The Best and the Rest

I had a fantastic birthday. Really, one of the best I can remember. Ed pointed out that for the last two years, I haven't really been able to celebrate. When I turned 22, I was running madly through small-town New Mexico, cobbling together a crumbling campaign and taking voicemail birthday wishes between class presentations. At 23, Ed and I were strapped firmly to our car seats and speeding headlong across New York state, in transit to the sweltering desert.

This year, I'm home.

Yesterday my new boss sent an e-announcement to the whole organization about me and my new job, and people were so excited. Later, the department came together and we ate ice cream, and they sang, and signed a card for my birthday while wishing me well in my new position down the hall. I felt young, surrounded by middle-agers who could barely remember just what they were doing at 24.

At 5, I hopped in my car and was immediately blessed with the sweet sounds of one of my favorite songs, coming across independent radio. A Murder of One carried me up 91 as raindrops hit my windshield, slowly, metered, while the sun shone sideways through the clouds. I looked for it and knew it would be there: a giant, arched rainbow stretching over the sky. I chanced danger and snapped a quick photo with my camera phone, swerving only slightly and slowing to an erratic pace. I made it home safely, the spectrum of color carefully stored in digital memory.

We went for Indian. I cleaned up and got pretty and Ed took me on the town. We ate masala and naan and indulged in simosas, wine and beer. We talked law and politics, history: our own and otherwise. When we came home I went into the bathroom and came out a minute later to Ed, standing in the kitchen, his face aglow with a birthday cake aflame with 24 candles. He's magic, I tell you.

Thoughtful, too. He gave me the nicest gifts and made me cry with his home made card. He made me laugh, howl really, for his creative gifting and sly assertions. Among other things, he gave me 24 individually wrapped packages of peanut butter crackers, simply because I love them. I love him.

The weather lately feels like a gift, a reminder of place and time, of contentment and forward motion. Autumn suits me. It's the perfect time of year.

The Birthday

I'm twenty-four! Lucky me, here at the end of summer and rolling through the Virgo cusp. It's a good age, I think. I've been asked a lot recently how old I am, and somehow, I seamlessly slipped into saying twenty-four. I never liked saying twenty-three, so I'm glad that now I am at least legitimately as old as I say.

Last weekend featured a birthday dinner with my parents and an incredible gift of tickets to see one of my favorite performers, ever. Ed has been sneaking around lately and banning me from certain rooms and from snooping in the fridge. I awoke this morning to a birthday banner hung in the cover of night while I slept soundly not ten feet away. Later on, we'll eat Indian food and light candles and celebrate.

Thank you for your birthday wishes, everyone. I love knowing you're out there, even as I wish you were right here.

Avast, me hearties!

Thanks to all those across the internet who reminded me that today is Official International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

I'll be shivering my timbers and swashing and buckling all over this place today.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Aye, matey. A pirate's life for me...

Shredded

We bought a ten dollar paper shredder at Target yesterday in a grand admission of adulthood. We've been carting around statements and records and sensitive documents for a few years now, because throwing my Social Security number, bank account number, debit and credit card numbers, and even my full name and date of birth into the garbage where identity thieves can snatch them up is just not my idea of fun. These are weird times we live in, and having, sometime during the last few years, become someone in possession of sensitive material is even weirder.

Today the paper shredded and I had a bit of a party.

The best part? Shredding to smithereens the pay stubs and insurance forms which proved I ever worked in the world's top accounting firm in grand old Chicago. See you in hell, Deloitte!

Tunbridge World's Fair

Tunbridge is the smallest village on the edge of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Once a year, it glares to life and last night, it was like this:

So many smells. That's how we know we've found an honest fair: fried dough, diesel tractor fumes, hay, horses, animal shit. French fries, italian sausage, engine grease, cotton candy, damp grass, popcorn, cheap perfume. Small change, bingo pennies.

We scoped the scene and bought enough tickets: two rides each. The Viking pirate ship had us first, and split our crew of four into pairs of two after little-kid hoodlums hopped the fence and broke the line. Me and Ed first, we sat near the far back in a row with a lone blonde scraggly kid. She was brave. I was not. My organs tumbled over themselves as the ship swung in a huge pendulous motion. My nerve endings sizzled and I held my breath until I realized it felt better to scream. Ed dogged me, "Lift your arms!" and I did. The scraggly kid did, too.

We departed from the ship and the next shift filed in. Caitlin and Tamara had the first pick. They chose the farthest back, most dangerous and daring seats. Caitlin sang while Tamara prayed and we waved, from the ground, 60 feet below. We ran into Scott and he chain-smoked while we stood around, buzzing with adrenaline and catching our survival.

We ran headlong for the speeding bobsleds next. The carni ride-chief smiled with blackened teeth and craggy angles and a glimmer, unmistakeable, in his eye. As we waited, he stood so closely to the spinning cars I thought he'd lose his legs. He knew better, of course, knew exactly how close he could stand without getting clipped while still making us gasp in fear. I know he relishes this knowledge, holds it dear when he thinks of his work and the way he makes the children shake with nervous delight. We boarded and leaned from one side to the next to make our hanging cars sway. We were reprimanded, of course, the trouble-makers that we are. The ride spun our guts out and blared dance music as we moved at the speed of sound into and out of the same tunnel, once forwards and then back.

We must have felt near death because as soon as the ride ended, we all bounded from the platform and danced with the energy of night in the grass. Who knows why, what made us move, what compelled our spirits to cling to life but we did. Spontaneous night dancing at the fair.

Feeling satisfied with death-defiance for the night, we wandered up the hill, above the lights and blinking sounds and away from the crowds. We found a shack selling homemade apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, four dollars. We indulged, and it was worth it. We visited the horses, resting in their stalls after what must have been three strenuous days of travel and show and behaving nicely. They were weary, or alternately wound up and kicking. They were like dinosaurs, all big eyes and inquisitive brows, sloping backbones and enormous ribs.

We saw the world's (or at least the World Fair's) largest pumpkin and marvelled at sunflowers as big as a car tire. We found the sheep, and the goats, and the cows and their owners, more weary than the horses even, passed out in hay bails, side by side, boots up in the night. I wished I'd had a camera then, to capture the fair in one single shot.

It was late, and we were tired. Back atop the hill, the noise of the fair had faded below and the scene was like Light Bright made huge and lifelike. The ferris wheel wound its way into the atmosphere. Game winners hefted stuffed animals and rang bells for strength. Kids with sticky faces clung to their mothers legs, crashing after sugar and overstimulation. The last daredevils of the night shrieked from the highest point of the Scrambler and the Zipper. We walked along in the dark through the parking lot with herds of high schoolers, all awkward romance and angsty conversation. We drove home along the river, and the fog lingering above the water led the way.

Winter?

Hi.

It seriously feels like it could snow. I am drinking chamomile and wearing three layers and wrapped in a wool blanket. Hello, September.

The other day Ed and I went to a partners' cocktail party (Ed was allowed to come with me for this one) and I taught some kids from Georgia the meaning of "leaf-peepers." I've never done that before.

Today I promised my Jenny from Miami that we'd embrace New England pastoral traditions together. I promised apple and pumpkin picking, rosy cheeks, robust children. Except, without the children. That should be fun.

And my birthday is coming up! Next Wednesday I'll be twenty-four. Two-four. Woo.

Five

"...I'll always love you though New York...New York, New York..."

Rails to Trails

We went bicycling in the woods, on a trail that used to be a railroad track. It was warm again this morning, an Indian summer to sate us as we launch headlong into golden afternoons and brisk evenings. Autumn is nearly upon us, but not before a few more balmy Saturdays.

**

Paulo Coelho writes of omens in The Alchemist. His protagonist is searching for direction, yearning to know what's right, and has only himself to rely on. He reads signs in gathering clouds and sunrises, in children' eyes and the changing wind. He listens closely and believes in an inherent goodness, and these omens lead him to his fate.

When we lived in Chicago, our omens sat silent and stubborn, caged inside the city limits and bounded by intersections, asphalt, and skyscrapers. We searched restlessly for a path, a way to make it there and to be happy. We found jobs and tried to love them, and feigned comfort in the city life of bars and clubs, live music and sushi joints. We shuffled into packed trains and stood pressed against other city dwellers and window panes as they rushed by projects and dumpsters and abandoned lots.

We tried to make it better, to make the city a place where we could still do what we love. We found old bicycles and fixed them up in Ed's backyard and rode the streets to the lake on weekends. We drove miles on packed highways to find trails north of the city leading to the Botanical Garden, an escape from the urban pace. We traipsed through city parks and sat beneath trees, played soccer on eight square feet of grass and frisbee in the alley behind my apartment. We were a comical juxtaposition, hippies in a hipster landscape. It didn't work. Our fate was elsewhere, and we felt its dormancy as a different kind of sign.

**

Lately, the omens are shouting at us, laughing and playing in sunsets and rainstorms, swirling in tea leaf designs in the bottoms of our steaming mugs. This summer, we moved in and brought our old bicycles from home to live here on our porch. Ed tuned them up while I was at work, and they run better than they ever have before. We found a cheap bike rack for the back of our car and now we can go go go! We stay in most nights, reading by the window or playing in the kitchen. We have local hideaways we scuttle to when the sky gets gray or the night opens up. We have trees and grass and hills and rivers and trails! Trails where old railroad tracks used to lie. And we bicycled there today. And the omens, they sang.

Thursday

The sun is out after days of gray, and I've been feeling the rain. It's career stuff and life stuff and this lack of direction, this nebulous blob of uncertainty which hovers around me every day. I am reminded at work that I am temporary, yet to be hired permanently. I am mired with uncertainty by a decision I had made with gusto only days before. I can't seem to figure how to get from here to there, or even where I want there to be, when it comes to my life, and my work, and my time.

As a result, I've been acting rotten. Not intentionally or even always overtly, but my gnarled feelings are leaking into my daily interactions and pourring through my words, my facial expressions. I'm being impatient, shutting off communicication, raising my expectations as if anyone but me can pull a fast one on this funk that's taken hold. I feel worse for the wear, worse for knowing I'm making other people feel bad, guilty that I don't see the ways I affect others. I told Ed that I think I've spent the first 23 years of my life believing fiercely that I am nearly always right, that my actions and reactions are called for and warranted. I've felt justified by my own innate sense of justice which I see now, was skewed to fit my perceptions and was a result of my own emotional landscape.

I feel myself entering a new stage in which I recognize that what I perceive is not necessarily real or right, and is not an excuse for erupting the way I do. It's a balance between trusting myself and doubting that the acutely sensitive glasses through which I see the world provide a clear view. It's an act of honoring what I feel while allowing room for alternative truths, for the perceptions of others to be as valid as my own.

It's a concerted effort for me to be more aware. It's a a matter of forcing the clarity of hindsight into the present and watching what I say, what I do, and how I react. It's about not waiting until the guilt and the aftermath to realize that I am wrong.

I read on a tea bag yesterday that the greatest happiness is found in service to others, and I'm trying. I think I get so wrapped up in my own dilemmas and questions that I tend to forget that everyone goes through this. I think that if I can be strong and supportive of everybody else, I might learn eventually how to do it for myself.