a friend that year

It was some short story I read years and years ago. One character says to another, "We were friends that year." That has always felt like one of the saddest things I've ever read. Of course friendships change as we change, but the idea that they are somehow temporary saddens me.

I've been lucky in my friendships, I think. I have friends that I've known for more than 4 decades now. We're not the women we were when we met, when we were so young, but the women we are now are still friends.

The woman,in the photos to the left was a friend. Helen died a few days ago, after fighting cancer for more than four years. She died at home, with her brother and sister and an old friend. People who had seen her during this final illness said that she was fighting until the end. She would.

She was one of the reasons I moved to Seattle in the first place. She told me about a studio apartment in the building she lived in ($100 a month!) She told me about this job at the women's natural food collective. She and I used to cook together, nearly asphyxiating ourselves with some overheated spice mix from Paul Prudhomme's first cookbook. We watched gay male porn together (awkward). We talked about books and movies and gossiped about the insular and drama-laden lesbian community in Seattle.

Helen was one of the co-owners of The Wild Rose, the lesbian bar where I worked when I was going to the University of Seattle. Helen and I would stay after the bar had closed up and play those table top video games, Pacman and one of those Pong things. We lived in the same building until she and her partner bought a place out in the Central District.

Our friendship didn't really survive my leaving Seattle for graduate school. It was hard staying connected to Seattle and I'd heard that Helen was relaying this false story about me. Gossips gossip and I shouldn't have been hurt that being out of town meant I was fodder now, but it did.

I haven't talked with Helen in something like five years, Haven't seen her in closer to a decade. I don't really know where I'm headed with this, but she had been a friend that year and I am sad she's gone.

seasonality

In case you hadn't noticed, 2016 has been the worst. It led off with David Bowie dying in January. Then Alan Rickman, Maurice White, Vanity,  Patty Duke, Merle Haggard, Prince. Muhammad Ali, Elie Wiesel, Gene Wilder, Bill Nunn, Leonard Cohen, and last weekend, Leon Russell.

(Miss Clio died in there too.)

Gwen Ifill died today. I heard from an old friend that a mutual friend is dying. Other friends are facing other health challenges. Someone I've known since I was five years old died suddenly earlier this year.

This is what getting old looks like.

It feels like fall, when one day the trees are full of brightly colored leaves and then there's a storm. Overnight, there are only a few stubborn leaves left, hanging on the the branches while the rest carpet the ground. So I'm approaching that fall day with all of my friends, hoping that we will be those bright, stubborn coins of color, until the heart of winter.

cooking

I've been thinking about my grandmother recently. My dad's mom died in 2001. I can't remember now whether it was before of after 9/11. I'm inclined to think it was before because her coffin was covered in lilacs and you can't get them all year round.

She was my favorite grandmother. I probably saw more of her than my mother's mother. We lived with her until I was about three. We drove into NY to have dinner many, many Sundays. She was funny and did crossword and other puzzles in the newspaper.

One of the big things we shared was a love of cooking shows. I would come down to visit when I was in graduate school in upstate NY and the two of us would watch them together. This is back in the 90s, so the food networks hadn't taken off, but there was plenty to watch.

I inherited her set of Time-Life cookbooks, her toaster, and a common kitchen knife she used to use. It's bigger than a paring knife, but a little less slim than a boning knife. It comes in handy for lots of little cooking tasks.

And there are her recipe cards. She had a pile of them, tied with a piece of aging gold-covered elastic, which must have come off some gift or other. The handwriting changes, not to mention ink colors, so I think she was doing these over time. Some seem older than others, but I have no idea when or why she wrote these down. Was it memory? She had been a cook for a family living up in Pauling NY, when Pauling was the country. That was before she and my dad moved back to the city and she got a job with the city that she kept until she retired.

She was a good cook.

A much plainer cook than her sister, my great-aunt, who made the first paella I ever tasted. She was a very good cook of comfort food. She has a lot of them on these cards, recipes for cakes, stews, blintzes. She's got about five different BBQ sauce recipes.

I don't know whether she ever cooked any of these things or if they were placeholders, they way that someone now will pin a recipe, copy a link, or bookmark a page. I have recipes I've never made. To be honest, I haven't cooked out of more than five of the Time-Life cookbooks that I inherited, either. Having them on the shelf reminds me of the pleasure she took in food and in cooking. They remind me of her.

When I started this, I didn't know where it was going except that I think about my grandmother often. Just last week I mentioned her in interviews with some students I'm coaching at El Cerrito High School. I miss her still.

incurably informed

The title comes from Pat Cadigan's Synners, a cyberpunk (is there a cyberpunk anymore?) novel about interconnectivity and relationships and AI. People figure out how to connect neurally to the internet, a virus gets into the system and chaos ensues.

The "incurably informed" are the people who survive the virus and have to figure out how to live with a new reality. My reality is about the same as it's ever been, but I was feeling incurably informed a couple of weeks ago.

I can blame it on the political season, which has been fraught. There was something new in the mix for me this time around and it was social media. In 2008, the time I spent online was in the comment sections of blogs. Although you get to know people through their comments -  their styles, preferences, prejudices, and so on - they weren't intimate places. It was easy to get into fights or disagree, but it didn't feel personal. Social media, especially Facebook, is different. It feels extremely personal.

I've been a member of a private FB group for four or five years now. The group is majority white, largely over-educated, with an age-range from about 23 to 70 or so. For the most part, it's been a great place for discussions of all sorts of things, movies, comics, music, books, politics. This summer has made it a less great place. More people are on edge. There have been a number of blowups and I found myself waking up every morning, checking the feed and feeling angry and anxious for hours. But I would keep checking in throughout the day, sometimes commenting and sometimes not, but there would be this undercurrent of tension, as though I was simmering.

The public FB page wasn't much better, The private group had always been a refuge from the stuff that people posted there. I know people, am friends with people who believe in chelation therapy, who are intensely and publicly religious (I am an atheist), who are terrified of all GMOs, who repost discredited memes. I have one old friend who posts lovely images, but she's an outlier there.

The refuge was less a refuge all the time, so I decided to take a break last week. I took FB off my phone and tablet.. I took the URL out of the saved bookmarks and I stopped logging in a week ago. it was hard at first. Social media was where I went when I was procrastinating about work or avoiding making a decision. It was also where I got most of my news. The first days were a struggle, but by midweek it was ok and by Friday, I wasn't really tempted.

I got a lot of work done. I have been less angry (and believe me, if I had been on during the Democratic convention, I would have been a tower of rage). Today I was going to go back and right at this moment, I'm not sure I want to dive back into the scrum.

what to do on your birthday

I never know what to do with these marquee birthdays. I spent my twenty-first birthday in the bedroom I grew up in, drinking tequila and looking at a book of Bonnard paintings. I spent my thirtieth riding around the Olympic peninsula with Cathy Dowd, watching it rain and listening to the scrape of a busted windshield wiper and Bruce Springsteen on the 8-track. I can't remember what I was doing for my fortieth, but I was in Ithaca. My fiftieth, sixtieth, and now sixty-fifth have been made much more celebratory, because of Laine, who has a sense of occasion. Still, I don't know what to do with the idea of these supposed milestones.

So on the 14th, I decided to stay off social media. I finished a terrible book that morning, then did what I told myself I was going to do. I read my first two journals. These books are a combination of workbooks (I was writing a lot, a lot of poetry) and diary. They cover from early in 1973, probably February to maybe December 1976. It's hard to tell. I was not very consistent about dating the entries. Partly that was deliberate. The younger me thought dating entires was pretentious. I have no idea why I thought that, but I wrote it down. But I suspect that I didn't date things because I often wasn't exactly sure what day it was. And because I wasn't very systematic.

I was high a lot through 1973 and 1974. I made some of the most important friendships of my life in these years. At the same time there are names that I barely remember and some I don't remember at all. The phone numbers are usually only seven digits long,

I had horrible handwriting. It gets better and I begin to print occasionally starting in 1974, but at the start? Nearly completely illegible. For all the idea of a journal being a private place to record thoughts, these early diaries are exercises in misdirection and obfuscation, as though I wasn't able to say things clearly even to myself.

Now I have very good handwriting. I am a bit more systematic than that young woman. Maybe I'm marginally better at writing, at least to myself, what actually going on rather than some allusive opacities. But I am still not good about talking about my feelings. I am still likely not to be all that direct where emotions are concerned, though so much better than then.

It amazes me how busy I was, reading, writing, trying out a million different things, a dozen different selves.

I wrote a friend from that time about the journals, telling her that I still had the journals, my first good cooking knife, my copy of Borge's Labyrinths, and a Melitta filter holder. I should have added that I still have that woman just past girlhood too.

coaching in El Cerrito

For about a month I was a slightly shell-shocked unemployed person. Then I started being an unemployed person who wanted to have something to do. So I volunteered with the WriterCoach program. I've worked with them before, 2011- 2013 or thereabouts. The program is in schools in Albany, in El Cerrito, and in Berkeley. It all started in Berkeley, with a bunch of parents. The idea is to support students by coaching them, not by being assistant teachers, but by helping them get their ideas on the page, by listening to them about their challenges in school and out. It is the opposite of copyediting or correcting student work. The whole goal is to build a relationship with the student that allows them to open up and write more easily (or write at all).

I like doing it a lot. I liked doing it back a few years ago and was happy to be able to volunteer again.

Of course there was a two day training, which was sort of fun and sort of boring, but had a remarkably weird guy there who is going to coaching in some poor Berkeley school. He took off his shoes. He wiped his neck with the weak tea in his water bottle. He interrupted a lot. I was sitting next to him and he managed to take of 2/3 of the table, an unhappy marriage of manspreading and girl training. Somehow it's always easier to shrink back than push back.

At any rate, I coached for the first time today. I'm a sort of substitute because I joined late. I had two students today M and S. I'll probably keep working with M, but S's regular coach will probably be back next week. They are both great young men, but very different. I coached S second, but I'm going to talk about him first.

But before that, let me talk about the context. El Cerrito High School is a lot like this part of California. From their website: "[Our] student body is diverse, including 28% African Americans, 27% Latino, 21% Caucasians, and 24% Asian. Approximately 20% of our students are Limited English Proficient and 13% are designated as Gifted and Talented. Approximately 11% of our students qualify for Special Education services and 50% of our students qualify for the free/reduced lunch program."

So a lot of minority students and a lot of poor students. It's a big school, about 1,200 students. The class we're working with is a ninth grade class, so this is these students' first year in high school. The classroom is packed with desks, packed with students. And most of the students are POC.

Most of the WriterCoach folks are white. In our group of about fifteen coaches, there are two people of color, me and another woman, who is also African American.  This has been true for every group of coaches that I've worked with, majority white, maybe a couple of Asians, maybe a couple of African Americans, rarely any Latin@ or Pacific Islanders. Most of the coaches are of retirement age, though there is a sprinkling of younger people.

All the coaches come to the room where we're going to work about the time that classes are about to change. We get our students' folders and wait to walk up to the classroom together to collect our students. We walked up to a chaotic classroom (each of them has been) full of students. Some are chatting, some are sort of paying attention to the teacher, a young African American woman, some are just hanging out. We stand along the walls until all the coaches are in the room. The each coach introduces her/himself and calls out their students' names. We tell them which one we're working with first, which second. The students stand up and then we all walk back to the place where we're coaching.

S, my second student, is one of the easy ones. He came in with a ton of ideas about the assignment. He grabs his pencil and starts writing, but the lead is down to a nubbin, so I give him my pen, and he's off to the races writing about healthy eating being a right and what that means. (The class had just watched Food Inc.) Every so often he stops and we talk about what he's written. He asks me about the differences between they're, their, and there. Then he goes back to writing and I make notes on the coaching sheet that he'll take off with him. S is a big, confident boy. On the way to the coaching room, he made a deprecating comment about not being a writing person like his mom.  I asked him what that meant and he laughed and said someone who writes a lot, so maybe his mom is a blogger or something.

He may not feel like a writer, but he has the sureness and easy fluency of someone who knows that he can put his ideas down on paper, even if he gets a cramp in one hand from writing a couple of paragraphs.

M is not like that. He's a little guy, maybe a couple of inches taller than I am. He slouches and doesn't always look directly at me.

Before we headed up to to classroom, the site coordinator came up to me to tell me about M. She had coached him last week. He didn't have his assignment. He didn't do anything. She says something about him, "not having any light in his eyes."

When we're walking back to the classroom I ask him whether he likes this school. He says he's new here, hasn't been there very long.  I ask where he's coming from and he says he's been in a lot of schools.  He says he likes the fact that his friends are at El Cerrito High. He doesn't like the police there, who apparently stop and harass the students. When we get to the coaching room, he doesn't have anything ready for the assignment, so I ask him to read the prompt. He reads ok, but when asked what the prompts means, it's clear that he doesn't quite understand what he's read, so we talk about it. We break the sentences down in smaller pieces. I wait for him. I don't push. By the end of the 30 minutes, he's got about five sentences. There are two completely different essays here. One is a reasonable response to the prompt (food is a right), but the other is a response to the movie Food Inc, itself. It really bothered him to see the cows and chickens slaughtered. That was the thing that stuck with him, not healthy eating, not the way that big corporations control what we eat, but the suffering of the animals. He talked about how they would do that to humans if the tables were turned and this clearly bothered him. (He's not a vegetarian.)

I tell him that he's got two different essays and that if he has the time, he should develop them both because his reactions were what the teacher wanted to read about and that including the emotional reaction as well as the thing asked for is fine. I gave him the notes I had been taking and told him that they were his to work with.

So here's this emotionally sensitive boy that the site coordinator, who is a nice woman who cares about these students, said had no light. Afterwards she said she was happy that I had gotten him to write something. She meant it.

I was angry about this earlier today, but now I'm sad because I don't know what it takes for people to see the students they work with clearly if they're not the easy ones, if they're not Ss. How do we keep out that hairline of pity or lowered expectations? I wish there were more POC in the coaching group.  I wish we all weren't so old and sure that our understanding of the world is what we should be sharing with our students. (I overheard a number of coaches telling the students about the evil of commercial food production.) I wish that M wasn't so drawn up against the world, but I'm glad I get to work with him.

spare parts

The first week after knee replacement surgery is a haze. Pain meds every six hours. Weak attempts at exercising the new joint and incredibly swollen leg three times a day. It turns out that they weren't kidding about the effect of narcotics on the GI tract. And reading anything more complicated than a thriller is impossible.

The second week, the new knee moves better and hurts less. Pain meds every eight hours and walking around pushing a walker isn't so hard or as tiring.  Then it's twice a day for the pills and I went to the movies to see the new Star Wars.

The third week, I'm home and doing a lot more for myself. I feel better enough to feel bored. I can read with a brain again, so I'm reading the incredible A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I had tried to read in the hospital, right after surgery, but couldn't keep the different characters apart, even though James makes each voice distinct. Laine and I hang out. Sometimes she's watching tv and I'm reading. Sometimes we watch Netflix together, like Tangerine last night. The swelling is down so that my left side looks nearly normal-ish.

I was trying to get out of having the surgery until the month before. Earlier this year, like back in March or so, I had started using a cane. My left knee hurt that much. Then I started working out, concentrating on my leg muscles. Then I stopped using the cane (mainly because it is a nuisance to travel with). Then I tried to talk my doctor out of the necessity for the operation, but she said that my mobility would just get worse and worse.

In retrospect, I don't know what I was afraid of. That something horrible would happen on the operating table (it's not a table, it's like a very accommodating bed thing). That I would have a stroke? That it wouldn't work somehow? That it would hurt?

Well, it did/does hurt. But Kaiser is on it about pain management.  Nothing has been unbearable for long, not even the one night in the hospital, when it hurt to think about moving that leg. The team at the hospital was reassuring and answered any questions I even thought about having beforehand. Knowing what was happening and what would happen helped a lot. Having a good and cheery physical therapist who tells me I'm doing great helps a lot.

But when it comes down to it, I think it is that I thought (and my friends thought too) than I was too incapacitated. That I had been too inactive for too long and that recovery as going to be long and slow and hard and incomplete. That doesn't seem to be true. Maybe I can still make withdrawals on a lifetime of basically great health.

Whatever it is, I couldn't have done it without the support of two retired friends who volunteered their house and their time to be my rehab residency or without the support of the the world's best gf. With them, I can be here at home, bored out of my mind, watching a cat watching the turkeys promenade through the side yard.