just like a book
and never missed a page.
Oh, I loved him like my father
and I loved him like my friend.
And I knew his time would surely come
but I did not know just when.

In my hour of darkness,
in my time of need,
O lord grant me vision,
O lord grant me speed.

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Categories grief, life

february ninth

February 9, 2010 //

Today is your birthday, and it was hard to imagine how much fun I would have had with you turning seventy, and how incredibly, impossibly young that now seems, for a man who used to joke that every day above ground was a bonus.

We went to La Villa for pizza tonight, with some of the friends that I’ve found the most comforting these past few months, some of the friends who know that any minute I’m smiling is bonus. We should by rights have gone to Di Fara – I still remember how absurdly proud I was that you loved Dom’s pizza even though you waited an hour for it, how you bragged to other people that you’d waited an hour for the best pizza you’d ever had, how you got excited when Di Fara’s was mentioned on Food Network because you’d been there! – but I was in class until eight thirty and La Villa was as close as I could get, buddy. We ate there, just in November, just the four of us, and I remembered the sight of your smiling bespectacled face across the table.

When we got home I stayed up after Stuart had gone to bed and finished the amazing novel L gave me. I sat in the big armchair Mom bought when we lived in Houston, the one you called the thousand dollar chair, as if you couldn’t believe a chair could cost that much, and read the last thirty pages in less than an hour. It reminded me of coming downstairs some mornings, when you still worked, and finding you reading. You used to wake up early, crazy early, just to have a few hours to yourself every day. Mostly, you read. Such a man of sacrifice, and yet when given the time to indulge, you read. It might be my favorite thing about you, my favorite thing I got from you, of all the beautiful and intricate and subtle things I inherited.

And now it’s almost midnight and it will no longer be your birthday and I’m a little grateful because I never quite know what to do with milestones, but also a little sad, because as much as it’d be so pretty to think so, I don’t believe in an afterlife where you’re reading this but I do believe that in writing to you, I’m honoring you the best this life knows how.

Happy birthday, buddy. I miss you so.

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Categories grief, love and family

zero out of zero stars

February 8, 2010 //

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.

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Categories grief

she blinded me with [library] science

January 15, 2010 //

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.

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Categories librarian, travels

time forward and time past

January 12, 2010 //

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.

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Categories grief

flair for the dramatic

January 9, 2010 //

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.

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Categories grief

sad, but thanks for asking

January 6, 2010 //

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. 

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Categories grief

wherein I make brief lists

January 5, 2010 //

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.

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Categories Uncategorized
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