I was really looking forward to writing this week’s blog. I’ve been off work, and so I was sure I’d get myself into some crazy situation. As hard as I tried, though, I didn’t.
Well, that’s not completely true. Freya, the big white fluff, was sore after last Sunday’s hike up by Echo Lake. On Friday morning, she was holding one of her rear paws in the air and refused breakfast. For a dog who will eat basically everything twice, I knew something was up. So, I called around and the only place that had any availability was the pet urgent care across from the Whole Foods in town.
So, I lift (all 100 lbs of) her into my little blue car, and we’re off. Unfortunately, all the parking spots immediately in front of the emergency clinic are taken, so I park under a tree, and call them to let them know Freya had arrived. In retrospect, I was glad I parked where I did because of what happened next. A thirty-something Latina in some sort of Chevy coupe pulled up next to a parked mini-van with two older men and an injured Saint Bernard in it. I think, but I can’t be sure, that the older man in the driver’s seat thought she parked too close to his sick ride (she was forced to because the person to the left of her had taken his half out of the middle, so to speak.)
Anyway, when the woman got out to hand off the small dog to the veterinary nurse, the man in the driver’s side of the mini-van got out, too, and started yelling and waving his arms around wildly. The woman said something like, “Sir, I realize I parked a bit close. I need you to just be respectful about this,” and it was like she lit a match and threw it on kerosene.
The guy went crazy.
I thought he was going to literally beat the woman with his cane. She got back in her car and he started hitting her passenger side window with his fists and yelling. Eventually, a string of veterinary nurses would come out, creating a human barrier between the woman in the car and this irate elderly guy with the injured Saint Bernard. When they took the dog in on a rolling table, they asked the woman to move to a handicapped parking spot at the other end of the parking lot.
There was a free spot open next to the minivan with the psycho old guy, but there was no way I was taking that one.
This was a day after I’d gone to Lake Tahoe, just to see it again since it used to be my home and I haven’t been back much in the COVID-times. I was feeling cabin fever, oddly, even though I don’t live in a cabin. Anyway, that was the day that I-80 was completely backed up because a driver became angry with another car on the road, pulled out a gun, and started firing at the other car. Meanwhile, he lost control, hit a large diesel truck, and was jettisoned into oncoming traffic where another 18-wheeler collided with the car, killing the driver with the gun who had gotten upset for something that was probably not that big of a deal: not driving fast enough or I have no idea.
Really, I’ve experienced anger, but not the type that leads to insanity. It’s like the time in Whole Foods when this man was browsing the vitamin section with his girlfriend, and I was looking down at my shoes, depressed, after a long, hard day at work. I didn’t notice them, and I got in their way and didn’t move fast enough. “Why can’t you not be a stupid cow and watch where you’re going?” the man asked me.
I wasn’t mad. Shocked, maybe, by his words. But not mad. I just dropped my basket of groceries and started crying. That’s typically my response to these kinds of things. (However, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about running that guy and his girlfriend over in the parking lot. But I didn’t do that, either. I was in Rich’s car with bike shop logos all over it. I didn’t think that would be good publicity.)
So instead of lashing out or doing awful, evil things, I cry, I ruminate and carry these scenes or ideas around for a while. And at a certain point, I blog about them.
Finding a New Frame
The view from the top of Mt. Rose looking North on the morning when I just decided to run to the summit in one solid go.
Coming out on the other side of last year with a memoir manuscript—and now a healthy big, white fluffy dog on antibiotics—has made me realize I not only need, but want, a new frame within which to understand myself and my life journey. I’ve written a lot about the past and I am grateful for the MFA program and countless other writing retreats, conferences, seminars, programs, mentors and editors who have helped me to hone the tools to do it.
But it only goes so far to define your life by what has happened in the past. I realized this week that I’m much more interested in where my life is going than where it has been. Granted, where it has been is what the book I just finished is about, and sending that out opens another can of worms that typically results in me having the worst anxiety attacks ever… which has led me to wanting a new beginning, a new start. A new frame and direction. A new story to tell.
I just completed a certification program in Soul-Based Coaching, handing in a year’s worth of work, hours of sessions with practice clients, reflections on my processes, video and audio recordings, transcripts. It was no easy task. The woman who did that—me— deserves a new frame, a new beginning, a new adventure.
This week I have asked myself what I love most in the world. It’s been an interesting exercise, because honestly, how often do we ask ourselves what we actually, truly love about our lives? The answers didn’t just roll out of me, either. I had to really think about it: if all restraints (financial, physical, emotional, temporal, etc.) were removed and I could do anything, what would I do? And does that mean that’s the thing I love most in the world?
The answers, when they came, were interesting to me. It was the early morning run to the summit of Mt. Rose I loved, and I’d love to do for the rest of my life. The forest-smell at dawn and just me, a pair of running shoes and the trail. The point isn’t to go fast, it’s just to go and keep going, one foot in front of the other, until 5 miles later, you reach the top.
(It’s also humility: I finally bought this belt thing to hold a water bottle. I remembered the belt thing but forgot the bottle of water. Proving, I guess, we’re—I’m—never, ever, ever going to be perfect. Or in my case, hydrated.)
But that run: I kept running, even when I didn’t want to. Light on my feet, up the trail, loving every single stinking second of it because I literally felt like I was just short of flying like the hawks in the thermals above me.
I also love hanging out at the bike shop, shooting the shit with the bike mechanics. They’re a good twenty years younger than I am, but I can still toss around an off-colored joke with the best of them. It’s actually interesting to hear what they think about life. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard as the day I asked about their slang words for parts of the body. I won’t go into details, but it’s funny how even twenty years doesn’t matter when you’re tossing around body slang, proving that there’s a certain timeless quality to filth.
I love not having to prove anything to anybody. I’ve been running more outside and I track distance more just to see where I am in regards to my own progression … I really don’t care where I land with other runners. On Tuesday, I did an Orange Theory class and then drove to the trailhead of Tamarack Lake (just below Mt. Rose Summit Trail). Three steps in, I fell. I was so tired, I just let myself fall and then I just started laughing. It was ridiculous, and I thought: “At least I got that over with,” before I picked myself up and started running again.
I love humility. Realness. How my white shorts after I fell had this brown patch on the back that sort of made it looked I could have had digestive issues. I didn’t, but whatever. I rocked that dirty short look at the sandwich shop, because I was HANGRY after OTF and a trail run.
And you know what? I was HANGRY. I ate a sandwich. A whole big sandwich with turkey, cheese, aoili, and who knows what else. It was delicious. Because- you guessed it— I love food. Real food.
I’ll write about that in more detail at some point. But real food- there’s nothing better.
Human-ness
Despite the craziness in society around me, when I went to Lake Tahoe, I stopped by a place where I used to work. The person I would have shared my life with (maybe?? ugh, who knows?) works there, and I happened to see him. I did and didn’t want to see him. There’s a lot of sadness there, for me. A lot of loss. But after COVID, there’s also a lot of empty.
And this person who I haven’t spoken to in six years materializes in front of me at a marina where I spent years of my life and we talk about this year. I tell him I lost some chickens. More importantly, the kitten we (the relationship-we) had adopted together ten years before grew up, got old and this past spring, passed away. That’s when he told me about his life. This person I once lived with and loved is taking care of an aging and ailing parent now, splitting time between this mountain town and another one.
At a certain point, I can’t feel anything but compassion for all of us that go through life. It’s hard. It’s not fair. It’s never what we said we wanted in the first place. And this person whom I’ve associated with loss. It was loss, true. But for a time, it was also wonderful. It was the place from which I learned how to begin writing about my life. I will always be grateful for that. And, then what happened, happened.
The conversation ends, of course—it has to— and I go to the Lake and I take a picture for social media. I walk along the main street of the town that use to be my home, looking down at the lake, and then I ask myself the same question I have been asking myself for weeks now: “What makes me happy?” Given the unmoored. Given the restlessness. The anxiety. The sadness—all of that. What is next?
Maybe it doesn’t have to be such a hard question. Maybe a new beginning is simply about picking an arbitrary moment and taking that first step into the unknown. Into possibility where some new joy resides. Taking a chance on life again, a new trail. A new frame. A new beginning.
I hope so. Because that is what I am doing.
