The Something I Wait For

I’ve spent a great amount of time thinking that something is out there, just around the corner, just a few steps away. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t looming right behind me, so close and yet completely invisible and unknown.

Part of me wonders if this is what everyone goes though before they hit whatever they define as mid-life, expecting/believing in some greater potential yet to be realized. When it doesn’t arrive, is that what throws people into a downward spiral?

Good God, am I going to be driving a sportscar and wearing a baseball hat to cover up male-pattern baldness?

I’ve never lived anyone else’s life, I’ve been through this before, but this seems unusual. This isn’t a set idea of what I want to do or what I want to be. This is an amorphous shape just beyond the corner of my eye. I fully expect that, like much of my life thus far, it will appear unexpected and unimagined. When I see it I will be both surprised because I didn’t see it coming, and at the same point realize that much of my life up up to this point has been in preparation for something I didn’t expect or understand.

It feels like it is getting closer. Looming larger. But no matter how hard I squint, I can’t make it out. Since I don’t know what it is, I can’t prepare for it.

So I wait.

Momentum

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved to read. My father read a lot, my brother read a lot (still does), and my mom read to me every night for years. I don’t remember how old I was when my mother stopped reading to me, but remember thinking I was glad none of my friends knew she was still doing it.

I went through a phase in elementary school when I would come home from school and read a Hardy Boys book. Every day. Until I had read them all. When I was older, I filled my summers with as many Stephen King books as I could get through the magic of inter-library loan.

What eventually dampened my zeal for reading was… college.

As an English & Religious Studies double major, I was reading so many books … all the time. I’m not sure how many years it takes a professor to lose all sense of reality regarding how much a student can read while taking 3-4 other classes, but (almost) all of my professors either had no clue or didn’t care. They would assign far more reading than could ever been completed, and then tack on some “optional” or “suggested” reading as well.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that many professors want to help you “build your library” meaning that they want you to have certain books at your disposal on your bookshelf. I heard this numerous times by the professors themselves. As much as I can understand the logic behind it, I wish more professors assigned a reasonable amount of material and delved more deeply into it.

The second reason is a guess, but I think it is an educated one (if you’ll pardon the expression): many professors think that if they set the bar very high then you will try harder and accomplish more. So if they assign 100 pages a week, maybe you’ll read 80, but if they assign 80, they’re afraid you’ll only read 60. They want to help get people into the habit of reading, and reading a lot.

If that was their theory, it completely backfired on me.

When I realized that there was no way I could read everything they assigned, I stopped reading altogether. I was never very good at “skimming” a book. If I read it, I wanted to really “get into it” but if I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t bother at all.

(Aside: I accomplished this by picking one of the earliest readings of the semester and be sure to contribute a lot to the class discussions. That left a lasting impression on a professor. Then I sat in the front of the class, attended every class, learned how to pay attention to what was discussed, and took a lot of notes.)

Graduate school made it worse.

By the time I finally graduated at age 25, I had stopped reading almost entirely. I read a few novels that summer, but never really regained my real passion for reading.

Not long after that I made a conscious decision to stop reading a book I had decided to read for pleasure. I remember putting a bookmark into it and thinking, “Yeah, I get it.” The bookmark was a lie. I knew I wasn’t going to open the book again.

Unfortunately, once I started throwing in the towel, it became easier and easier to quit a book, harder and harder to finish one. It was only a few years ago that I discovered Audible and “read” more books in one year than I had read in the previous five. It reminded me what I had once loved about reading: getting pulled into a story, picturing the scenes, or simply learning about completely new things.

Sometimes A Book is More than Just a Book

In the past year or two I realized what happened with books is symptomatic of a larger issue in my life: not finishing what I start.

I find it remarkably easy to begin projects, and find it hellishly difficult to complete them. As I wrote almost a year ago:

The first 80% of a project takes 100% of my energy and interest.
The last 20% of a project gets thrown into a box and pushed in the corner.

When I start something, I throw myself into it entirely, focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else… but once I stop, I might never start it again.

There are two pieces of this puzzle to figure out:

1. Figure out what I really want to do, and do them.
2. Figure out what I don’t really want to do, and don’t allow it to take time or energy that I should be spending on things in the first category.

Someone (I think it was Michele) asked if we had a word or motto for the new year. Mine was “Purposeful.” To me it goes directly towards the two points above, as well as our theme this week of “momentum”: if I make a purposeful decision about what I want to do—and, equally importantly, what not to do—it will help gain and not lose momentum.

Hopefully 2010 will be the year I switch back from being someone who starts many things to someone who completes many things.

This entry is part of the 52 Weeks Thing. Not sure what that is? Read more here.

TJ Gets A Ticket…

I’m going to assume you listen to Live, from a Shoebox and more specifically that you’ve listened to Episode 14 where Alison talked about getting pulled over and Episode 20 where she talked about getting pulled over again. As in, a second time. By the same cop.

Her courage and determination to fight The Man has inspired me to share my story where I, too, fought against The Man.

The year was 1989, or maybe early 1990. I’m about 16 years old, driving with my Dad in his fully tricked out 1988 Chevy Cavalier, by which I mean it had power windows, seats, and a cassette deck with auto-reverse.

We were driving the 8+ hours to my sister’s house in Erie, PA, which mean about 7.5 hours on I-90, which is referred to as The Mass Turnpike in Massachusetts. We were driving along in “fairly busy but moving along” traffic, and I was keeping up with the flow of traffic. All of a sudden we came around a bend, and there is a State Trooper standing on the side of the road, and he pointed at me, then pointed at the side of the road. No radar gun, standing outside of his car in his big Trooper hat and sunglasses, standing at the side of the road.

So I pull over, my heart pounding like the wings of a hummingbird-on-crack, and my Dad is telling me to relax and be polite. I’ve been driving for less than a year, and I’ve never in my life talked with a police officer who hadn’t come to my school to give some sort of a safety demonstration.

He comes to the window and asks me if I know why he pulled me over, and I said no. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going 55MPH, but no one was going 55, so… why me? He says, “I clocked you doing 79 in a 55. License and registration please.”

79MPH.

My Dad opened the glove compartment and started looking for the paperwork. I tried to get my wallet out of my back pocket, but it was stuck and wouldn’t come out. All the time I’m thinking to myself, “What? 79? There’s no way…” I hear my Dad say something to him that I wasn’t going anywhere near that fast, and the cop says that he has my on radar, which is of course absurd because he was already standing outside of the car when we came around the corner. He was waiting for me.

He went back to his car to do whatever it is that they do, and I hoped that he would seem my clean record and tell me to just slow down. No such luck. He comes back with a ticket for $190. Now think back to when you were 16 years old, and what would $190 sound like? It sounded like $1,000. He asks me to sign the receipt, indicating that I’ve received the ticket, not indicating guilt, and shows me where to send it in.

We resumed our trip and I was beyond livid. I was driving exactly 55MPH for as long as my Dad could put up with it before he said “It’s going to take up 12 hours if you keep driving like this, you’re not going to get another ticket, just stay with the traffic.” I said something calm like “I WAS JUST STAYING WITH THE TRAFFIC WHEN HE GAVE ME THAT TICKET AND HE SAID I WAS GOING 79 THERE’S NO WAY IN HELL I WAS GOING THAT FAST AND I CAN’T BELIEVE HE GAVE ME A TICKET OH MY GOD MOM IS GOING TO KILL ME AND I’M NEVER GOING TO BE ABLE TO DRIVE AGAIN EVER.”

Finally I did pick up my pace a little bit, but I drove the rest of the way (the final 90% of the trip) in a foul mood. At one point my Dad said, “I want you to try to get the car up to 79 MPH.” WHAT? “I want to see how it would feel to drive that fast.” After assuring me that he would pay the ticket if I got another one, I started accelerating. At 72 MPH we both started to get nervous. At 75 MPH, the car felt like it was going to careen out of control. I let my foot off the gas and slowed back down to about 62 MPH (which is the official speed of “the speed limit is 55 but you probably won’t get a ticket if you’re going this fast.”)

“And he thinks we were going faster than that and didn’t notice?” my Dad asked rhetorically. Then we remembered that another white car had sped past us just before we got pulled over. We theorized that there had been a hidden cop car with a radar gun which caught that car, and then radioed ahead to the guy who pulled us over, and he got the wrong car. My Dad told me to request a hearing for the ticket.

I was still afraid of telling my mom about it, but he said it would be fine and we went about the rest of our visit. I got home a few days later and quite honestly had forgotten about it. A lot of other stuff had happened and I had thought about it so much it was no longer shocking or even news… I was sure that they had just spotted the wrong car.

Only problem was that I completely forgot that I had put the ticket in the pocket of my jeans. Which my mom then washed. And dried.

The ticket looked like I had balled it up. You have never seen anything more crumpled and faded, torn, etc. I was sure I was going to go to jail for contempt of court or something — and I still had to mail it back and request a court date. My mother literally ironed it, trying to make it look less wrinkled. It didn’t help.

So we mailed it off.

And heard nothing.

For several years. (Not a typo.)

I was sure that it had just been thrown away, but something like three years later I got a court date. Except that I was now in college and couldn’t go. I asked for a rescheduled date over Christmas vacation, and they sent a date back for the following summer.

Now I had always heard that if the cop who wrote the ticket didn’t show up, they had to throw out the ticket. That is apparently not true. The guy who was at the court that day made no bones about the fact that he wasn’t the guy who had originally written the ticket. I explained about the other car and that I was sure that it was the wrong car. The judge asked me if I had been speeding.

Here’s the thing: in the meantime, the speed limit for that area had been increased from 55MPH to 65MPH. I had planned to argue that aspect of the case as well. But I didn’t know what to answer. So I went with the truth.

“I was probably going more than 55, but there’s no way that I was going 79—” and I was just about to mention about the speed limit change when he said.

“How about a reduction? $50?”

Wait, did he mean $50 off the $190 or a reduction to $50? Either one was better, but the way he said it, I wasn’t sure.

“What do you mean?” I asked, obviously confused.

“I mean you write a check to this court for $50, and that’s the end of it. Does that sound like a good deal to you?”

“YESABSOLUTELYIHAVEACHECKWRITEHEREWHODOIMAKEITOUTTO?”

My Dad had sent me with a literal blank check, with his name already signed, and told me to make sure that whatever I did, I didn’t lose the check.

That was the first time I got a ticket… with my Dad in the car. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the other time…s…

Mixed Emotions

We were in a staff meeting for the so-called “professional” staff.

The secretary knocked on the door and told my boss and my co-worker that their wives were on the phone, asking to talk with them right away. This had never happened before. I had met their wives, and they were not ones to get overly excited about something without reason. For them to call and insist on talking to their husbands immediately was strange…

They took the messages seriously, excused themselves from the meeting, and left the rest of us there wondering what to do with ourselves. We talked for a moment about how odd it was. Then it dawned on us: both of their wives were teachers. While the echoes of Columbine and other school shootings may have faded, but they had not fully disappeared.

Across town, Tracey was waking up. Her part-time work schedule was flexible, and she didn’t have to be in the office for anything in particular that day, so she had slept in. When she awoke, she felt… strange. Was she coming down with something? No, she had felt this way before… She poured herself a bowl of cereal and milk, hoping it would calm her stomach. By the time she sat down, she was pretty sure it was morning sickness. Last time, the “morning sickness” (which, despite its name, lasted all day) had been intense, nearly violent. She had lost weight during her first trimester.

She sat down on the couch and turned on the television, hoping to distract herself with whatever morning show she could find.

Instead, she turned the TV on just in time to see the second plane hit the Twin Towers.

Back at my office, we were trying to get whatever news we could. Neither my boss nor coworker had come out of their offices. Our initial concerns about a school shooting were fading away, and we were hearing vague reports about a terrorist attack in New York, and a possible explosion in the White House. Airplanes were said to be involved. My boss’ daughter lived in Manhatten, and was scheduled to be on a plane that morning. I had met her several times. She was my age. His wife had called to ask if he had heard from her. He hadn’t. My co-worker’s brother worked at the White House. I didn’t even know he had a brother. His wife had called to ask if he had heard from him. He hadn’t.

There we were, 900 miles away from New York city, 700 miles from D.C., yet not feeling very far away at all. Wanting to do something, but there was nothing we could do. Nothing but watch.

The boss’ daughter called later that day, to say that she was O.K. It think it was a day or more before my coworker heard from his brother, but he too was OK. “Knowing” two people who were briefly “missing” is nothing like having a friend or loved one there. No one I know or even tangentially related to me was injured or killed on 9/11. My mother’s flight back from Scotland (where she had been visiting my sister) to Boston was delayed several days.

Tracey decided not to tell me that she was pregnant until Friday. I’m not entirely sure why; I suspect because of all the disruption and upheaval of that week. But I knew. When I say I knew, I don’t mean it in any of that Hallmark, soft-focus, “I saw her and she was just aglow” nonsense. I just knew. And I knew that she wasn’t telling me, either because she wasn’t ready to talk about it or she thought I wasn’t ready to talk about it.

It was a dramatically different experience than the first time, when she had come out of the bathroom with the home pregnancy test and literally jumped for absolute, 100% joy (I also feel I should note that she was also 100% naked). That had been about a year beforehand, but that story did not have a happy ending. Instead it ended, 20-something weeks later after 3 days in the hospital, with a death certificate which had no corresponding birth certificate. That’s another long story for perhaps another day, but suffice it to say that I live my life now with the belief (and hope) that the worst day and worst experience of my life are behind me.

I mention that only because it was another dimension to the story of finding out on September 11th, 2001 that she was pregnant. It was an odd day to find out such good news, making the day one of extremely mixed emotions, especially considering our own personal history and tragedy.

Perhaps—and this occurs to me only now, 8 years after the fact and after I have already written the above words—she did not want to tell me because the news of the day was filled with tragedy and sadness and fear and anxiety about the future. Her news would stir up memories and fears and anxiety too. So she waited. On Friday at lunchtime we attended a prayer service together. After the service ended we went to lunch. I remember her telling me, and I remember telling her “I know.” (I think I was fairly glib about it…you know, like when Han said it to Leia?)

We talked. The excitement of the first time was displaced by the awareness of all that could go wrong. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

I’m not big on stories with morals or the idea that God or the universe or whatever sends us “messages”. Nevertheless, I have, from the beginning until now, always believed that if there was such a message it was this:

There will always be reasons to fear, to give up, or to give in; but there will also be reasons to hope and to work for a better future.

Go live.

Pointer: "Something I never want to hear again" »

I tried to get the linked post to publish Tuesday at 1 p.m. but it never appeared in my Dashboard, and so I’m thinking it may not have appeared in anyone else’s either.

If it did, sorry for the duplication.

Something I never want to hear again…

[originally intended to be published 2009-09-08 at 1pm]

By the time you read this it will be at least 1:00 p.m. (eastern time, USA).

I will be at a funeral for a friend of ours who died of cancer. She was diagnosed in February. She was, perhaps, more an “acquaintance” than a friend. She was someone I knew, a little. Occasionally we’d see her at a church, or at the local theater where she helped with the children’s plays. We’d see her at this or that event, or picking up a few things at the grocery store. Here or there.

I had heard second- or third-hand that she had cancer. Whenever our paths crossed I’d ask her how she was doing, and she always said she was doing well, and seemed to be. It seemed like our paths crossed fairly regularly for awhile, and so I never thought much about keeping in touch with her. After all, cancer is no longer the death sentence it once was. Or so we’ve been told.

A week ago Sunday I saw her name and thought, “I haven’t talked to her for awhile, I should call her.” That’s never really the way things had worked between us, we had always counted on life to bring us back together. Or at least I had.

Saturday morning I got the call that she had died. Almost a week had passed since I thought about calling her. If I hadn’t gotten the call, I probably would have seen her name again on Sunday and thought the same thing. Would I have done it? I wish I could say I would have, but probably not.

I went to the “calling hours” tonight. I met her sister, who lives in town but I’d never met. Hard to imagine not knowing people in a town this small, but it happens. We exchanged pleasantries. She told me her sister had been in the hospital for two weeks, but things had gotten bad pretty quickly. She seemed to be handling it pretty well. I guess she had time to see it coming.

The hardest part, by far, was talking to her daughter. I knew her about as well as I knew her mother: a sweet girl with a light laugh and a pretty face, just starting her junior year of high school. She seems to be taking everything in stride. To everyone who said “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she shrugged, looked down, and said “That’s cool.” In print it looks cold or rude. It was neither. It was just all she seemed to be able to say. It’s as close as she could get to “thank you.” I have no psychology degree, but I’d guess she’s in some stage of denial, operating on some version of auto-pilot. Waves of well-meaning adults and friends keep coming to say the same things to her. They didn’t know what to say and she didn’t know what to say.

She sat at the end of a row of the folding chairs with thick cushions, meant to comfort the grieving when preachers go too long during the eulogy. Another girl I assumed to be her best friend sat two seats away with an empty seat between them. Her aunt sat on one of the large upholstered chairs against the side wall, surrounded by the same well-meaning adults and friends saying the same things to her they had said to her niece.

Eventually I sat down in the row behind the daughter, and a few seats to the side. I had said my clichés and offered my sympathies as best I could. Others who came in threw their arms around her and hugged her, and she accepted their gestures, but as I watched her body language, I was glad I had resisted the urge. She seemed to be doing it to comfort them, despite wishing that they would just say their words and move along… not because she didn’t care or didn’t appreciate them, but that she just didn’t seem capable of accepting them.

At first it seemed strange that her friend had left an empty seat between them. Eventually I wondered if it wasn’t a subtle indication of how well her friend knew her. “I’m here, but I’m giving you the space that you need,” she said without words.

So they sat together. Her friend seemed neither anxious nor chatty. She just sat by her side; neither out of reach, nor too close at hand.

I wanted to have words of comfort for her. I wanted to ask where she would live now. I wanted to try to break down some of the walls that she has so quickly built up around herself. I wanted to do something. I’ve been told that this is an especially common (but not uniquely) male response: the urge to “fix it”… even when there’s nothing to be fixed. I found myself wondering about her father. I had never heard about him. I had never been close enough to her mother to ask, nor she close enough to me to tell the story.

So I sat there, hoping that perhaps my presence alone might offer some comfort like I imagined her friend’s presence was. It seemed unlikely, but maybe it was something—

I didn’t hear the question, or see who asked it… all I heard was the answer:

“Oh, she’s going to be buried next to my dad.”

There was the answer to the question that I had resisted asking.

“How long has he been gone?” I asked, betraying even more the lack of real knowledge or friendship between us. “I don’t know…” she began, and then corrected herself, “…I never knew him…”

Her aunt spoke up, “He died when she was 9 months old…”

She is 16. Her mother died at age 46. Which means that her mother, at around age 30, had a newborn baby and a dead husband.

Rationally, I know that there are thousands of cases like this, if not more. Single parents with even younger children, whose spouses die and leave them alone to tend to their young child. I know that it is not unique. I know there are tens of thousands, if not more, children who never know their fathers, for a myriad of reasons. I know all these things. I am educated about all these facts.

But until you’ve heard a 16 year-old say that her mom will be buried next to the father she never knew because he died when she was an infant, you can’t really understand how much you will hope to never hear that ever again.

Driving in Pittsburgh

So I was driving through Pittsburgh today, and while stopped at a red light, I wrote:

Pittsburgh: “Even our pedestrians drive like assholes.”

Because they do.

Now, I currently live in a small town, but I’ve driven in Boston, New York, New Jersey, California, and Atlanta.

I have never in my life seen as many people pull the “I’m stepping out into the road, and I’m gonna glance down and see where you are, and oh you’re far enough away you’ll probably stop before running me over, so now I’m going to saunter my lazy ass across the street like I’m a finalist in the Slowest Turtle Competition.”

That bullshit would get your ass run over in Boston.

Pittsburghers, please know that I really love your city, but your traffic patterns are more confused than trying to learn Chinese arithmetic from Ozzy Osbourne.

“Hey, this lane is now Right Turn only!”

“Hey, it’s not Left Turn only!”

“Hey, you need to go straight, but straight is a 98° turn, and we decided to make the road narrower on the curve.”

“This road is wide enough for 3 cars, so we decided to allow for parking on both sides of the street. What’s that? No, it’s not one-way! It is, however, cobblestone and has more bumps than a measles colony.”

“This street is 2 lanes in each direction— SURPRISE! — after this traffic light we allow parking in the outside lanes. I KNOW! ISN’T IT GREAT?!?”

“Oh, and one last thing: we only hire bus drivers who have no peripheral vision and who are incapable of turning their necks to check for oncoming traffic. Just didn’t want to throw you any curve balls.”

Anyway, I posted the above message to Twitter, and not even 30 seconds later, my phone rang, a number I didn’t recognize but it was a 412 area code (Pittsburgh, for those who don’t know).

Now, you have to understand that my phone hooks to my GPS, which is great except that I had all of the windows down, and I knew that if I was trying to talk through the GPS speakerphone, whoever was calling would have no way to hear me.

So I have to unlock my iPhone and tell it to not use the GPS speakerphone while I’m trying to roll up my windows and turn on the A/C (it is hot as Thor’s balls today).

Finally I answered the phone:

Me: “Hello?”

Voice: “Our pedestrians do not drive like assholes!”

I was like, “Holy fuck, someone from the city is monitoring Twitter for people defaming the city?!”

May I remind you it has been like 45 seconds since I posted the message, but I had also sent Jason my cell phone number so we could try to meet up, and he had apparently gotten my DM and seen the message at the same time.

Meanwhile the light has turned green, but I haven’t noticed because, well, see above, and the guy behind me starts blowing his horn.

I’m going to take a nap now.