from wacky to weird (New Mexico Highway 14)

Madrid, New Mexico is a far cry from the European city for which it must have been named. Just a cluster of 20 or so storefronts along Highway 14—better known in these parts as the Turquoise Trail Scenic Byway, which connects Albuquerque and Santa Fe via lush (for this state) wooded hillsides rising and dipping to reveal repeated vistas of mountain range beyond mountain range beyond mountain range—the New Mexican town looks, upon first entry from the south, like the ramshackle remains of lives long ago lived. The houses that precede the “downtown” seem strewn across the hillsides, rusted out cars and trucks and other detritus speckling the slopes around them as I am used to seeing only in the Southeast. The shops look a bit thrown together, built from whatever wood or glass was handy at the time, no architect’s or developer’s input considered. Once inside them, however, I sensed a wacky charm that makes this town a blessed respite from the suburban strip mall zone that Albuquerque seems to be. I found beautiful jewelry and a toked out, California- and Southwest-loving hippie silversmith inside one; in most of the others, identical old lady shop-keeps, with gray hair whisping around lined faces; turquoise dripping from necks, fingers, and wrists; and zany voices singing out to welcome us in. We had our best meal yet in New Mexico at the hippie’s neighbor’s restaurant, which is the first place I’ve found in this state with an ambiance just right for writing, so back I plan to come with my computer. We also enjoyed the company of the Mississippi-born waiter, who was so pleased to find that we’re from the South that he three times sat down beside us just to chat—the end revelation of which is that Madrid, NM is a boring town for a 23-year-old from anywhere to live in, even if he’s an artist and it’s a veritable colony of crazy artist types.

We left Madrid delighted, chipperly suspicious that we had found a place for me to source new characters for my writing and no longer set on making it to Santa Fe but instead eager to get to the next town up the Turquoise Trail—Cerrillos, home of the turquoise mine from which the rings my mother and I both bought in Madrid came. We had gotten the impression, from the repeated references that jewelry sellers in Madrid had made to this town, that Cerrillos too would be thronged with shoppers. But the only signs we saw of life in Cerrillos were parked cars and two horses stabled in the interior courtyard of one Main St. home. We saw no people as we drove from First St. to Second St. to Third St. at the backside of town; we felt spooked by the dirt roads, the falling-down storefronts, the faded signs. Cerrillos is a true ghost town—but with people clearly living it, because there were those parked cars, and there were artistic fences around the houses and a sparklingly new-looking Visitor Center. Why they would live there, in a place with literally nothing going on, we could not guess. But we didn’t stick around to find the quirky appeal this time; we left quickly, unnerved, ready to be anywhere in New Mexico other than this not quite deserted shell of a town.  

a home of one's own

It’s not a big house—the one I arrived at yesterday, where I will stay for the next month and write. It’s not big but it feels plentiful—with options and variety forgotten by this long-time one-bedroom-apartment-dweller. When you come through the front door, you find yourself standing in a large, open-ended living room, with dining room and kitchen spaces at one end. To the left there is a hallway off of which lie two bedrooms and a study, two bathrooms, and a deep open alcove that begs for an armchair and a large desert plant with which to bask under the skylight. There are, in fact, skylights everywhere, giving the home an airy feel; and it turns out that there are also nooks scattered throughout. Off the living room, tucked between the laundry room and kitchen, there is a room just big enough for two chairs and a tv beside a shelf of cookbooks. Behind the back wall of the living room, there proves to be on one side a breakfast nook, drenched in daylight from the pebble-filled back “yard” (hello, arid climate), and on the other an open stairwell, into which light pours from above, beckoning you up the carpeted steps. Here perches the one second-floor room of the house, with white walls and windows on every side, so that I can write in the warm glow of a winter sun and facing clay-tile rooftops, adobe facades, the evergreen branches of pines amidst the increasingly barren boughs of one set of deciduous trees side by side with the lush, yellow-leaved tops of others—and above and beyond all this stretches the broad, undulating rock wall that is Sandia Crest.

I came to Albuquerque to work on my writing, to create a space and time outside of my daily life in which to focus deeply on my creativity. Less than 24 hours into my stay, I can already see that I’m going to also be treated to something else soul-essential while I’m here. I’m going to remember what it is like to live in a house, with hallways and outdoor spaces and options for my habitation of it. This room I will use for writing—and maybe morning stretches in the sun. In the living room I will nestle into the comfy couch or armchairs and read books and New Yorkers, catch up on tv, perhaps write as well. If I yearn for more sun during those activities, I will sit in the breakfast nook, by the large sliding glass doors that let in so much light. I might write in the study at the front of the house, maybe even atop the guest room sofa. If I yearn for more comfort, I will go to my bedroom, with its downy-soft bed—and which has a hallway inside it! When I want to feel a sense of movement I will walk up and down the two hallways. It’s a silly thing to have missed immensely but I’ve been craving a hallway for six years now—the whole time I’ve been living alone. It’s probably the same craving that made me antsy to drive here—to just get in the car and go. It’s a little do to with momentum, a little to do with transition, a little to do with having options. It’s a lot to do with a sense of freedom—with having enough space to be all parts of me.

heavily laden

Heavily laden with fruit
the persimmon tree demonstrates an
awkward sort of resilience:

leaf-less, gawky, it would look life-less,
or life-losing, bedecked in so many balls that its
branches give the impression of over-burden.
Yet the unexpectedly glowing orange skin of the tasteless fruits
defies the season to brighten the street.

Heavily laden with fruit
the persimmon tree demonstrates an
awkward sort of resilience,
its spring-like color antithetical,
its cargo both weighing down the tree and enlivening it.

jungle gym

Maybe now I understand how the jungle gym feels
when small feet batter its limbs:
the child's heels dig into the metal with security;
his feet lift from the structure, and return to it, joyful:
he may be bruising my thighs as he kicks off from them, arms encircling my neck,
to feel the rise of a wave from safety,
but I feel no violence enacted upon me.
Bouncing here, shoulder-deep in the sea,
I feel only the trusting tug of his fingers on my hair,
the warm kiss of his tiny lips as he clings to me
between ecstatic rounds of freedom.

hiking in December

The slopes are vibrant with the green of new grass; the streambeds fill musically with water. The red-brown of a hawk looks like rich color against the gray of a deceased tree trunk. Beneath a wintry sky soft with clouds, coyotes stalk the hillsides. A patch of budding daffodils stops me in my tracks; after all, it is December. I, silently composing poetry, find myself smiling. I look up, and the silhouettes of three deer against the yellowing western sky give me delighted pause. This is California in December—wild and living.

I hike alone and smiling. From this vantage point, I can see that I have regained the balance it takes to really live.

in the mood for love

My mom has often worried aloud that it is my parents’ divorce (or, as I might put it, their twenty-two-year-long bad marriage) that lies at the heart of me almost always being single. I’ve tried to assure her that that isn’t so; that I never concluded that marriage was something to avoid. Yet the older I get, and the longer I remain perpetually single, the more I recognize the role my parents played in shaping my thinking about romantic partnership.

I remember seeing my parents kiss once, and only once. That night my dad brought my mother flowers—a large bouquet, probably of roses—and gave them to her in the kitchen. I don’t recall the ensuing kiss lasting very long; but afterward, I think they were smiling. I couldn’t tell you if there were other romantic moments in their marriage; if so, I wasn’t privy to them. There were certainly plenty of fine days, when we enjoyed pleasant family time together along the pine-needled paths of a mountainside or beneath the dark sky of a summer night. But something I never witnessed—had no model for, no real understanding of—was the two of them making decisions together, operating as a unit together. I think of them more in their individual happy places, introducing me each to their own true loves. My mother spent so many hours of my childhood kicking and pulling pottery into beautiful forms, gardening, painting, cooking. My father would entertain us in his study, connecting our Apple IIe to the tv so we could play Frogger and PacMan at his feet while he solved equations on yellow sheets of lined paper; letting us shoot marbles around him in the living room while he paced across the carpet, considering questions of theoretical physics; taking us into the woods of north Georgia and showing us trilia and may apples and the footprints of muskrats. Their passions converged only in nature and Bob Dylan. Their backgrounds—strikingly similar, both with foreign-born Jewish mothers who shed their religion in the light of anti-Semitism and, after coming to the United States, became chemists, and married chemists, and decided in the 1950s to send their children to Unitarian Sunday school to help them fit in; their strikingly similar backgrounds were the thing, I think, that must have drawn them together when they met as PhD students at the same university.

But those commonalities never seemed to suffice in terms of marriage, despite my parents clearly feeling both love and intellectual respect for each other. If I learned one thing from their marriage, it’s that all the love and respect in the world amounts to squat if you can’t actively show it in a productive way; if you can’t change yourself to meet the mutual needs of the two people in love; if you don’t want to change yourself to be half of a dyad committed in love. And because they didn’t seem to want that unification of their two worlds, and because the marriage they did have was so painful for us all, I ended up believing in individualism and independence so much that perhaps, despite all kinds of pining away for certain guys, I never formed a true desire for a relationship at a young age. What I wanted from dating as a teenager and in my early twenties was not the building of a world together—that was so far from my understanding of how life works; all I wanted was to love and be loved. The terror my mother felt about being able to support herself after her divorce had left me fully committed, at age fifteen, to making sure that I could always take care of myself; expecting someone else to do that was not part of any life equation in my mind. When I did fall in love with someone toward the end of college, I think that commitment to thriving on my own may have prevented the magical-seeming development between us from landing where it seemed all along to be heading; may have prevented me from fully letting him in. Being able to identify what doesn’t work isn’t the same as understanding how to pull off the thing that would; I think I was both scared of love and oblivious to how to do it. Though I value immensely my ability to know what I need to be happy all on my own, perhaps in strengthening a part of me up to achieve that I also built walls that kept me from seeing something that so many other people take for granted. It is only in my thirties that I have decided I might not just not mind but also would actually like and truly want to share my world, my heart, my choices with someone else. Having had no model of a strong marriage until my adult years, when my brother and certain friends undertook relationships that I admire, I’ve only recently begun to be able to think of being part of a pair as a good thing without eliciting in myself feelings of guilt.

Having concluded that I would like to get married, that I actively hope to meet someone for whom I am happy to give up some of my independence, is a big step for this girl writing to you right now. It’s a big deal for me to be feeling as I have been this past week. It’s not about the particular person whose visit stimulated these emotions; rather, it’s about me seeing my own comfort in both being playful and sweet with him. It’s about an awakening. After all these years on my own, the prospect that I could one day delight in sharing my world with another now leaves me absolutely, positively in the mood for love.

re-membering

“Re-energize by being energetic.” It was just a note I wrote during a phone call. We hadn’t said it out loud; it wasn’t one of the action items my professional coach and I set for me that week. But it felt like the sum total of what we were saying, and I didn’t want to forget it. Beth was challenging me to host three dinner parties in one month; I was saying I would get back to writing at least once a week. I needed to truly commit to myself that I would do these things; so I wrote that statement, and I put a star by it, and I circled the star. I needed not to forget it.

I was coming up on my first anniversary at my current job—a job that was the culmination of a year of graduate study and many more years of pondering; a job that signified the beginning of my second career, the honoring of a long-held belief that perhaps, though writing and editing satisfied me almost completely, there was more for me to achieve; something greater out there for me to do. I had decided, after nearly fifteen years of working with young people on the side of full-time things, to blow out that commitment to low-income youth by bringing my full range of talents to bear on it.

For years I had wondered if I would be able to work in a people-oriented environment. I knew it would be completely different than the research-write/edit-revise-and-refine world I had inhabited for nine years, which a few months into my new career I closed my eyes and remembered through a single symbolic image: me seated in a warmly lit dark room sipping a cup of tea. For almost a decade, my notion of working was to quietly produce pages, chapters, and books from somewhere within me. I had spent hours reading source material, still more hours reworking paragraphs to perfection; meetings with others never took more than two or three hours a week of my time. I typically spent a year and a half to two years on each project.

Now almost all I do during the day is talk to people. I go to meeting after meeting after meeting, often driving from location to location and sometimes finding myself in as many as six in one day; when those are done, I go to my programs, where I check in on staff, work with students—try to find the reward for all the fast-paced, stressful, way-more-than-40-per-week hours of managing 65 staff in the service of 700 children in four different schools and two school districts. I rarely spend more than 20 minutes working on any one thing. I rarely see a tangible outcome of my toils—so rarely that last week, I felt a shiver of euphoria after creating a two-page Tips for Tutoring document to hand out to volunteers. I rarely see physical evidence of all that I spend so much time on. I rarely feel that I make or do anything.

Mostly, I support others in doing. Though I work in youth development, my main focus is staff development; rather than getting to revise and refine anything myself, I spend a tremendous amount of time helping other people effectively revise and refine what they do. This shouldn’t surprise me; it is the blueprint for any managerial job. And though I’m getting quite good at it, I’m not sure it always satisfies me to be good at helping others do well at their jobs. According to a BBC career quiz I took online recently, I should undertake work that is creative and inventive. Though certainly both adjectives describe many of the initiatives I take on at work—like assessing our organizational processes and structures (or lack of them) and getting my staff to put more efficient ones in place, or motivating the staff to create programming that brings our organizational mission into all grade levels—after taking that quiz I couldn’t bring myself to close the results for a day or two, because they also say that I should be making things. That there is something different about stimulating others to do things and doing things yourself.

Human beings really do differ, I’ve realized. Some work well one way and others work well a different way. I watch many of my staff thrive on coordinating and motivating people. And though I am good at these tasks, I feel that I thrive when I am the one quietly, slowly designing and refining things until they are perfect. I am, I think, not just a former editor but forever an editor; studying the structure and contents of a thing, deciding how they could better suit their purpose, and implementing changes to make them do so is the process I am prone to take with everything. The first two parts of that sequence are what my friend Meg would call taking something from 0 to 90%: getting it up and running and out the door. The last part of the sequence is going from 90 to 100%, and I seem to feel lost when I don’t get to that part; I feel an important part of me has been left dormant.

The kicker, when I reflect on my nature and whether it is a fit for the job I’m currently in, and the thing that has made me so confused and befuddled that it’s been hard to have anything much to say (write) for the past year, is that despite not feeling a fit with my job, I feel unbelievably proud of it, of the place I work, of the amazing things the people I work with do daily with young people. I never felt that sort of emotion when working in textbook publishing—not once in nine years. The paradox that that knowledge embedded in my mind silenced me, plagued my sleep, pushed me, even, into depression. It sapped me of my energy.

I’ve known for months that I needed to get that energy back. That I believe in living not just a little but a lot, and that I know how to. That I have always done that in the past. I feel like I could write a book on how to live a balanced, enriching life. Yet it has been a huge struggle for me since starting this job to achieve what used to be an absolutely ingrained, normal way of being. This job knocked me on my ass. It has hogged the hours in my week, hogged the energy in my body, hogged the people-person-ness that I always thought defined me. Right now I am fighting both to reach a place of always loving it and to put boundaries on it. I am fighting to want to stay in my job and to get the rest of my life back.

It’s hard to radically alter your world, though, when you feel lethargic, blue, subdued. Depression is vicious in that it builds on itself; you become less and less able to reach out to the things you know would make you feel right because you are too pinned down by it to bother. That’s why it was so important for me, one day six or so months in to working with Beth, to share something more than just professional with her; to share the personal struggles too. I wasn’t going to be able to be happy with the job until I was also happy with my life. So we sat on the phone together identifying things I used to do in my personal life that made me feel whole; identifying ways to re-member myself and in so doing get the blood flowing back through all my veins.

It is hard to put words to the good feeling of seeing myself begin to make the necessary little changes. First it was seeing the fruition of a promise to myself to go hiking every weekend of summer. Then it was the cooking—initially just for one friend, but now a handful of them have been indulged. Next it was the writing—not yet weekly, but I’m picking up the pace. And lately it’s been the social—the conquering of will power over doing work when I know it’s time for resting; the conquering of will power over resting when I know it’s time for living. I’ve been organizing monthly parties, spontaneously leaving work early and going to the movies, and even, this week, playing hooky to indulge a long-held impulse when a certain high school friend came to town.

It’s hard to feel that anything is more needy of my attention than these kids who are receiving so little of what they deserve, but lately I’ve been squelching the inclination to feel guilty when cutting back on the time I give them and instead just feeling good that I am giving me what I need too. I know that I will have nothing to give them if I have run myself into the ground; so I have let go of the guilt of putting a boundary on that work. And maybe (I hold myself to no predictions these days, but maybe) the result of freeing myself from that sense of responsibility will be that I will re-energize myself so fully that I will be able find satisfaction in the ways in which I do fit so well with this new career. My staff always tells me how keenly that’s true. Maybe I will eventually appreciate it too.