“What’s your plan?” she asked.

“What? When? Now? In life? I don’t know.”

“Are you heading home?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, I am.”

The rest of my life seemed up in the air but that much I knew.

“I’m going home and I think I might just go to bed… I’ve had a very bad day.”

After a crazy, wonderful, stressful week and a half of walking and working, spending time with my family and working, sleeping too little, eating too much and working, I came home again to find a little mouse corpse in the middle of my living room. I would have felt bad but for the fact that it was a mouse in my house. I would have felt glad but for the fact that he was dead and I had to do something about it.

Bob (the mouse) apparently dug into my first aid kit – cough drops, foot warmers, latex gloves. It’s too bad he couldn’t figure out the childproof lid on the bottle of Xanax; he might had died a much happier death. Instead, I fear it might have been death by toe warmer. Either that or the poor little bugger starved to death as I’d neglected to leave out food in my absence.

Judging by the stain on the floor, he was probably dead by the time we named him. My sister’s kids and her friends narrowed down the choices to Bob, Steve and Nachos and we went with the first. Bob. The name of my former stepdad. I didn’t realize I was attaching the moniker to a dead mouse at the time, but it is what it is and the mouse is dead. Bob.

The little mouse corpse, the mess in the medicine box and the desiccated bundle of matted fur and tiny bones, was just a harbinger of the bad day to come, though, and in my first meeting of the day, I found out that I might not have a job. Or I might have a job doing something else. Or I might get offered a job by someone else. Nobody knows but people are pretty sure that things are going to change. Drastically. And two years without raises might turn into three. Or four. Or no job at all.

I wanted to tell someone about it but realized I had no one to tell. I tried telling a friend but he chose that moment to tell me he’d fallen in love. My uncertain future failed to fit into the conversation I’d tried to start and I had nothing to say. I called my sister but she had no hope to offer. I went home and realized I didn’t have food, didn’t know where to find my car, still needed to clean up the mess of mouse juices left on my floor.

In the end, I just curled up in my chair and waited for the day to end. Tomorrow would be better. Tomorrow I’d come up with a plan or no plan at all and just do my job until there wasn’t a job left to do. Then, I’d figure something out. Life was too short to worry. Just look at Bob. He had no idea what was coming.

Tag: Life

Oh my, but there are ‘cubs’ who want me to be their ‘cougar’.

I usually don’t write about my personal life here.  It’s mine to enjoy, worry about, stress over, indulge in, etc.  But in the last few weeks I find myself the targeted object of a younger generation.  And this has never happened before – even when I WAS younger. It’s causing me some anxiety, which I detest. WTF?

First, some basic

With tousled hair and sleepy, mascara-smudged eyes, I left him at the curb and slipped into the airport and the premiere line for security. Priority.

The line was short. Too short. I was early for the second day in a row, ready to pay for the internet and work, write and think for a few hours until I’d board a plane headed for home, for somewhere close to home. I’d called to find out how to change my flight, to get one night in Chicago, but the man at the other end of the line, the man so very far away in India, gave me the wrong information. Inaccurate. Costly. Incredibly frustrating information.

“Use any computer,” barked the woman behind the counter to me in the “elite” line.

“Actually, I need to talk to someone about changing my ticket and spending the night in Chicago.”

“You’ll need to buy a new ticket,” she snapped and walked away.

“That’s fine,” I replied tersely. “I can get one with miles.”

In the end, though, without time, without internet access, without options, I found myself buying a ticket to somewhere inconvenient but close to home, plus fees for ticketing and locking my credit card for the rest of the weekend due to suspicious purchases. Elite status didn’t really help me with any of that, but it did put me in first class for the first half of the trip and a shorter line for the second.

I got to board first, to settle into my seat and find space for my bag. I got two glasses of wine in that very short flight and unlimited numbers of snacks. (I stuck with one.) I got to keep my seat back as long as I wanted, my electronics in the on position and my window shade wherever I wanted. I got to spend a night in Chicago.

On the way there, my rowmate and I chatted a little. She was fabulous. At 91, she went to water aerobic three times a week and dancing once. She’d lived in DC for a while but moved to Chicago to marry her first husband – they were married for 50 years. Husband number two came somewhat later, when she was 78 and he lived another eight years. She’s single now and enjoying life. She told me to enjoy it. Repeatedly.

So, I did. I savored the brief hours in Chicago that cost more than the whole trip itself and made my way to the gate to go home. The short, short line at security got me there in time to find another heading in my direction. My airport. My actual airport. Boarding. I walked up to the agent.

“Are there seats available?” I asked with a hopeful smile.

“There are but you can’t switch airports.”

“Yesterday, I had a ticket for National and then I had to buy another one to Baltimore,” I shrugged. “I just want to go home.”

She got me a seat, an aisle seat, in the bulkhead on the earlier flight and I settled in for the flight, looking up to see an old friend board behind me, someone I hadn’t seen in almost eight years. I was exactly where I needed to be.

After an afternoon with my dad and brother, after salads and Normal Rockwell and Allan Ginsburg, I made it home for the first time in a week and a half. A pile of mail waited by the front door. I didn’t know where my car was parked, and the mouse in my house seemed distinctly displeased with a decided lack of food in the house. I felt the same way, as I settled in. My bed was unmade and I looked distinctly as if I’d fallen out of another and straight into my clothes, but it didn’t matter. None of it mattered – the money, the mess, the sheer exhaustion.

“Enjoy life,” the 91-year-old woman next to me had said on the plane. “Enjoy it.”

I was tousled with reason.

Tag: Travel

“Just in case you missed it the first two times, we will have another chance to see the big cherry on a spoon in just another minute… Wait… Wait… There it is!”

My mom had never seen it before. Neither had my sister or the kids but the area through which we’d driven an hour earlier seemed more than vaguely familiar and suddenly I recognized part of the route of our walk. Day 1. Before the rain. And somehow, I became a rough tour in one of the Twin Cities, neither of which were mine.

We meant to go to the Science Museum to see the Dead Sea Scrolls in an exhibit bound to exceed the one I’d seen near the Dead Sea itself but life got in the way. We didn’t make it to the box shop to ship the sleeping bag and shoes that I wanted, the clothes I didn’t, and some presents from Christmas (eight months late) and my birthday (a week early).

We didn’t make it to the museum, but we did make it to breakfast, sharing pancakes and french toast, bacon and grits, and even getting the last of the oatmeal, even though I was technically too late for the banana and brown sugar-topped treat. We even found costumes for the girls in the gift shop, for Halloween and the Renaissance Festival, crystals for my nephew, a top for my sister and a jacket, our mother.

We made it to the farmers’ market on a gorgeous sunny day with a hint of a breeze and piles and piles of vegetables that seemed to have grown out of control, cabbage bigger than my head, watermelon the size of not-so-small children and zucchini that could have served as peg legs, filling out tights and boots even more completely than my own calf.

We even managed to see the Spoonbridge and Cherry not once, not twice, but three times on my last day in Minnesota. It seemed right to end the week with a cherry on top.

Two adventures down, one to go before I’d head home again.

Tag: Travel

Things I’ve learned this week in Minnesota…

* Walking 60 miles in three days feels like the right thing to do, no more, no less and I’ll do it again. I will keep doing it until there’s no more reason to walk
* Kids will walk just about anywhere with a promise of sweets
* They’ll walk just about anywhere without it, too, with me
* I need more water
* Excited puppies and faces don’t mix
* 12-year-olds with caustic tongues and 83-year-olds with facing memories make interesting driving companions
* I’m not ready for autumn but the leaves are changing anyway
* Blisters need time to heal
* So do hearts
* A week isn’t nearly enough

Tag: Learning

It’s amazing how easy it is to get kids to leave the house with the promise of candy. This afternoon, five of them joined me in a jaunt to the Sweet Spot downtown. Even a two and a half mile walk left them undaunted, me exercised (and slightly lighter in the wallet) and my sister free to enjoy an hour or two of peace and quiet.

Of course, she didn’t know what to do with herself, so she cleaned. She cooked. She burnt the bacon meant as a mainstay in lunch and came up with a backup plan as I walked downtown and back with her own three urchins and two that we borrowed for the day.

Bubble gum cigarettes and licorice ropes, jaw breakers and taffy filled my bag as we walked home. Stackable, lip-smackable candy Legos. Orange soda. Lollipops.

The children all stayed under the relatively low ceiling of what I was wanted to pay and stuffed their little white paper bags in my purse for the walk home, anticipation peppering the baconless lunch as they waited for the word that they were free to dig into the treats. To sample, at least. Rock candy. Gum drops. Double dipped peanuts.

The kids shared their candy with us and I gave the small bag I bought to share, to my sister. We’d made cookies the previous night, requiring a 2-mile walk to the grocery store for butter and earning a small yelp of “Fudge! There are still cookies in the oven.” That last tray gave way to the trash bin but we still had three dozen snickerdoodles to eat.

We’d also taken a two-mile walk to get ice cream cones that seemed ready to exit poor little tummies before they’d even been licked into oblivion. Small, soft-serve cones melted almost as fast as the sun left the sky and we were home again as the last licks melted on tongues.

I seemed to be bribing children to walk with me with promises of treats but other than the incident of the broken flip flop, otherwise known as the screwed up screw shoe (during which my brother-in-law reaffixed the strap of his youngest child’s shoe using a screw from the bar and a lot of ingenuity) and the time the 6-year-old fell asleep in my arms with ¾ of a mile left to go, they didn’t seem to mind the walking.

At least, they stopped asking me to drive, with the full understanding that I wouldn’t. I just couldn’t seem to justify driving someone else’s car in a small town I didn’t know on gorgeous late summer days.

The leaves had already started to turn. The temperatures had dipped into the mid-40s overnight. Soon, summer would give way to fall would give way to winter and snow and I wasn’t ready for that.

School would start after the weekend. I flew out on Saturday. For a couple of days, a couple of nights, I could bribe kids with candy and walk with children I loved, enjoying the town as their mother enjoyed a few minutes of quiet. We’d swing and talk, sing and laugh. Dance. Eat treats.

As for me, I didn’t really need candy. I’d found my own Sweet Spot.

Tag: Family Walking Candy

It’s kind of an “oh, duck” kind of day. I’m just sort of failing, miserably, at everything I try and suddenly, I’m needy. I’m never needy and it frustrates me to no end that I want affirmation and reaffirmation and to sit in the corner and cry, but there’s no time for that.

Working remotely on a very big project and several small projects with deadlines and due dates and a major point of contact on the other side of the world means working in the middle of the night to allow some sort of timely communication. Two other points of contact are on vacation and not responding at all. I worked until midnight the night before the walk, the night I came back and last night with my niece asleep on the couch and then in my bed.

The first morning of the walk and every day since has included rising between 5 and 6 to work, to walk, to do my nephew’s paper route and try to spend a little time with the family I so love and so seldom see.

Yesterday, a 6-year-old fell asleep in my arms as I carried her home from the park. I bought lemonade from a sidewalk stand and tea from another, sipping the sweet brew from a dirty, dirty cup that would had been used by someone else and would be again. I bought the same for my family and a trio of kids my sister watches.

Last night, my niece watched me for hours on end as I worked to recreate charts and links, to change parameters, to make sense of the data that continues to come despite the fact that the deadline passed.

“Poor Lodi,” my nephew commiserates. “Did that lady email you back?”

“I’ve received a lot of email,” I reply. “There’s a lot of work to do.”

“You know what will cheer you up, a puppy face,” he holds up the dog and launches into a story, more questions, and I feel like an ogre for focusing on the work that really doesn’t matter, not in the long run, not to the people on vacation who ignore the questions that dictate the direction that I need to go while sending me more work.

And my nephew wants to go to the music store. My mom wants me to come to her office. The kids want to play. The dog just wants attention. I went to the SPAM Museum yesterday. I went to the park and swung on a swing in the fading daylight and I came back to work again.

It wasn’t enough. It was never enough – not for the kids, my mom who wanted me to work and stay and eat with her or my sister who wanted the same or the clients or myself.

Oh, duck.

Tag: Overwhelmed

“Do you want to do that house?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not? We just need to do the reddish orange house and then the green one.”

“No,” his sister repeated and he turned to me. “Lodi, do you want to do it?”

“Sure, honey.”

I jogged over to the green house to throw a newspaper on the doorstep and back to the road with my niece and nephew.

“Let’s go!”

I wasn’t exactly dressed for jogging in my sandals and skirt but I wasn’t quite awake when I’d dressed. At least I remembered to put on all required articles of clothing: No shirt, no shoes, no service.

My nephew asked at least half a dozen times about my tee.

“Hey, Lodi. What does that mean? I pig New York?”

“It’s a camera, honey.”

“I picture New York? What does that mean? In your mind?”

“I was there a couple of weeks ago and taking lots of pictures when I bought the shirt.”

A little while later, he asked again and again after that and again.

“I picture New York. In your mind? Were you in New York City?”

“I was.”

The questions kept coming, the conversation, as the three of us walked the boy’s newspaper route.

I never was a paper girl, per se, but subbed on occasion. The Daily Jeffersonian came out in the afternoon, though, so I did it after school rather than the cool, damp, darkness of 5:30 on a summer morning. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I said “yes” to joining him on the route but for the fact that I loved the boy.

Subbing on newspaper routes stressed me out in the days before I’d learned the word. Stress. In the mailbox, on the step, in the door. Everybody wanted their paper in a different place and I had trouble keeping it all straight doing it for a couple of days every few months. I had trouble keeping the route and the houses straight, too, and knowing what shortcuts to take, doubling back on myself time and again.

Somehow, I always seemed to end up with an “extra” paper that wasn’t extra at all but someone else’s news that I shoved in a mailbox on the way back home, embarrassed to have screwed up and even more embarrassed later when someone called to say they hadn’t gotten their paper and they always called.

Nobody bothered to say that they’d left their dog unchained and barking, scaring the poor little petless girl that was me or, even worse, the poor big petless girl that was me. I stood silent and immobile as dogs fiercely barked and wondered why I’d agreed to take over the route for even a few days. More than 60 papers and a handful of dogs never really seemed worth three dollars a day.

This morning, my nephew paid me a quarter for the pair of papers I delivered. At a dime apiece, he’d rounded up a nickel for the company. He also offered me the morning news, but I just wanted to go back to bed, to start the day over in a couple of hours. It was too early for me as the sun broke soggy and warm in the eastern sky. I’d never make it as a paper girl.

Tag: Family

Everything was the same but somewhat different. This house, the house that I’d known all my life as my grandparents’ house, was filled with the things that filled my own house growing up and my sister’s house in West Virginia as well as a few bits and pieces that were my grandparents and things that were new.

The walls had changed colors but they were still the same walls, defining the same rooms I’d always known with things that felt like home. The paneling in the family room had been painted.

Grandma’s room was a den and the study a bedroom for the youngest child who’d made a bed in the closet. (I used to sleep in my own from time to time.) The sheet music I bought in New Orleans and had framed in Washington DC now adorned the wall in the bathroom that used to smell distinctly of roses and Gold Bond.

And the dog.

Grandpa never would have allowed a dog. Then, again, neither would my sister, but there she was. Coco. Wagging her little tail to beat all.

My poor tired mind didn’t know how to process it all. One day earlier, I could barely walk, talk or form complete thoughts. I pulled my computer into my lap just hours after a monster walk and soaked my feet while putting in hours of work. Epsom salts helped with the blisters; nothing helped with the workload.

I put in more hours in the morning and went to my mom’s office for the day. We broke for lunch – ice cream from Dairy Queen – and went back to her office, where I finished the day. Home to my mom’s to repack. To my sister/grandmother’s house for dinner. To a playground. Back to the house for a movie and more work.

I needed to stop. I needed a break. I thought I’d have one in Minnesota but the weekend was grueling. Much like the feet that bled before the first day of walking, it was an inauspicious start to a week, and I tried to do more and more to carve out some time to spend with my family.

The kids peeled off and went to bed. My sister fell asleep on the couch. I saw my brother-in-law for about five minutes before he closed the door, and I went to bed in my niece’s bed/grandparents’ study to work some more. I had to check the closet for the girl for fear of a midnight surprise but she’d found somewhere else to lay her head.

At some point, I hoped to lay my own, to close my eyes and let my body and mind stitch themselves together. It was all just too much.

In the meantime, I could only focus on how much I loved the place and the people and things that filled it. Sharing closing ceremonies with my family. Pink champagne. A gifted footbath from my stepdad. Frosted glasses of beer. Swinging at the park. Hugs. The fact that my sister looked far prettier in my dress than I ever did. The fact that I could work for the week from Minnesota.

The rest would come out in the wash, caught by those color catchers at my mom’s house, which seemed equally strange with so many familiar and unfamiliar things, parts of my past, pictures of me, in a place I’d never lived.

Tag: Family

Hundreds of people filled the cheering stations, young and old, men, women and children. They clapped and slapped hands, rang cowbells, offered thanks alongside cold, wet paper towels and freezer pops, icy wash clothes, stickers, a spritz or a soak.

A group of little girls offered lemonade from a stand in their yard. A man offered a seat on his couch, one that he moved from spot to spot along the route, Jodie’s couch – the place his wife rested as she suffered the effects of both the cancer and the treatment, chemotherapy, radiation.

People held up signs for their wives, mothers and daughters. Friends. Lovers. Sons. Real Men Wear Pink. Blisters Don’t Need Chemo. I Love You, Mom.

I’ve never read, said or even thought so much about words like “hooters,” “knockers” and “boobies.” I have never before shouted the word titties in a major metropolitan environment. I’m not even sure I’ve said it aloud before this weekend.

Some the signs proclaimed their bearers survivors, one with the numbers crossed out and replaced marked each passing year, five, six. Seven years as a cancer survivor and the owner came out to cheer every day.

I walked with survivors – one year, two, 25, 30. I saw lymphedema sleeves and scarves covering heads stripped of hair. I saw t-shirts with pictures and names. In honor of… In memory.

I saw taped limbs and crutches. Women who limped as they started out and hours later when they returned to camp. I limped for 23 miles on blistered feet and then 17.3 more, and then I danced across the finish line, the 50th finisher of about 2,400 walkers.

Blood, sweat and tears seeped from my body, sometimes all at the same time. Walking through cheering stations alone, with hundreds of people clapping and cheering, offering thanks, nearly made me cry. It was just so overwhelming with kids and candy and so many eyes looking at me like I was special.

It wasn’t just the cheering stations, but the kids in their pajamas on their front lawns at 6:45 in the morning. The houses decorated with pink string and ribbons, hand lettered signs and balloons. The sprinklers and water guns. The firemen with their hydrants and hoses. The motorcyclists supporting Juicy’s Jugs.

The man in the red shirt stood alone on corners and clapped. I must have seen him at least a dozen times throughout the three days. A couple of women offered free foot massages every afternoon but I was in the zone. Besides, there weren’t enough unblistered spots left to rub. They all made the walk pass quickly as did the conversations.

I walked and talked with several amazing, beautiful, strong women over the course of the three days and I walked alone. I took pictures. I told stories. I think I got a sunburn but I haven’t seen a mirror since Thursday.

And suddenly, I’m done. It’s over. I’ve walked 60 miles and slept on the cold hard ground. I’ve done it alone in the middle of a couple thousand people and soon I’ll meet up with my family. In the meantime, I need to cheer for the rest of the walkers and enjoy a perfect moment with music and cowbell under a tree, on the grass of the Minnesota State Capital. We’re all almost done.

Tag: