My Friend Jenn

My friend Jenn at her job at the middle school.

Having grown up in the Bay Area of Northern California, and lived there all of my life, in 2005 I packed up two bouncy boy children, a two month-old baby, a pet mouse, two hysterical cats, and the man with whom my life had become inextricably joined, to move to Los Alamos, New Mexico. On the way, the mouse succumbed to the heat of Death Valley and was dead by the time it arrived in Arizona. My life in New Mexico would be mouse-free, which is something that I cannot ultimately regret.

I left behind Earth flags, hipsters and Puerto Rican food to alight in a place where, to my chagrin, everything closed at 8 P.M. and people talked comfortably about Jesus in mixed company. Bidding farewell to the land of peace and justice centers, community gardens and the birthplace of such earthshaking phenomena as Starhawk, Metallica and U.C. Berkeley, I moved into a cozy nest under the wing of the National Laboratory which gave the world nuclear warfare. (Ironically, my maternal grandfather's admonishment against the celebration of the mushroom cloud image graces our local Historical Museum.)

The thing, though, that I ended up missing most was my friendships. In California, I had been lucky enough to be invited to attend a group of people who gathered for periodic meetings known as Almond Roca Senior Socials. The moniker of Almond Rocas came not from the menu but from the general topic, which was the nature of being human, summed up as this: You know how when a cat takes a shit in a litter pan and then covers it up, afterwards with the litter pebbled all over the exterior of the turd, it strongly resembles an Almond Roca? This is how humans are about everything–trying to disguise shit as candy. These conversations were far more interesting than I am making them sound. My point is that I had a community which was intellectually involving, and which also was knit together by the exposure of raw feelings and pained hopes–candy revealed to all of us together as crap, which restored the crap to a kind of value.

At the center of my life there was my friend Amy. She deserves her own essay, so I won't write it here. Suffice it to say, she was my closest friend, present at the births of two of my children, and the only person with whom I have never had sex who would pull her car over to the side of the road in order to try and hold onto cell reception, so that she could talk to me a little longer, because I needed talking to, or listening to. Amy definitely does not live in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She is as much a part of Northern California as manzanita or Coast Redwood. After almost seven years here, my soul is still sick with missing her.

However, after I had lived here two years and went to work at Mountain Elementary School, I met Jenn, who was our school counselor. Jenn is the most refreshingly honest person, besides Amy, that I have ever met. She is honest even when it would be far better not to be. She cares deeply about the people in her life and can be counted on to be an unshakable friend, going further for people than the bounds of friendship dictate or demand, which is what extraordinarily kind people do normally. Because I sensed all this about her, she was the first person in Los Alamos I dared bare any real part of my soul to, and she has proved more than worthy of that trust. For all these things, I treasure her. But even more so, I treasure her Facebook profile.

This status update captures the essence of what I–and I think many others–love about Jenn:

This morning I found a fortune cookie fortune in my purse that says "Investigate the new opportunity that will soon become an option." So, I booked myself on an 8-day cruise with my friends.  

My life is full of task boxes set up up neatly at the start of my day, whereas Jenn seems to be a helium balloon lofting from rooftop to rooftop and alighting long enough to share joy with people. Somehow, despite this, her house is always lovely and mine is always messy. Recently, I had a long conversation with Jenn, who, in her extraordinary way, manages to be a great friend to both my mother and to me–which makes a kind of sense, since my mother is a great friend of mine. On this occasion, though, I had turned to her to help me bring the perspective of the mother of an adult woman to bear on my experience. My mother and I both were muddling through the difficulty of my still being ill and how this might affect both of us. Jenn decided we should all three have dinner and talk. A few days later, when I hadn't heard from her about cementing plans, I texted her to confirm and got this response:

I don't know anything about this. Did I forget? Do you mean to be texting someone else? Did we have a conversation after I took Ambien?

...which made me burst into a fit of giggles. Perhaps this sort of thing happens to everyone and they merely cover it up. Perhaps it only happens to Jenn. Either way, I find it completely charming. After the dinner, when Mom and I were sitting in the living room of my house chatting with my husband, Jenn called and told me she had been stopped by a cop. She was sober, but he had her get out the car and examined her. While she was out in the howling wind by the side of a main drag, a wholesome-looking family rode by on their bikes and clearly saw the now middle school social worker undergoing a field sobriety test. Later, she posted all the details to her Facebook profile.

I just got stopped by a cop. He made me get out and he made me follow his pen with my eyes. It was mortifying! This was after a dinner of tilapia, baked potato, AND ICED TEA!!!! He said I was on the center line going around a curve. I couldn't explain to him that I just needed to use the bathroom! But, he knew from the eye test that I hadn't been drinking so he didn't give me a ticket. But, SHIT! I know people who know me saw the whole thing! It was SO EMBARRASSING! He didn't realize that I am just am oblivious driver! No alcohol!

I didn't have a problem with doing the tests because I knew I hadn't done anything wrong but it made me SO DISCOMBOBULATED that I first pulled out my Visa card and tried to hand it to him! Then I told him that I hadn't been drinking and I was the middle school counselor and I'd just eaten tilapia. I was all over the place. It's amazing he didn't arrest me just for how I was behaving. And, since he didn't know me personally, he had no idea that THIS IS HOW I ALWAYS AM!

Perhaps, if Jenn gets to suddenly and without forethought, book an eight day cruise with friends and I do not, she also is the unfortunate soul who will suffer the indignity of a public inquisition of her virtue. These two things, I believe, are linked.  In the end, I believe that she would deem the field sobriety test a fair price to pay for the spontaneous trip, and I would not, and that—I suppose–explains our lives. I don't want to suffer the indignity that comes with a life of weightless spontaneity and yet that is what I love Jenn for, and I am sometimes extremely jealous of the lightness of spirit she brings to the same potluck where I come with a casserole made of lists and analysis.

Jenn is good people. Really good people. She has a blog where she is journalling her weight loss journey, and, whether or not you relate to or care about weight loss, she is a delight to read. She brings to it all the humanity that makes all of her communications ring out like a sounding bell from the ordinary falsetto drones of small talk. It is about scraping off the outer coating of what looked like candy to find a cat turd. It is about laughing hysterically. It is about loving oneself, everyone else, and the world and still daring to want more for all of them.

Because of Jenn and Kristine and Kimberly and a litany of others like them, I think it is O.K. to live in Los Alamos. Mountains have not supplanted oceans in my heart, but have finally won a place next to them. After all these years, I have planted gardens as if I finally know I am staying here.

Home, in the end, is wherever your friends are.

Passages from the FBI File on Tara Adams

Photo Credit: Flickr by Cliff

1. March 1, 1983. Our subject, born Tara Kathleen Gordon in 1975, recently came to the attention of the government due to her involvement with a group known only to the Bureau as "Scissilla." We believe this to be a code name for some sort of terrorist organization. Today, an agent engaged the subject in conversation in her third grade classroom, having assumed the guise of a friendly substitute teacher. Tara spoke freely and, in fact, passionately about Scissilla and her beliefs surrounding it and its related worlds (or perhaps, cells), while cantering back and forth and twisting the hem of her dress. (It was noted, by the agent, perhaps irrelevantly, that she was the only girl in her grade not wearing jeans.) Tara claimed that Scissilla exists in a parallel Universe which connects to ours through a magic waterfall. In Scissilla, she claims, everyone lives as a shepherd or farmer and is at peace with the world, practicing no violence. There is though, according to the subject, a neighboring world, Jipsivan, which is currently attacking both Scissilla and its surrounding worlds. Tara believes that "Jipsie" agents are currently at work on Earth and that she, a native of Scissilla, has been reborn here in order to stop them. After consideration, the Bureau believes this issue may be more germane to the field of psychiatry than national security. Due to the seriousness of any charge of terrorist activity, we will, however, maintain a file on Ms. Gordon.


2. August 15, 1994. Tara Gordon again came to the attention of the Bureau today while attempting to board a plane from Boston, having carried a double-edged knife to the security line. This peculiar series of events, which suggest a miscalculation in our previous decision to suspend surveillance of this subject, played out as follows. The nineteen year-old Ms. Gordon approached the TSA personnel at security proffering an elaborately decorated dagger and a polite expression. She explained that she had purchased this item in a store in Ocean Point, Maine for the purpose of giving it as a gift to her boyfriend and had then taken a car and Greyhound bus to Logan Airport, where she and her mother now planned to travel back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It had occurred to her at some point, she illustrated, that perhaps there might be a problem with transporting this knife onto an airplane and, in order to avoid having her baggage seized, decided that the best course of action would be to pack the item in carry-on and then retrieve it, to reveal to the TSA personnel, so that, with her accompanying explanation, they need not be alarmed about her bringing it on-board. However, at the point of her brandishing a dagger illegal in the state of Massachusetts in an international airport, things soured quite suddenly and the authorities were contacted. When agents arrived, in the guise of a small group of Hari-Krishnas, events found Ms. Gordon in tears over the loss of her dagger, which she claimed was a religious item, and the degradation of her character that accompanied this experience. Strange as it may seem, it is this agent's impression that Ms. Gordon was not engaged in a terrorist act, but was instead acting on a sort of ridiculous, unproved faith in the inherent eagerness of the world to understand her intentions. Naturally though, the file will remain open and very limited surveillance will commence, to protect the government's interests.


3.  October 27, 1994. A thorough background investigation into Tara Gordon received today reveals some troubling items. Apparently, there has been some question as to the patriotism and American values of her family going some ways back throughout their history. Her father's family hails, not insignificantly, from Russia, but her mother's family, although not Bolshevik by lineage, is worse. Apparently, Ms.Gordon's maternal grandfather, one A.Powell Davies, longtime Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., was an antagonist to the government during the years of his peak influence. His FBI file reveals notes stating that Rev. Davies awoke every morning before dawn and worked at a printing press underneath his house, producing Communist propaganda which he would later distribute about the family's neighborhood. (It is noted that his wife, Muriel Davies, was later observed frequently to have said that not only was her husband not a Communist but that he never arose early enough to do anything before dawn.) Evidence of un-American sympathies does not end there, however. Rev. Davies was actively critically from his pulpit, of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his church provided gifts of drawing supplies to the children of Hiroshima following the bombing which ended the war with Japan, a clear act of traitor-ship.
   
   His daughter, Bronwyn Gordon, is perhaps even more questionable if somewhat less influential. On no less than seven separate occasion, a note has been made by TSA employees of Ms. Gordon's behavior when passing through security at airports, her presence at the previously mentioned dagger incident notwithstanding. Her comments have included statements such as "Well, did you find an explosive?," "It's not as if I have a BOMB!" and "If you search my disabled client inappropriately, I will call the police!" It seems that Ms. Gordon also lived for a time with her then husband, Tara's father, in a tepee, on some land that did not belong to either of them, in the state of Washington. Both Rick Gordon and Bronwyn Gordon's presence in Berkeley in the Summer of Love is also a damning piece of evidence against them. At this time, both of them were caught up in notions of  "people's power" and it is suspected that they may have consumed illegal street drugs.
   
   Ms. Tara Gordon herself, the new report reveals, was present at the Gulf War protests in the company of a friend who strongly resembled Jesus Christ but was 6'2" and photographed wearing both a Russian ear hat and a pin bearing the hammer and sickle. This friend later joined the Trotskyist Party and remains, we find, an avid Trotskyist to this day. Ms. Gordon herself at this time referred to herself alternately as a utopian socialist, an anarchist and a faery. Clearly, we must keep a close watch on the activities of Tara Gordon. At some point, she will be caught in act of outright terrorism.


4. March 1, 2012. After close to thirty years of observing this subject, we believe it is finally time to close the file on the 36 year-old woman now dubbed Ms. Tara Adams. After what seemed a disturbing trend toward terrorist socialism at a young age, Ms. Adams has settled into bland normalcy in all of her daily dealings, year after tiresome year. It is noted that she has produced three children of unusually troublesome temperament, but this cannot necessarily be construed as a terrorist act. Periodically, Ms. Adams, or her husband–an outspoken Unitarian in the same vein as her grandfather–will make a remark worthy of notation in this file, but no action ever comes of this, and their activities reveal a pattern of soccer games, vegetable consumption and medical appointments. After Ms. Adams began writing her blog, Faith in Ambiguity, in 2010, it slowly became clear to agents studying her that the initial impressions of field envoys in 1983 were correct. Ms. Adams is clearly a case for psychiatry, but not, it seems, for the FBI. As of today, the file of Ms. Adams is officially closed and all investigation into her bizarre activities will cease.

My Mom is Down with the Hood

My mother, who is an otherwise mentally stable white woman of sixty-eight, with a liberal political and religious upbringing, has now taken to carrying racial minorities in her handbag.

"Boy, did I ever score at the thrift store today," she tells me yesterday on the phone, her voice booming with pride and good fortune. "I found a whole bag of Homies."

Me: "A whole bag of what?"

Mom: "Homies! They're a bunch of gangster people. Some of them are Hispanic and some are African American. They're all different, and I have an entire bag of them."

Me: "And you bought them because...?"

Mom: "Mikalh loves them! I pointed out to him that they have dark skin like he does. I thought he should have them to play with."

O.K. My mother thinks that my sweet six year-old Native American son needs tiny gangsters to play with. This makes total sense.

"I'm going to make a scene with them," my sixth-grader Devin says later with enthusiasm. "Look! It's a shooting!"

"Something about this seems deeply problematic, in a way that I can't quite define," I explained to mom.

"Just look at them," she exclaimed with delight, her outstretched cupped hands full of tiny hoodlums. "This one's name is D.G. He's a Mexican!"

Me: "How do you know he's not Guatemalan?" I challenged her.

Mom: "He is holding a Mexican flag, Tara."

Me: "It's like 'My Best Friend is Black' elevated to some completely screwed up new level. 'I love Hispanic Americans! I have one in my purse!'"

Mom: "You're the only one who thinks this is weird."

Me: "Devin, you don't think this is weird?"

Devin: "They're Homies, Mom. I'm fine with it."

Me: "Whatever."

Mom: "I think they're wonderful. They should make a set of Unitarians, too. And a set of Mormons!"

Devin: "She spent two hours on the internet searching for their names, you know."

Me: "Well, that's even sicker."

Mom: "This one is Perico. That's Da Foo and this is Live Wire."

Me: "I'm going not going to talk about them anymore, Mom. You just wait 'til Rowan sees this."

However, when my unusually sarcastic and satirical fourteen-year came home to find my mother and Devin playing happily with gangland figurines on the dining room table, he was unperturbed.

Me: "This doesn't bother you? It isn't weird that she has a bag of gangsters in her purse that she is playing with?"

Rowan: "They're Homies, Mom."

Me: "Whatever."

Finally, though, when my husband saw her with them this morning at our breakfast table, a look of bemused discomfort crossed his face.

"There's something about this that's disturbing," he said.

So there's that final additional wrinkle to the already complicated situation of race relations: middle-aged white people who carry toy Mexicans around in their handbags. Proof of a post-racial society–or just deeply fucking weird?

Clearly my dog has been talking to door to door Mormons.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: Silent Sunday. Just post a picture that represents your day.

(Sorry, I may have mentioned I don't follow directions especially well.)

Clearly my dog has been talking to door to door Mormons because somebody told him it was Christmas and yesterday morning he was bouncing up and down like some sort of forty pound donkey-eared Mexican Jumping bean and making it impossible for my mother to get her camera set up.

He didn't even seem disappointed that he didn't have a stocking to open. 

People who take Topomax should never do anything.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: What are your biggest pet peeves? via Em at  http://warmedtheworld.blogspot.com/

I'll focus on one: forgetfulness!

I hate when people forget things. It makes life like this: everyone else is a cub scout but me-I'm the den mother. Did I mention my whole family has ADHD? (My middle son leaves socks around our house the way the Easter Bunny leaves eggs.)

Here's the worst part:

A couple of months ago, my neurologist prescribed me Topomax for my migraines. And it dramatically reduced my migraines. Which is a big deal, since, prior to that I had UPGRADED to an average of 15 migraine days a month.  But it made me an idiot.

The first week, I lost my credit card, forgot to pick my six year-old up from school, and tried to set fire to my house over and over again with a glue gun. Now it's a bit better. But I can't write letters backwards in the air anymore! (Shut-up. I need to. It's part of my job. I'm a reading instructional coach.)

A funny thing happened today.

I can't hand-write the addresses on my holiday cards anymore, because of my fibromyalgia, and my husband had the brilliant idea of using Excel and Avery labels to make the job easier. So, last night, I was carefully aligning and sticking labels onto holiday cards. Which I send to everyone in the goddamned world. 'Cuz I'm that good. I even wrote a cute holiday letter.

So today I'm carefully, lovingly folding each letter to include with the photo cards of my three kids and my canine-donkey hybrid dog. I've got through about thirteen when I notice they all say

"We hope 2010 finds you happy and well."

Maybe it will be construed as a joke?

Just when I was feeling really low, though, my mother, a brilliant woman and writer who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in creative writing, calls me:

Mom: "My car is gone."

Me: "WHAT?"

Mom: "It's just completely GONE. I parked it on the side street, on Bathtub Row, outside the Senior Center, and when I came out, it was just...gone."

Me: "It isn't."

Mom: "What do you mean?"

Me: "It's not gone. You just can't find it. Do you need me to come and get you and help you to find it?'

Mom: "Yes, because I'm about to cry."

Me: "OK. I'll be there in a minute."

Mom: "I'm in front of the Senior Center. I'll be the one crying."

So, I got in my car, my self-esteem having already been slightly elevated. My mother, although having been blessed with a well-honed wit, has been given short shrift in the mathematical and directional skills departments. But, to be fair, this was her first visit to the Senior Center since moving to Los Alamos.

I drove up to the square grey Senior Center building and adjacent parking lot, and came immediately upon my mother's silver Toyota Corolla, with her sunglasses perched on the hood. She was nowhere in sight.

I phoned her. The ringing ceased and a loud rustling sound commenced, which continued for about forty seconds, until I hung up. "God damn it, mother!"

I put the car in gear, rounded the corner, drove down a side street and discovered my mother standing on a snowy sidewalk outside a brown apartment building, looking expectant.  I honked.

She got in the car. "Well, I don't know where the fuck you think YOU were but your CAR is at the Senior Center."

And we both started laughing. It's good when you can laugh through the dementia.

It eases the pain.