Category Archives: Under the Whale

Chasing the moon

Dan spent yesterday afternoon at the club, the front door propped open so that people could come in and buy t-shirts or old posters he had on sale. It was kind of a depressing day, with people mostly coming in to gawk, take pictures, or, to his amazement, say “you mean you’re really closing?”

He came home deflated that he hasn’t saved more memorabilia over the years, and that business has been so lousy in this final month. This all happened so quickly, it was impossible to create any real finale for the place. People might have stayed away for fear of getting trapped in the crowds, so there weren’t many crowds. Or they never believed it was really going to happen, thanks to the dubious reporting of The Other Paper, where the only real coverage was the speculation that Dan was bluffing or that the landlord was going to have a change of heart. (Never, I repeat never, trust TOP‘s “facts.”)

Fortunately, I read Space.com almost every day. So yesterday, I found out that last night’s full moon would appear to be the biggest of 2007. Venus and Saturn are also hanging out together in the western sky.

So, here on the realio, trulio (props to Ogden Nash) last weekend of Little Brother’s, we loaded our son in the car at sunset on Saturday night and drove to the country. The sky was electric pink and an old, unmarked mix tape of mine that I unearthed in the club’s basement played Neil Young’s “Long May You Run.” Venus was bright, with the faint Saturn nearby, and fireworks were going off all over the countryside west of town. When the moon peeked over the horizon, it did indeed appear to be huge, streaked with hazy red and orange stripes.

“Is it Jupiter, daddy?” Declan asked.

This is the planet that Dec is both the most fascinated with and the most afraid of. After watching a few specials about it, I must admit that I’m a little scared of Jupiter too.

Life soundtrack: Neil Young with Stephen Stills, Decade, “Long May You Run”
Neil Young with Stephen Stills - Decade - Long May You Run

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Out of Touch

We’ve had a January of non-stop pain-in-the-ass bad luck and a couple of truly sad events.

First, our beloved dog Samson was diagnosed with bone cancer. He deteriorated rapidly and was in immense pain. We said goodbye to him over the New Year’s weekend – my husband slept on the living room floor with him to help keep him comfortable. He was a beautiful mutt. Everyone’s best guess was that he was part golden retriever, part chow, and part Afghan Hound. A member of the family for over 10 years, he was one of the world’s truly loveable creatures; a sentient who calmly offered himself up for petting whenever he sensed that you were stressed, a beautiful athlete on the hiking trail and just plain loving soul. We still miss him daily. His ashes and pawprint are on the windowsill.

A week later, another kind and gentle soul, Dan’s uncle and godfather, passed away. The youngest of my mother-in-law’s siblings, eveyone lamented his difficult life, which was rife with health problems. But what I knew of him in the past ten years was that he seemed to be a contented man who was extremely loyal and devoted to the extended family. We took a trip to the Pittsburgh area where Declan was at least able to meet several second cousins who had yet to make his acquaintence. He and I spent the service outside the chapel because he decided that the room going quiet was the perfect opportunity to talk. We went to a strange restaurant afterwards, where one waitress was assigned to the room of over fifty people by herself, and a bartender nearly bit my head off for requesting apple juice.

Other highlights of the month: Dan’s car broke down. He accidentally killed my laptop with a can of ginger ale. Last week we had a flat tire and got food poisoning. We’ve had about three colds in six weeks and a few friends are having scary health issues.

We are grateful that there are new beginnings this week with the Chinese Year of the Dog (I am a dog myself, and the Tibetan Losar.

Meanwhile, Declan can crawl! He scootches around on the floor like an inchworm or a drags himself by his front arms like a G.I. It’s an amazing but frightening development, because he can really cruise. In the tradition of the rural Ohio humor of my family, my mother has suggested that we put a cork in his butt and tie it to a brick.

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Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman

A couple of nights after I had my dream of bleeding breasts, I had another, even more vivid one.

In it, I was having a drink with a woman I used to be quite close with, but have not spoken to in years. I was trying to explain to her that I had missed her often, that I missed her humor, that I missed learning from her. Even though there has been nothing but silence since 1998, the fact that we were no longer friends still sometimes stung me like a fresh wound for reasons that I couldn’t explain.

She laughed.

And then she left the bar, still laughing at me. I followed her into the street and watched her walk away.

“But you hurt me,” I said, sounding weak in every sense of the word.
This made her laugh harder as she walked off into the night.

When I think about men that broke my young heart, I remember the fact that I felt pain, but I don’t actually remember the pain. Losing a friendship with a woman is different. Days after I ran into her in my dream, I ran into her, for the first time in about eight years, in life. With all that time behind us, I still wanted to curl up and cry.

During my mid-20s, A and I were co-workers and co-players who peed our pants laughing while drinking bourbon and smoking and watching “Billy Jack.” (“Watch his feet, he kill you wit’ his feet.”) We lauded each other when one of us turned a particularly good phrase at the alternative paper where we both worked. She had helped to get me hired. We were both obsessed with identity politics and pop culture and law and crime and finding the best ways to write about them. We also gossiped about co-workers, imitated our more annoying sources and tore some of the people we didn’t like to shreds, verbally, behind their backs. Like most exercises in the demeaning of other people, the subjects of our scorn didn’t always matter much beyond of their service to the art of a good story and the sense of belonging that could bring to the teller.

She knew secrets about me that even my mother didn’t – things that she listened to with loving consideration inside of the warm glow of times when the idea that we wouldn’t be friends for decades seemed absurd.

She was my colleague and friend, but became my sometimes boss, a role that probably wasn’t any more fair to her than it was to the rest of us. She was a good editor, but a lousy manager, and her first foray into boss-dom launched our relationship into open water where it sunk with the pressure and only periodically came up for air. Whenever she seemed to pull away or cut me out of the loop (which she often had to as my boss), I’d become clingy and annoying. I’d campaign for my own relevance with her to the point where I’d later smack myself in the eye for recoiling into an insecure adolescent persona I thought I’d outgrown.

There were other people to blame. There was an unreasonably hostile work environment to blame and there was our youth to blame. There was a culture that raises women to believe that they can’t be direct, especially with each other, to blame. But these problems sat around like unclaimed luggage in the office hallways, and were never really unpacked.

Naturally, there were also men involved. One man who I suppose she ultimately preferred sharing her writing with. Her relationship with him once put me in the excruciating position of having to choose between betraying her and betraying myself at work, and I chose the latter, or the “high road,” as my mom would call it. (The “high road” is often on the same sea level as a doormat, I’ve found. Other people were much hipper to that fact than I was in my 20s.) I also had a man who had his own way of butting in. And these things are a whole other part of the story.

I buried her and mourned the friendship more than once, only to have it resurrected when we had a particularly good laugh or accidental heart-to-heart. But after pitches and pitfalls and fits, our friendship croaked, well after our newspaper had met the same fate. She stopped returning my phone calls as I became more and more paranoid that I was now one of the people I used to help her avoid. When the phone rang after hours, I’d answer and she’d whisper “I’m not here,” while smiling and wiping the air with her hands. There were usually colorful reasons why a particular person wasn’t worth talking to or needed to be avoided, replete with anecdotes that summed them up like a well-drawn comic strip. She tended to withdraw from any conflict or tension, and whenever some sprouted between us, I would dread the idea that I might suddenly become one of those two-dimensional characters, animated inside of A’s richly detailed frames.

We also worked with another woman, K, who remains one of the only people I would cross (and, lord love a duck, I believe I actually have crossed) the street to avoid. Sitting in a desk next to hers in my first weeks on the job, I remember how she’d speak sweetly to people on the telephone, then begin cussing them out the second the receiver hit the base. Being one of those people she spoke to sweetly on a regular basis, it didn’t take long for me to realize that anytime she was on the other side of a closed door, chances were good that she was facing it and shooting me the bird. She identified herself as a feminist almost daily, but was no more capable of treating her fellow woman with respect than our publisher, a preening, self-absorbed lefty with the obligatory sensitive new age guy ponytail, treated the office receptionist. Like Kleenex.

Near the end of the paper’s existence, I actually caught K in the act of talking smack about me behind a partition, describing me as universally incompetent due to a rotten sentence I’d written during a 60-hour work week in which, due to our constant downsizing, I’d written over half of the news content. A had been cast back into the role of editor in the final act of the paper, so I complained to her sort of hysterically. She sympathized and apologized, but laughed that we all knew K, and the she had warned her that this kind of thing was bound to happen someday. When asked to apologize, K actually told me she was sorry about how I heard what she said, but that she felt it was all true. It was just unfair, especially coming from a woman who used to sweet-talk me into doing her job while complaining of headaches that lasted well over a year.

We were all like latent characters in scenes from Odd Girl Out.

A year and a half after the paper folded and several phone calls to A had been unreturned, I hadn’t lost all hope. I have plenty of friendships that have gone through stretched, elastic phases and eventually snapped back. Other former co-workers I ran into complained that they hadn’t heard from A either, expecting that I had. And she was in a one-year master’s degree program, which seemed like a legitimate reason to be out of touch.

Then I ran into a former co-worker who I saw fairly regularly who said “so, it was good to finally see A last weekend, but you didn’t miss much. Were you out of town or just so annoyed with her no-calling-anyone back act that you’ve written her off completely and decided not to go?”

It turned out that K had a party for A’s completion of her masters degree that I, who hadn’t moved, changed phone numbers or become in any way unfindable, hadn’t been invited to. This seemed strange, since people from our old accounting and production departments had apparently received their invitations.

A party snub is no big deal when you’re regularly in touch with a person. Apologies are made and you just see them the next time. But before I’d been a co-worker, I’d been a friend. And if I had just been forgotten – if people from accounting were a priority to reconnect with and I wasn’t – then that was almost worse. At best, I was simply forgettable, at worst, I was snubbed with the intent to h
arm. I held another funeral for the friendship in my mind and tried to banish the viral feeling I had that close relationships with women simply weren’t worth having.

A few weeks later I went to a bookstore where I often took refuge from the isolation of freelance writing among the crowd of weekday strangers that always appeared to be doing the same thing. As I charged toward the coffee counter to get a cup to take for a lengthy browse, I realized K and A were right there, chatting animatedly at a table in the cafeÃ?©. It was too late to just turn-tail and run, so instead I opted to act oblivious. I ordered my coffee and poured in my cream with my back to them, acting like I had no idea they were there. Then I bolted for the highest book stacks I could find to hide among, then sat down and tried to catch my breath. Not only did it physically hurt my heart to see them, I was immediately ashamed that the feelings it provoked in me were so strong that I didn’t feel capable of doing anything but fleeing.

Maybe it would have been different if A had been alone, or with anyone but K, who I thought could probably benefit from a 12-step program for people who apparently derive their entire sense of self-worth from demeaning others. I’m sure I felt hurt that a person who I had seen talk smack about virtually everyone she ever encountered was someone A saw as more deserving of loyalty, or who was in any way a more rewarding friend. I thought about calling A so many times to get angry, spill my guts or cry that year, I’m not entirely sure that I didn’t.

But I thought I’d let it go. In recent years I’ve worked with several people from her city and publication, so I hear of her sometimes. On the rare occasion that I’ve seen K, I’ve just looked past her, crossed the street or walked away. But it’s a little like cutting out a three and a half year period of my life which, while it was often absurdly stressful, was also formative and a time in which I produced work I’m still proud of.

And here we are eight years later with this dream, coming at a time when I’ve really just started to foster some of the deepest new friendships with women that I’ve dared to try since the A experience. Motherhood opened up all of these new possibilities for healthy, loving friendships with other women and I have tried to let go of some old fears and embrace that – to trust that we don’t have to be petty with each other or stop communicating because being direct is too painful. And maybe once you’ve had 16 doctors stare up your hoo-ha while they ponder the safety of you and your baby, you learn something that no one can really explain about humility and fear and love.

So this past Saturday, just a couple of hours after I had left the company of one of my newest, dearest friends – one of the only people that I exchange “I love yous” with regularly outside of my family (as I once sometimes did with A), I stopped by Target to pick up an extra set of lights for the Christmas tree. Declan was 19 pounds of asleep in my arms and the baby carts were blocked by a kid cart and A, who was talking to her younger sister right in front of them.

Maybe it’s because the dream was such a fresh event that I’d Googled her just a week before, or maybe it was petty self-consciousness over the fact that we’ve practically traded body types in ten years – she is now rail thin and I’m more Rubenesque – but I immediately felt kind of winded. But I wasn’t going to waste the trip by leaving and I wasn’t going to walk all the way to the Christmas decorations without a carrier of some kind. So I marched through them awkwardly and started yanking at the kid cart to get to the baby cart, apologizing under my breath for moving them aside.

“Tracy, is that you?” she asked. I think I tried to act surpised, but frankly, I’m terrible at faking anything. “Is that your baby?”

We had an awkward exchange, at least from my end. I babbled incoherently and sort of breathlessly about the writing work I’ve been doing lately. I let her know that I’d been vaguely aware of her whereabouts for years and met a few folks who knew her. But I didn’t say how much I love being a mother, only that I’d wished Declan wasn’t asleep so that she’d gotten to see what a nice person he really is. I didn’t say that I saw that she’d done something amazing with her career last year and that I was struck with both pride in once having known her and envy that I’m not currently in the position to do something similar.

She said something about how I should call her at work sometime, or let her know when I was in Cleveland, which I am a couple of times a year. But this became the thing it was hardest to let go of as I went on to buy my extra string of blue pearl lights. I think I made some kind of obligatory “that’d be great” kind of response, but then I contemplated that situation and couldn’t imagine any outcome other than I call, and then never hear back.

Having unresolved pieces of my past seems harder than it did before I became a mom. I want to be wise enough to know what to do when my little boy, whose eager smiles are so quickly returned by most of the world right now, suddenly aren’t. And how do I convince him to let go of rejection when my own old wounds can still feel so fresh?

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Daddy mogul, baby critic


Daddy mogul
Originally uploaded by tzt.

Due to his father’s strange adventure on the Judge Judy show and a visit to my father’s house for Thanksgiving, Declan has made his way to Los Angeles and Manhattan at the grand old age of six months.

He’s wandered through the Getty Center, MOMA and even The Aldrich in Connecticut.

Suffice to say, he has an appreciation for minimalist and abstract painting that his father and I may never develop.

He shrieks with joy when he sees bright orange or yellow.

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