How It Will All End
July 30, 2007
Filed in: Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota
So here’s the plan: Kansas. Alaska. Hawaii. The extreme ends and the smack middle of these our United States.
(Somewhere a little northwest of Lebanon, KS is the geographic center of the lower 48 states. The geographic center of all 50 United States is outside of Castle Rock, SD but I’ve already been to South Dakota. So in what can especially these days be described as the true American way, I’m ignoring cold hard fact in favor of something a little softer that better fits my purposes. For more on this, see S. Colbert on Truthiness, a concept I personally believe will be studied in school by our children’s children.)
And because the 50th State project isn’t about travel (not everybody is burning to go to Kansas, even though I am, and pretty much every syllable that needs to be written about travel to HI and AK has already been written and in a manner far abler than I could muster), here’s the meta-plan:
1) travel to eco-threatened Alaska with wacky, sitcom-ready family (nature-loving proto-hippie grade-schooler; grouchy, gorgeous, techno-addicted teenager; discomfort-averse, obscure-literature-quoting, Jesuit-educated, wine-swilling husband).
2) travel to Hawaii, a place in which neither of us has ever really had much interest, with aforementioned lit-king husband, sans children. Sort of what my now-European friend calls a “dirty weekend,” only flipped on its head (please please no puns intended) by my endemic New Englandness, which views any kind of year-round natural beauty and luxury-level hotel pricing (not to mention “dirty” and “weekend") as blasphemous and bad for your skin, and T’s homegrown polite Midwest skepticism, which manifests itself in public primarily as “hmm” or “huh” depending on the level of transgression, only to bust out full on into “How could they?” or “How dare they?” or “Please. Spare me.” in Pinot-fueled privacy.
3) Kansas. Alone. ‘Nuff said. Did you know Kansas will turn 150 the same year—2011—that I turn 50? We’re destined to be together, me and Kansas, I can just tell. Remember sweet Dorothy’s observation: Kansas, she says, is the name of the star.
But, you think. But. But what about North Dakota? North Dakota! Why, I’m glad you asked . . .
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How It All Began
July 23, 2007
Filed in: Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota
Close to six years ago, C’s second-grade teacher--a bit of a free spirit (some used the phrase “utter chaos” to describe her classroom, but C and I both loved her creativity)--sent him home with an assignment. Find out something unique about a family member and write about it.
Since he’d experienced firsthand every event of significance in his then-baby brother’s life, and since his father wasn’t home, that left moi. What’s unique about wiping up after sodden juice boxes, standing watch at the bottom of the slide and untangling Slinkies all day long? Not a thing.
C waited, pencil to paper, glowering. The rest of his afternoon was calling to him.
I thought back to my pre-kid days. Nothing unique there, sadly not even the R-rated bits. “Well,” I said desperately, “I’ve been to a lot of states.”
“How many,” he said, unconvinced.
“Well…” I counted. Living as I have nearly all my life in New England, you tend to knock back a solid handful just getting out and about.
Better yet: In the summer of 1985, I quit my job and with a friend drove 9,000 miles in a big loop around the country in a tiny car the color of a pencil. 37 states right there baby. Then there were a few random ones picked up in the intervening years (special shout-out to MP for Sunday morning bbq in AR). That left, miraculously--nay, uniquely--just four: Alaska. Hawaii. North Dakota. And Kansas.
“46!” I said. “How’s that?”
He shrugged, head bent over the page. It was good enough to get the homework out of the way, but still. Not a very satisfying number, 46. “You should do all 50.”
“Yuh,” I said back, picturing a week in, say, Kansas loaded down with a Pack ‘n’ Play, a stroller, and the requisite menagerie of I-can’t-get-to-sleep-without-it stuffed animals. “How ‘bout by the time I’m 50, okay? You can come too.”
He shrugged and slid off his chair with a look that said, “50! Do people even live to be that old?”
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Apologies All Round
July 18, 2007
Filed in: The Home Front
You’re going about your business, trying to stay out ahead of things. You’re making sure the bills don’t get swept into the recycling bin, making sure the kids have a vegetable at lunch, making sure you stay away from that one co-worker in the coffee room.
You try to hug your spouse once a day, even if it’s in such a way that makes it clear that, sorry babe, nothing’s going to happen tonight. You try to think of your grandmother on her birthday, though she’s been gone eight years now. Sheepishly, you try out a tooth-whitening system, but it’s okay because you do it ironically, keeping your expectations hipster low. You’re doing your best, in other words, to be a B/B+ citizen of the global economy.
Then somebody--your colleague, your child, your neighbor, your mom, your childhood best friend, the love of your life, a perfect stranger--hits you with one of those two-word whammies that leaves you in unexpected, knee-walking despair.
“It happens.”
“We’re broke.”
“You free?”
“He’s gone.”
“I’m married.”
Or this: “I’m blogging.”
With sincere apologies to the love of my life, my children, my mom, my neighbors, my co-workers, my best friends from childhood and elsewhere, and perfect strangers the world over: I’m blogging.