the wisdom of others

well, today i let some other people teach me. and at the end of the day (9:06pm), i'm in a good mood. clint says he loves me when i'm in a good mood. we just went on a walk. clint is teaching me a man's way of interacting. or at least his. he says he doesn't need to talk to reinforce or manipulate :) our emotional bond. he says it's relaxing to him just to hear the birds. technically speaking, i like that, too. but i tell him that it's relaxing to me to talk. so he tries not to be annoyed with what i say and my questions. and i try not to be annoyed when he doesn't speak. we strike a happy medium. walking down our street (as i was talking about people clint doesn't know and how they bird-watch), clint said "look at that." he was pointing out our new neighbors. "they're a bunch of women." "you sound like some grisly guy who doesn't like women." "no, i was just laying it out on the bed." "you better not." :) i was happy. i like women. i like men, too. even when they don't talk. but it's nice to know there will be women.

today in yoga terri taught. she knows she is in substitute rank to liz, who is in kansas city. but terri also has good things to say. she says none of us are heroes. there goes my last post. she says breathing is the most important thing we do all day. she took us through a relaxation where we went to the arctic. i tried not to think about global warming. she told us we were hearing the polar bear babies chasing after their mothers. i tried not to think about whether or not that made me want a baby. she took us on a journey in our minds, which are a powerful thing. i tried to let that sink in so i wouldn't want to get on a plane. the us air industry spent $60 billion on fuel this year. in 2000, they spent $15 billion. i am still going to california.

but, until then i just may keep taking kind of quiet/kind of talky walks with clint. i bought us some groceries. i've got books to read. yoga to do. running and biking. and look at me talk and talk and talk and nobody has to hear me if they don't want to. they can read this. but is there silence when you read? i don't think so.

be your own hero/heroine

all my life i've had some worries. they came down to being about life. i was anxious about a lot of things. and so i looked for models/mentors/heroes. i still have a lot to learn. but now i know that i am capable of learning. and i'm proud of what i've done so far. this is not an ego-centric post. but, a wise woman once said to me: be your own mother. now i'm also thinking: be your own hero. when we keep looking outside for the answers, we waste time. yes, there are wonderful models to be learned from. but i think it comes down to two things: the only things that can stand in the way of getting what we want/need are: fear and lack of creativity. i've been learning a lot about getting over fear (though i still creatively work at this), and creativity is an unending source when we open ourselves up to it. patience is also good. but so is a bit of pressure. i've always put pressure on myself to accomplish my goals. it's taken longer than i wanted sometimes, but i keep learning to put my priorities in the best spot they can be in that moment. anyways, it sounds like i'm giving advice like a life coach. but, this is my blog, and clearly, i'm the best life coach on my own life, so advise myself in a place where i can retrieve this moment of seeming clarity i will.

the joy

i had to steal this picture of claude's niece, jen? i think you won't mind sharing her joy on my page, linked to yours.


her joy is what i wish we could all exude
in life every day, and she makes me very
hopeful about having a child as lovely
and sweet. wow.

being an adult is so full of artificial ups
and downs and perceptions of rejection and
highs of approval, but this little girl seems
to be saying that being human is not that
at all. it can be exhausting trying to "get it
right" all the time, and i love the feeling that
everything is already quite alright and just as it should be if we just stop and swing and smell the coffee, if we are content with the baby teeth of our lives where they are... what an odd analogy. but sometimes i wish myself to be in a certain place, and yet this girl's joy is all the same whether or not she's on my blog or jen's. she's right there in that moment, and that's the only place she wants to be. i want to engage such innocence. oh the delights when we choose to be light.

6 months (and 3 years)

I can't believe I've only been keeping this blog for 6 months. It feels like 6 years. We've been really tight of late.

I also can't believe I've been married for 3 years today. It feels like 30 years :) We've also been really tight of late.

I think there's a connection.

thanks for putting up with and supporting me, clint. hope i'm doing the same for you.

from 80's TV to Facebook

Looking back at the 80’s and noting all of the movies I watched, I realize I was not always raised by parents. Like many other children who came of age after the all-engaging TV screen was invented, in many ways, I was raised by TV. In my case, perhaps I had it a bit worse (or better, depending on your perspective). Until I was four, I had to share the TV screen with my older brother Kyle and with my mom. Then Kyle went to live with his dad, and when our mom died, my dad and I were lucky (or unlucky) enough to have cable and two separate televisions. With my mom, I watched some shows here and there that I never would have chosen on my own: Phil Donahue and Richard Simmons. After her departure, I was a child master of the remote control.

While from the outset this seems like it will be a sad story, I think my story also sheds light into the cultural influences of the 80’s and their ramifications on my generation. Many people disparage the junk food that 80’s pop culture and its commercial influences were for youth. And it’s true that I became obsessed with Barbies, Barbie-standards of beauties, Hi-C “fruit juice,” Kool-Aid, and their latest commercial varieties. But it’s also true that my television addiction in the 80’s and half-way into the 90’s resulted in emotional expectations and ways of being that I share to various extents with other members of my generation. And I would posit that our addictions are not all bad.

A list of the movies I watched in the 80’s reveals to me in retrospect much of my development. Though my dad was often watching his own cultural choices (or junk food) in the living room while I camped out on his bedroom floor, he also set positive examples of literacy and community engagement away from the television screen. But I didn’t fully put his modeled modes of literacy into effect until the end of high school, and primarily in college, when for four years, I watched no TV and learned from books, professors, friends, and community volunteering. In essence, I traded one group of influences for another. However, during all of my years (with the exception of my public schooling), I was the one holding the remote control (and even in school I could zone teachers out). In my television watching, in the college courses I took, and in the friends and experiences I chose, I was the one deciding where I would focus my interest, and I chose the sorts of emotional experiences I wanted to have.

At the age of four, my TV watching was mostly limited to Nickelodeon (a children’s network), on which I watched a somewhat educational variety show called Pinwheel. I also watched Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers on PBS. A friend of mine who is a professional family counselor identifies Mr. Rogers as the show that changed our culture. Mr. Rogers was child-centered and promoted vast and pervasive self-esteem. He said we were all his friends and neighbors. While my friend, born in the late 1940’s Baby Boomer generation, sees problems resulting from the Mr. Rogers model, I see a different set of emotional expectations in my generation, and in many respects I would posit that these expectations are positive and conducive to vast levels of human connection the like of which human civilization has never experienced before. Such rapid change does not come without its consequences. But I think the potential for good is enormous, and in this essay, I will liken 80’s pop cultural influences to its ramifications in today’s social nexis, particularly as we see through the new all-pervasive screen: the computer, the internet in place of cable, and the limitless potential of social networking through technological platforms such as Facebook.

The 80’s were a feel-good era. They were following the openings of social boundaries created in the 60’s and the 70’s, and feel-good programming was being created for children on such levels that a child like me could experience something as traumatic as her mother’s suicide and could still emotionally coast by on the babysitting of cable’s programming. As an 80’s single-parented kid, when I wasn’t having dinner with my dad (or eating food in front of the TV paid for my dad), I was socializing in droves at daycare, coming home to all-engaging TV babysitting via cable, and during every other weekend when I wasn’t being babysat by my Grandma (and the television choices we collaboratively negotiated), I was in control of (and addicted to) the remote control.

When PBS and Nickolodeon were not providing my favorite brain-candy, I changed the channel to movies or asked my dad to take me out for some rented VHS so I could find full emotional fulfillment surpassing what I often found with the few kids who were playing outside in our neighborhood. I started with an addiction to Disney, then took on Jim Henson creations, and found fulfillment in the stories of Annie (an orphaned little girl who lives a fantastical life with an older, single dad), Punky Brewster (same story, only older dad wasn’t filthy rich), and then moved on to stories such as: ET; The Star Wars series; The Secret of NIMH; The Fox and the Hound; All Dogs Go to Heaven; An American Tail; Adventures in Babysitting; Back to the Future; Karate Kid; Beetlejuice; A Christmas Story; The Goonies; Stand By Me; Ernest Goes to Camp (and everywhere else); Ghostbusters; Big; The Never-Ending Story; The Princess Bride; Fame; Gremlins; The Little Mermaid; Little Shop of Horrors; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Pee Wee’s Big Adventure; Teen Wolf; The Toy; and Willow.

Unsupervised and unregulated, I also watched many films by the time I was 12 (in 1990) that were beyond my life experience and maturity level but were entertaining to me: The Jerk; 9 to 5; Bachelor Party; Heathers; Pump up the Volume; When Harry Met Sally; Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure; Breakfast Club; Sixteen Candles; Can’t Buy Me Love; Pretty Woman; The Color Purple; Crocodile Dundee; Dead Poets’ Society; Dirty Dancing; Driving Miss Daisy; Elephant Man; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; Footloose; Good Morning Vietnam; Lean on Me; Hoosiers; L.A. Story; 3 Men and a Baby; Mr. Mom; National Lampoons; Police Academy; Pretty in Pink; Rain Main; Roxanne; Say Anything; Smoky and the Bandit, Splash, Stand and Deliver; Steel Magnolias; Tootsie; and Top Gun.

Now before parent readers who religiously read parenting magazines, supervise and participate in their children’s media experiences, and provide alternative activities to TV get their stomachs all tied in knots, let me point out that I write from a perspective which is not completely traumatized. TV was an escape for me when I was dealing with childhood trauma that I was far from having the resources to understand. Yes, I was probably self-medicating with mostly positive emotional experiences. But, I did learn a lot about American culture in the process. While I didn’t have a regular nuclear family experience which I could use to connect with other kids, I’m sure I watched many of the same TV shows and movies, which gave us a common language.

I learned about American conceptions of romance, popularity, adventure, rejection, success, and relationships of all kinds. I was wise beyond my years in addition to being overly exposed. And I developed an aesthetic that led me not to Freddy Kruger movies and slashers but films that emotionally buoyed me and made me hopeful about marriage and the future.

In total, I think my television and movie viewing engaged me deeply emotionally, if only through a screen. I became comfortable with a familiar cast of an “American family” which I shared with the rest of the culture: there were the Huxtables (of the Cosby’s), the community of “Cheers,” and what kid didn’t dig the Smurfs? We had a vocabulary and sense of cheerfulness in common, and we were fed these emotions with the unstated charge of “now make these feelings a reality in your world.” While we came from various degrees of nuclear family normality and functionality, we watched families like the Cosby’s deal with life’s complexities in a connected, nurturing, and comedic kind of way. We learned about the greater possibilities of human interaction, and I think were humanized in the process.

Granted, watching such simulated happiness could also have deepened the pain of those whose realities who did not or could not meet such idealized depictions. Many (if not all) of us may have felt separated (as we naturally were, through the screen and reality) from these happy, healthy people. And if we felt shy about pain, this could have caused us to feel further alienated. But we also saw that such positive feelings and interaction were in fact, theoretically possible.

Many of us who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s (and I can’t speak for those who went before us because I wasn’t there) have since gone to college, where we connected over our interests (or the classes we chose and signed up for) in greater droves. From TV to daycares to colleges, we are probably a generation who grew up feeling more socially connected and fully emotionally engaged than any generation before (well, with the exception of kids playing in the street or on sports teams, but those options weren’t available to us all). Or at least we were socially connected and emotionally engaged with greater numbers of people, if you include TV and film families and characters.

After such vicarious emotional development and expectation for connection in the adult world, we graduated from college and made our way into the marketplace, which for many, particularly in a recession, has proven to be a much different reality. Instead of moving right into families where we’re the adults like Cliff and Claire Huxtable (of the Cosby’s), we find ourselves trying get jobs often as receptionists, behind desks, and in cubicles, and find ourselves exhausted by a lack of live social and emotional engagement. When we go to find other young people to connect with, Cheers does not exist. Instead, everyone’s busy with their jobs and listening to music in their cars, and unless one finds a comfort level with a particular bar and group of people, we often find ourselves back in our apartments, without our parents, with the remote back in hand. Mr. Roger’s promise of being neighbors, validating our self-esteem, and connection, for many of us has been hard to come by.

Some of us have the support of family to make our way into a world of a particular specialty where we make contacts. Many others, though, drift as they try to find a work environment as emotionally fulfilling as what they’ve experienced in films and TV. This, however, is the reality absent one new element of our generation: a new form of social engagement, the new cable: the internet.

In the late 90’s, email was just becoming a social tool. My freshman year of college, I used it to keep in touch with my close friends from high school. I used email to carry on a long-distance relationship for a year (in addition to the phone, though I had to pay for it) with the man who would later become my husband. My best male friend from high school came out as gay for the first time ever over email in the late 1990’s. He still hasn’t told his evangelical Christian mother this fact of his identity, but he told me over email and was crushed when I no longer had access to my college’s computer network and documentation of that important written moment of his life.

In this new century, we’ve gone beyond email. First, there were chat rooms scaring parents over the content and recipients of their children’s confessions and connections. But now, there are safer sites where we verify our identities more carefully and reconnect with people we’ve actually known. The two most popular of these social networking sites are MySpace and Facebook. MySpace is more multi-dimensional, complete with the options of designing one’s page and “branding” oneself with images and a song that automatically accompanies a hit to your page. Facebook, however, is the more utilitarian and rapidly growing social networking tool.

The impact of Facebook and MySpace cannot be understated. A friend of mine found the daughter she gave up for adoption on MySpace quicker than any detective agency might have been able to locate her. On MySpace, I apologized to a friend whose boyfriend I crossed boundaries with over a decade ago. She forgave me and relieved me, told me of her current health problems. I’ve also connected with people from junior high and high school I thought I’d never see again. Even as a teacher, I’ve “made friends” with students who were resistant to me when I was their instructor, trying to get them to focus on Spanish and not their latest social dramas.

I don’t mean to overstate the importance of these sites. But what they do for social networking is remarkable. A friend in her 60’s tells me about her step-daughter who’s starting a Master’s degree at the Clinton School of Government Policy. I simply email her later and ask for the step-daughter’s first name, and I’ve tried to "friend" her and add her to my instant connections. Some of my friends also do leg-work for me. I can find old friends or acquaintances within their friends, or I can find new people among their friends based on our common location, interests, or names. One of the most shocking “adds” I received was from my namesake Heather Hunter, a porn star who a professor of mine discovered long ago, to my dismay, when he Googled me and found hit after hit of Heather’s sexy poses. Luckily, I married my high school sweetheart and appended his last name to mine, saving me from Google embarrassment eternally.

What does it mean for us that we’re becoming increasingly cyber-connected? It means if someone crosses my mind or thoughts for whatever reason, I can quickly not only send them an email but can start an instant chat. On Facebook, at any given time, I click on the lower right hand corner and can see a list not only of my friends but their up to the moment statuses. For example, right now: a former student from the first college class I taught has listed her status as “probably doesn’t have her priorities straight—Facebook first?” A high school student, who I met student teaching her high school sophomore English class is announcing: “Everyone should download their NHD photos.” When I missed Father’s Day with my families (mine and my husband’s) because I was attending a writer’s conference, my sister-in-law Alyssa immediately uploaded pictures of their new puppy, so I could see. Another friend of my husband and I, Bones, has downloaded his recent volunteer work in the Democratic Party and has pictures of himself with all of the Nebraska Democrat public figures. I saw these in a video he made of his friends, which included photos from my wedding and him hugging me as my husband’s best man. Suddenly, not only is an important day for me memorialized, but I feel more connected to specific figures of my state-wide political party and am thus more humanized and empowered.

The level of connection being made available through sites like Facebook is far surpassing anything we ever experienced in the 80’s (speaking from the perspective of having been a child then). We are not just connecting via our Hollywood acting family. We are becoming family, and meeting up online. I am “friends” with my nephews, nieces, and brothers. I instant message my 52-year-old brother at my leisure when he’s logged on to Facebook and Gmail and ask for updates about his law school experience. I can give him support. I went to law school and hated it, but he went at 50, and despite being the oldest person in his class, he loves it. He’s done the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s stuff, and now he’s ready to focus. But he can still stay up-to-date with family while planning a career as a bankruptcy attorney in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s failure to respond created a needy market of bankruptcy filers in New Orleans, and rescuer or not, my brother is off to live a comfortable life in their service.

Which brings me to a good point. Not only am I able to heal my junior high memories of low self-esteem when a “friend” in Portland (who I haven’t seen in 10 years) tells me he always thought I was the greatest and felt out of place himself in junior high. But, potentially, we’re building a platform to solve the world’s problems. I don’t have to dial, pay long distance bills, and wait on the telephone line to learn whether someone is in a meeting or might return my voicemail before she leaves the office. We’re logging on after our spouses and kids have gone to bed, when we still have some social energy left for the night. We not only update but inspire each other. We give each other the connection to inspire us during the times when when we have no friends or colleagues to talk to.

While some people not part of Facebook may bemoan the hours we young folks are spending on the computer, they do not realize the literacy we are developing. We are developing a literacy of connection, which is exactly what we need to combat the isolating, alienating nature of our times so that we can collaboratively solve problems. We’re recommending jobs, mates, friends, and graduate programs to each other. We’re viewing up-to-the minute photos not just of each others’ weddings and kids, but of the trips we’ve taken to places like Borneo and Syria. We are literally placing the world on the screen ourselves instead of just sitting there with the remote and changing channels.

The explorers and aid workers among us will bring the problems to our attention. As we become networked with everyone in our town, our university, our past, and friends of friends, we will continue to expand our network. The people of my generation (and older) are hungry to expand their social connections. We have so much to learn and be inspired by. We may watch John Stewart spin the ailments of our world so we can laugh at night. But during the day, we’re connecting with each other and not feeling so hopeless about what we can achieve once we move off the secure social networks of college campuses.

So, is my message that Facebook is a panacea, that we’ve found utopia, and it’s online? Well, we can’t do everything on Facebook. We still get our food from a farmer’s market, store, or restaurant locally; we still have to go outside (whew!) or on a treadmill to get our exercise; and to those who hold out because they prefer face-to-face connection… We all do! But the reality is that we can’t always connect with everyone we’ve loved and known face-to-face. People are working a lot, and to connect with people, we usually have to schedule a coffee date or hope to run into them on the bike trail or out and about. But, what about the friends who move to California, to China?

I do get invitations to California and China, but of course I can’t always afford those trips. On Facebook, though, I was able to give my Pakistani friend in China with a new baby some simple tips to her question: how do I lose this baby weight? Eat fruit, I encouraged her. Take up yoga; it will lower stress. Of course, yoga comes from India, but someone got on a plane, brought it to California, it got to Nebraska through the Interstate, and now I’m regaling its benefits to her (in China).

So, no, we can’t walk our dogs on Facebook (though there might be a funny simulated application for that). But we can exchange tips about leashes, about dog training books and TV shows like The Dog Whisperer. Imagine the people back in the 1940’s who said they’d never get a TV. Imagine the people back in 1900-whatever who said they’d never drive a car. Imagine the people who said they’d never get on a plane. Those of who have done those things may be jealous of the regular meals they’ve had with their families, but do they have nearly as much to talk about?

When I get together with my husband’s family, right away his younger sister and I start talking about their cousin’s fiancee’s most recently updated pictures of their new home in Iowa. “Did you see their house? Is their basement flooded? When's the date of their wedding?” Unfortunately, sometimes the downside in the short-term is that people are quicker to get online than pick up the phone. In my family, I’ve followed my nephews and nieces online to college, but their parents are organizing parties when they return, and we have more to talk about, if we think about it. Yes, we’re up to date on the pictures, but this is just a jumping-off context to everything else.

Does this mean human society has to speed up to constantly generate news? Well, it depends upon how we see things. I still get together with friends in California, sometimes in a group organized once a year. This would be much less convenient and possible if we didn’t have the internet to send out a mass free invitation and a travel search engine to help us find lodging (with pictures) and the best prices on tickets. We’re now very organized about our get-togethers, our investment in staying connected. But already we’re imagining new get-togethers. Sure, we can keep getting together and eating and drinking. But we can only tolerate so many days of that. Now some of us are talking about going on yoga retreats. And if we keep connecting, what will we organize next?

Many smaller groups of people, such as in churches, are organizing get-togethers with a higher purpose. People go on missions and raise funds for particular causes, like an orphanage in Haiti, that their church sponsors. Eventually, assuming we continue evolving as we become more connected, we’ll be trading more important tips. I’m not talking the stock market here. I’m thinking more along the lines of the videos people are making with their digital cameras. Yes, we continue to entertain each other, to amaze each other with our feats of marrying, reproducing, etc. But other images are trickling through to our consciousness. I‘ve connected on Facebook with Pieter, who I met when his Belgian friend Christophe married my American friend Kelly. Christophe came to Lincoln, to study film abroad. Kelly, also a film aficionado, met Christophe in a class.

On Pieter’s Facebook site, he has pictures of himself on the Iraq/Syria border. He’s wearing a turban in some pictures, jolly to be hanging out with people others would fear as terrorists. Another Belgian I know has a picture of himself in an African country, looking over a beautiful desert landscape. Being amazed by these images, not only will the tourist in us be roused. We will see new images that will take us to new levels of connection. Eventually, we won’t just be going to see the architecture and the landscape. And the Peace Corps won’t be for a select few. While oil prices might keep many of us closer to home, the tendency toward further connection is also going to expand the reaches of generosity.

So, is Facebook the magic ticket to world peace? Of course no one thing in itself is going to bring humanity together. But the technology we’ve developed can be used for good. There are only so many human beings on this planet. The more connection we feel with one another, the more responsibility we’ll take for our collective survival. We may start as tourists, and we may descend from conquerors. But creativity on Earth is making leaps.

We’ve had many brands in our planet’s history: there were the Romans, then the Discovery channel, and now we have the power of the Internet to emit our own frequency. Eventually, people look for something more than sexy images. We look for how we can give back, how we can emit a frequency that leads to more peace. While we can surely find peace in nature and away from computer screens, we can’t discount the power we have through technology to educate, connect, and help. When people say the power of grassroots, this is what they mean. When we see and can channel the power of our social network, we will identify our resources and spread the wealth of human connection and concern.

As for the fears that hold us back: “I don’t want to be sucked into the screen; I don't have time for that; I don’t want this new generation’s ways corrupting me; I don’t want to be rejected,” to you I say, maybe this isn’t for you—today. But when you realize you can connect with your kids while they’re away at college, at a new job in a different city, when you realize that you don’t have to buy a plane ticket or interrupt with a phone call to reach out and show you care, you may think again. We’ve already been emitting our own frequency in all of our relationships in our day to day lives… We've watched hundreds of channels beam down to us from satellites. Now we, as individuals, can be a channel on a global field to unify as well.

interesting people

my favorite things in life are language and those that produce it. art and music and nature are also good. but i find such treasures of people. there are just people out there who are models of living as blissfully as possible: my friend barb, whose 97-year-old mother lives a block away, whose daughter with her two sons live on a farm where they make their own cheese, and barb who, as a counselor, helps people learn how to live healthy lives, and who herself keeps growing, buying local produce, and is such a supportive and endearing friend. then there's robert hillestad, a retired textiles professor who i just met in a writer's workshop. i can't begin to express the exquisite beauty of his art. he is my friend now. if any of you out there are reading this, i just have to say don't make friends with people just based on age and common interests, like what kind of music they listen to. if you really get to know people and appreciate them, and especially appreciate their willingness to share, there are endless sources of inspiration out there. i find it really fun to talk to older people and see what kind of lives they've spun for themselves based on the same raw materials that are available to all of us in life. if we follow our bliss with some discipline and practicality, we can create such rich, stable lives.

80's movies

The 80's were a fertile time for good movies:
See:

• The Goonies
• Annie
• The Jerk
• Stand By Me
• ET
• All Dogs Go To Heaven
• An American Tail
• The Secret of NIMH
• 
  
• The Muppets
• Adventures in Babysitting
• Ghostbusters
• Karate Kid
  
• 9 to 5
• Back to the Future
• Bachelor Party
• Big
• Beetlejuice
• Heathers (90's?)
  
• Pump up the Volume (90's?)
• When Harry Met Sally
• Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
• Princess Bride
• Breakfast Club
• Sixteen Candles
• Can't Buy Me Love
• Pretty Woman
• A Christmas Story
• The Color Purple
• Crocodile Dundee (for a kid)
• Dead Poet's Society
• Dirty Dancing
• Driving Miss Daisy
• The Elephant Man
• The Ernest Movies
  
• Fame
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off
• Footloose
• The Fox and the Hound
  
• Good Morning Vietnam
• Gremlins
• Lean on Me (the song, at least)
• Little Mermaid
• Little Shop of Horrors
• Honey I Shrunk the Kids
  
• Hoosiers
  
• LA Story (90's?)
• 3 Men and a Baby (early 90's?)
• Mr. Mom
• National Lampoons Vacation
• Never Ending Story
• Pee Wee's Big Adventure
• Police Academy
• Pretty in Pink
• Rain Man
• Roxanne
• Say Anything
• Smoky and the Bandit
  
• Splash
• Stand and Deliver
  
• Steel Magnolias
• Teen Wolf
• The Toy
  
• Tootsie
• Top Gun
• Willow

So, as I think back about what I read and come up with a short list: lots of Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and some way too early for my age Danielle Steele, it's making sense... This is just a list of some of my favorite movies in the 80's. I was literally raised by the television in the 80's, in my dad's room on the floor watching these movies or in the living room. Wow, either I was really stunted or really exposed. Not sure which. But this is sort of stunning to recall.

Kind of sickening... I was part of the pop culture in a major way, but this is precious time I can't get back... hmm. Involved parenting can be a good thing.

other men

i think i could love
other men.
i've been drawn
to other exteriors.
i've been rapt by the words
of other interiors.
but, honey, their shelf life
wouldn't be the same.
if i didn't love you
i could go out
and dance with them.
we could sit around
tables with drinks.
and i could tag along
and laugh in all
their many social excursions.

but, honey, they'd never
know me
like you.
they could comment
on my work.
they could say it's
beautiful, profound,
and touching.
and even if they could
see me as beautiful,
profound, and touching,
their touch wouldn't touch me
like you.

you have known me
in our hometown,
in sixth grade, junior high
high school, where honey,
we dissected a cat together.
we went to prom together.
we met each other's parents
when we hardly liked them
ourselves.

honey, you knew my
grandparents.
you knew me our
freshman year of college
when we were first
spreading our wings wide enough
to fly away even from each other.

we had space for four years
and came back together
experienced and broken.
we nursed each others' wounds.

you loved me depressed,
you loved me angry,
you loved me when i
was going crazy not
being able to express myself
when i expressed myself
against you, and nearly
wanted to kill what we have.

and you kept loving me.
you loved me as my
boyfriend, as my friend,
as my husband, as my father.

and now you want me
to make you a father
to a baby of ours.

my answer is only
of course.
of course no one
could love me like you.
of course no one
could love you like me.

of course no one else
could give our kids
such a history.

so, honey, if you're willing
to stay gentle, to stay sweet,
to stay healthy and good,
if you're willing to let me be me,
then we can have
all we've ever wanted.

if we can give each other
the space to be ourselves
and come together
as we need to
we can have more
than history,
we can have more
than interesting,
we can have more
than love.

we can have
a family.
we can have
a present forever
and we can have
an eternal shelf-life.

no more words

We've had so many words
pass between us,
clashing moods,
new directions, are you
with me? Can you
wait for me?
Can you read me?
Will you leave me?
I am exhausted.
I am growing.
Will you love me?
Can I love you?

And then
they must be abandoned.
But not us.
Instead of words
We become bodies.
We disembody the words
Into action.
I lie on you,
kiss your cheeks awake,
check in to your humanity
with my kisses
find your ear, find you
finding me,
and when nothing is
said, and everything is
done, you don't have to say
you want to stay together
because you have,
and you do.

the desire to write a book

The desire to write a book and walking out into a world stuffed with books and living in a house stuffed with books that you love to read, and have piled on yourself to read but still haven’t written (which is especially heightened when you have a strong idea of what you’d like to write), can be likened to a person who loves children and loves to take care of them and interact with them and gets most of their meaning in life from children, and then has found a husband and keeps having sex but is not getting pregnant. It is the pain of present infertility with the honest belief that you can reproduce so you keep pushing on. With writing a book, you know you have to let it consume you if you’re ever going to get there.

why i write

Writing makes me feel psychologically safe when living in the world does not. It helps me to find insights, to heal me, make me whole, and helps me share my insights with others to help them become wholer so that I can better trust and connect with them. Maybe I don’t trust myself until I can do what I aim to do, which is to be a writer. I will feel like a real writer when I have a book. I will feel safe when I have a job that will lead me to continue to write. I need as much freedom to write as possible, and I really need it now. It’s how I know how to best be in the world, where I sometimes feel too little connection, or when I find it, it doesn't last long enough because every else has a job/hobbies/interests/what they make from life. I like to see how other people have used language to create beautiful worlds, order, and understanding. But after awhile, I'm ready for people to read what I write.

THANK YOU

To my elders, to my cohorts, to my tribe:

Thank you, Hilda, for reminding me

That the world needs our stories

And relationships are durable.

Thank you, Aaron, for teaching me

That each of our truths are true.

Thank you, Timothy, for soothing me

With your voice, presence, and stories.

Thank you, Jesse Lee, for returning

For staying connected to emotional truths.

Thank you, Marge, for being so good,

For loving art, poetry, and the Plains.

Thank you, Deborah, for your candor

For your courage and sweet connection.

Thank you, Jim, for the mangroves,

For advocating art and serene days.

Thank you, Rob, for being an artist gentleman

For your abidance through life in textile.

Thank you, Frannie, for pushing your vision,

For generating our roots in large, bold print.

Thank you, Mary Jo, for bringing peace and love

To friendship, community, and art.

Thank you, Jane, for your kind goodness

For staying true to home and for reaching out.

Thank you, Brenda, for your courage

For each step you take toward new wholeness.

Thank you, Christine, for the watermelon seeds,

For your sweet pursuit of the moment’s grace.

Thank you, Val, for your courage,

For writing, caring, and being willing to feel.

Thank you to my tribe, who uses English for good,

To express, to love, and to heal,

Thank you to the world who uses language

To carry on what’s best in us all.

And thank you to every human being

Who has passed on and added to this concept of art

The food of the spirit that keeps us connected

When everything else plots to pull us apart.

The Sheldon Art Museum

“Sheldon”

When the hydrangeas are in season

When the salty hotdogs are roasting

I remember the grace of the Sheldon

Because I believe there is great beauty in the world

Because I hate the feeling of complete chaos

Because art makes me feel safe breathing

Because outside the Sheldon feels like Eden

“Don’t stop ‘til you get enough.”

But I actually love the feeling of complete chaos

Because art is true

Because chaos is truer

Because life is orange and blue

Anaranjado y azul

I palpitate at the Sheldon

Gray, luminous, and dreamy

Prologue

I’m full of something tonight. Belief in myself. Delusions of grandeur, maybe. But it’s not a mansion I’m plotting to buy. It’s not another country I’m hoping to move to. It’s right here, under the beautiful, light blue sky in twilight with silver clouds, a thin, gray tabby darting in front of me, sitting atop the elegant stone steps of the Sheldon where I believe I can write my own story, beautiful and affecting, in my own city, in the capital of the state of my birth where I’ve chosen to make my life, where my family remains. It is twilight, and as the sky darkens, I make a promise to myself that I can keep. It’s not that I will “live up to my potential,” though doing whatever that means would be nice. It is simply to care for myself, to have patience with myself as I tell and shape the only story that is truly only mine to tell. Only I have the full power to affirm all my previous decisions, my claim to rich and stable life full of the promise of self-understanding, of staking my claim as the rightful owner of the beauty of my own existence, best positioned to render the complexity and simplicity of how I arrived on these steps, under the silvering night sky, surrounded by the lush green richness of one of the wettest, most storm and tornado-filled springs on record, nearing the heat of the summer in which I promise to give the art of my own life my best attention.

success

just now, washing my face, getting ready to go to bed, i looked at my face in the mirror. i guess i had to see my face to see what i'm feeling. too bad everyone else sees this shit first. i guess i'm just too used to feeling it. i saw the anxiety, and i thought "what now, heather? do you have to publish a book before you're going to feel successful? so what that anthony hawley's a year older than you and has books of poetry? is that what it's going to take? so what that other people can wave their books with their pretty covers around. you've got lots of pretty stuff inside, and you're showing that to a lot of people. still no change in the lost look on my face. god, i hate this i'm-on-acid, and i'm scared look. (good reason not to do psychedelic drugs. don't want to have a platform of recognition when the look returns.)

then the part of my brain that is clint's influence kicked in stronger: now, come on. you've felt successful before. you had your master's thesis binded. what about teaching? remember, you have to focus on learning. you aren't a perfect teacher. you're learning how to teach. you aren't a published writer giving readings of your beautiful, published words. you're learning how to write the story you're birthing. and you're doing a good job.

my face slackened. there she was. this was the girl/woman i like to see. yes, she's getting some wrinkles. but she's also getting somewhere inside. i'm learning. i'm doing what i need to do and giving myself love for learning and doing this. i don't need the agent's love right now. i don't need the readers to buy my book right now. i'm learning. i'm processing. i'm getting it down. i'm becoming more public about my intentions. and i have time.

now i also have the idea that i need to write my book before having a baby. i have good reasons for that. i may not stick with them. but i may. i'm being honest with myself and clint about that. i'm trusting that i can do this.

"Interrogative Mode" - a story in 333 words

“Interrogative Mode”

I started asking questions at an earlier age than a lot of kids. Or maybe I was just asking different ones. “What's your mom’s name?” I asked my friend Tracy when I was five. “Um, Mommy. I don’t know. What’s yours?” “Her name was Stephanie.”

Tracy had actually met my mom. She let me sleep over at Tracy’s when I was four. I didn't want to leave daycare until I understood my plans. “When do I get to sleep over at Tracy’s house?” “The day after tomorrow.” “When’s the day after tomorrow?” “Well, there’s tomorrow, and then it's the day after that.” “I don’t get it.” “It’s in two days.” “Two days. How long is that?” “48 hours.” "How long is an hour?" "60 minutes." "How long is Sesame Street?" "30 minutes." "So how many Sesame Streets?" "A lot." "So I have to wait a long time?" "Enough, Heather, we're going home. Go get your coat from your cubbyhole."

We had a hard time communicating. I was four, and my mom was grieving her father’s death. She got angry over little things like when I resisted the pain of her brushing my hair. Now I know she was depressed. Then, I got scared. But I could still touch her, like on her legs where there were prickly hairs. “Am I going to have prickly hairs like these someday?” “I need to shave.” “Oh.”

I saw my mom up close the most in the bathroom. I saw her sitting on the toilet and wadding up the toilet paper when she peed so she could have a nice bundle to wipe with. One day, she opened the glass shower door, and it swung open and hit me in the belly. I looked down and saw a brown spot where the shower door bumped me. “You just did that!” I exclaimed. “No, that’s a mole.” “No, you did that!” I thought I was sure.

Such different worlds we get depending on the questions, the answers, and what we want to believe.

entertainment

Heard Aaron Raz Link, Anthony Hawley, and then Harley Jane Kozak read tonight. Aaron twists my mind in lovely ways with his complex understanding of gender having been born "a girl" but then finding himself a boy and then making himself a boy, in the meantime kind of traumatizing his poet/editor feminist mother who was so happy to have a girl. It was interesting to see Aaron and Hilda's interaction. I'm not gossiping, but they have made themselves public figures by writing about their lives, and they are not private. They believe, after all, that the world needs our stories. Watching their interaction tonight and using my intuitive powers, I watched Hilda beckon to Aaron as Anthony read a bit in one of his poemies about how when babies are born, parents call out a name. "You see," Hilda seemed to be communicating to Aaron. "I wasn't trying to have a girl. It's what they said we had, so it's the name we gave you." In Aaron's poetry, he indicated that he'd felt hurt by the way his mother apologized to him for the girl stories she'd given him as a gift to use in life. She told him that she'd told him the wrong stories. "But those stories helped me," he was saying. Does it really matter that I'm not a girl? Hilda struggles with feeling like she was mis-reading her child all those years. But Aaron is saying, "I'm the same person. I'm just not a girl." They re-read their relationship with Aaron looking differently and seeming a different gender role, only it's the one that feels authentic to him.

to be continued on Harley Jane...

literacy and the arts

literacy and the arts are how we grow and heal in a culture and a time period that isolates us and expects highly individualized personalities from us. in order to interact with one another healthfully, we need to process our experiences, and in particular our pain, in many ways individually before we can be our best, healthy selves in the large, complex, imbalanced world we live in today. the better we process our past, the better we can relate and contribute to the future.

brave

i'm going to write my memoir, and i'm going to be very brave. and i'm going to be supported.

sheryl crow

i was just reading another lincoln woman writer's blog. i was reading about her writer's group, how they celebrated her success of finishing a novel. it made me feel wistful. suddenly, i faintly heard sheryl crow's latest album wafting into my ears from far away. it's 8am. i thought, "some woman is listening to sheryl crow right now, in my proximity on my quiet, quiet street. she can be my friend. yes, even if she's not a writer and doesn't read, we can listen to this together. i've got to be more open." i decided to go outside and take my bills to my mailbox as my alibi. but out there, i didn't hear her. "it must be coming from my backyard. that hairdresser lady with the kid who lives behind me must listen to this when her husband isn't home listening to country or hard rock. wow, i never would have guessed." i decided it was time to put kyla (my dog) in the kennel in the backyard. then, alas, i passed my bedroom. and my clock radio. and realized somehow i had set the alarm on the music function. i'd wondered where that cd went. i guess i'm still my best friend after all.

my truth

I wanted to have a conversation. I wanted him to be interested in what I’m doing and the fact that this is the best week of my life, that I feel so good. I wanted him to care. I wanted him to at least read my blog.

He said he was exhausted. He said he had a long day at work. He asked me if I would vacuum this weekend. He said the dust in the house was murder on his allergies.

I said yes, I’d vacuum. But would he read my blog? He said he was tired.

I said, I’ll be home at 9. He was sleeping when I got home. Then he woke up and was mad at me. When I tried to speak my truth, my perspective of the situation, he stayed mad, told me his perspective was the only right one, that I was wrong, and he left. He wouldn’t talk to me.

In the morning, I asked if we could talk. He was on his way to work. He said if I’m here when you’re home. I asked if we could eat lunch. He said he doesn’t when his worker is gone. I said not eating lunch isn’t healthy. He said look in the mirror. I said I’m healthy, dude.

I don’t want to live my live my life in a back and forth of my truth is the only truth, and I'll defend the superiority of my truth to the end. I need someone who talks to me and listens to me.

I want someone I can be creatively engaged with, someone who I can talk to about books and authors, someone who would at least go to readings with me sometimes and perhaps talk to me about them.

I want someone who wants my growth as a writer and is happy for me when I find it.

I don’t know how I didn’t serve his needs yesterday, other than the fact that I was frustrated that the only things he could say to me were “You look pretty. Will you vacuum? I’m tired.” It made me feel like a housewife when I had been engaged with writers, writing, and building my self-esteem and confidence as a writer all day and then could not talk to him about it. That made me feel crappy.

fruit of the conference today: working on sensory detail

My Grandma's Kitchen

"Grace Ann," my grandma nicknames me. "Where's the plate for your toast?"

"I don't need a plate," I say. "I have a napkin."

She walks into the pink kitchen whistling, her housecoat more muumuu-like than coat-like covering her large, soft presence with bright, huge flowers.

I'm sitting at the table, and my feet do not reach the pink and white tiled floor. My chair is brown and wooden with a rounded back and spindly chair slots. It is hard and secure.

My grandma Annie waddles over to the faded ivory refrigerator and gets out the eggs. She cracks an egg over the iron skillet, and it sizzles in bacon grease.

Orange juice on the table adds a citrus twist to the scents of smoke, bacon, and butter.

I walk to the counter, the strongest place in the house, where the real work is done. I grab a strawberry-patterned plate and sit back at the table.

"There's my girl," she says. "Now, we're not off to a fire. Here you go." She places the buttered, white toast on my plate.

"Your grandpa always wanted the butter spread all the way to the edges," she tells me.

"Did he want you to cut off the crusts?" I ask.

"Sometimes," she says. I look at her, past the cigarette lighter, the keys, and the napkins at the center of the table. "I love it just like this, Grandma," I say. "You're the best cook ever."

She stands beneath the glow of a cheap light fixture with dead bugs trapped in it. She smiles at me, her blue eyes twinkling as the sound of a game over the radio on KFAB drifts in, the bacon sizzles, and I eat my breakfast.

first day at the writer's conference

It is Father’s Day, and I didn’t spend the day with my dad. I didn’t want to waste his money. He paid for me to come to the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference, and he wants me to learn to trust my voice, to gain confidence in my abilities more than anything else.

I was not out of touch, though. My husband, Clint, went as my emissary since he was also visiting his parents today, only a mile away from my dad. I had Clint deliver a book to my dad, a biography written by Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s speech writer, who graduated from law school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln the year before my dad did. I picked the book up at Barnes and Noble yesterday and knew my dad would like it. He got to tell Clint the story of how he met Ted Sorensen and had a rare chance to connect alone with the man I’ve made my life partner.

Clint was ebullient about the new puppy his family got yesterday. While he was full of joy, I was moved to tears when he told me that the card I'd written moved my dad to tears, as I'd hoped it would.

I’ve just started to express the gratitude I feel toward my dad for cheering me toward this spot where I sit under a tree in my 30^th year pursuing life as a teacher and writer. In the card I told my dad he’d been right all the times he said he was father and mother to me both. I’d never wanted to give him that much credit, feeling that I'd made it through my youth despite him. But with the pain of my youth more properly processed, I see with deep appreciation the sacrifice my dad made to grow with me, despite who he’d been before and the complete lack of expectation he’d ever had for raising a daughter alone.

Today at the conference I met a man named David Luck. I took a liking to him immediately because he seemed to have roots that grew deep within him. His roots to life had been growing for 73 years, and so far I’ve found that those in their 70’s are my favorite vintage. I’ve watched my dad ripen in the years I’ve known him without my mom, since he was 52, and I was 4.

There was something about David’s singular ability to focus on me with his full attention that I found familiar. First I learned he’d raised his children as a single dad. Then, after I disclosed the circumstances of my background, he got a Eureka look in his eyes and said, “You know why I raised my kids alone? My wife committed suicide.” He was the first man I’ve met, other than my dad, who had lost his wife to suicide and unexpectedly raised his kids alone. It was like I’d known him right away as I’d selected a seat next to him in the crowded workshop on the daunting process of getting published.

David has self-published and knows the pitfalls, a process my dad is also going through as well. While the 70’s are a happy time when people have come to terms with their achievements and can relax, there’s a also a known race against time.

Neither David nor my dad seems to be huffing or puffing, though. Tonight David will sleep in a sleeping bag on the banks of the Platte River on his way back to Denver from Lincoln. My dad sleeps now in his house alone, happy, I’m sure to have heard from my siblings from his first marriage, to have seen Clint and gotten the book and card from me, and best of all knowing I’m being supported in a community of writers on a path where confidence can be hard to come by, and we need all the cheerleaders we can get.

While David has remarried and was four years divorced from his wife when she committed suicide, my dad has stayed married to my mom in his heart for the 26 years since she died. While they may not have stayed married this long had she lived, I have had the luck of being the living reminder of the woman who my dad feels was the love of his life, the woman who rejuvenated his spirit during the only time it ever faltered, when he was 40, faithfully married for 20 years with five kids. Sometimes I find myself wishing my dad hadn’t done the damage of leaving the first family. During those times, I was thinking rather ponderously and seriously without taking into account the full value of my existence.

Even my grandma, my mom’s converted-to-Catholic mother, at times seemed to have the same question. She’d lived through, stayed married, and continued to love my grandpa despite his years of carrying on an affair. But to leave a wife and five kids, to have her daughter responsible, or at least complicit, and now dead from the wreckage. Should it have happened? But there I was.

There I was with my dad, since I was four. Before the day that my mom killed herself, my dad was mostly the ghost in my life that he’d been while his first wife raised the first five kids. My dad was the guy behind the newspaper in the morning, who ate his toast and eggs with ketchup, kissed my mom goodbye and teased me with the moniker of “old bag” before going off to work in the morning. I could get a laugh out of him before bedtime if I did an entertaining stunt or a dance trying to delay my exit from my parents’ attention.

And then the void that had been my dad’s presence before my mom’s death made a complete 360 shift into her void, the one who had been my emotional center now gone, and my dad and I left bereft and together.

I called my dad just now and read him what I’ve got so far. He listened raptly, said “Very interesting, very interesting,” and when I was done reading, asked over the phone, “Can I go to the bathroom?” He wants to give me the attention I need.

We talked about Father’s Day, and I was right: my brothers and sister did call. He said he talked to Clint about our marriage, and despite troubles we’ve had recently, nearing the end of our third year of marriage, Clint told my dad he wants to make it work, that he needs to be more cooperative. The serendipity of my father relating this to me makes my head spin, that such a conversation would ever take place and that it would be shared with me by my father fills my heart with joy and hope.

It was true, also, that I woke my dad up to read this to him, but he said it was worth waking up for my call, to hear about the conference and connections I’m making. He thanked me for the card and said that, like they used to say about the letters of Gilbert Swanson, it was a “keeper.”

I feel ready now to give my dad my all anew. He goes in for his 11^th round of chemo tomorrow, and when he said he was “close to the end,” he meant of chemo and of nothing else. My dad is not done with work, with his interests, with his vigor for life, and cheering us on. In some ways, at 78, it feels like he is just beginning or that we are just beginning again.

I know my dad will not be the only great love of my life, but right now is his season in my estimation. He sees me finding my path with surer footing, and while he’s encouraged me down other paths at times, he’s seeing with the most sureness we’ve felt yet that I’m headed in the right direction. I’ve found the silver in the linings of my life just as he is also finding his.

This past year, in the months in which he’s treated colon cancer like a ball he hit out of the park, my dad has lost no hair, despite his rounds of chemo. He’s finally let it all go gray while his physician remarks “amazing” at his absence of side effects. I hate to make my dad out to be the all-American success story, but he’s had enough failing to make his trajectory of successes leavened with the salt of misfortune.

Sometimes I realize I don’t revel enough in the good fortune of still having my dad here. I'm just discovering my brother Tom, a seasoned writer and artist who works in IT in New York, seems to love my dad just as much as I do. Tom said yesterday that Dad has been his model as someone who has lived his life as a constant creator. He said he loves Dad so much that if he came to New York to chop off his fingers, he'd go on loving him just as much. Our dad has lived a full life. He grew up in a small, Iowa town and went on to have a record-breaking law school career, to be involved in Army counter-intelligence, to handle a huge Omaha government whistle-blowing investigation, and has done the legal work on many real estate development projects in Omaha. He saved a historic train station from demolition and turned it into a nationally known museum, and has given thousands of speeches about history in part to overcome his nervous twitches and tendency to stutter.

I’ve just now realized that my dad doesn’t stutter anymore. Even though he’s still writing books about his life, about history, and trying to get published, even though he still practices law full-time, he is not slowing down but perhaps his engine is calming.

I was at a funeral this week for a friend of my husband’s family’s who died in the town where we’re from in her 80’s. The man who owns the retirement community was a neighbor of mine growing up. He told me he recently heard my dad give a speech about sunken steamboats, and that my dad seems to motored by a power-engine while the rest of us are using oars. I don’t know how to explain it. All I can say is that it lifts my spirit, it gives me hope, it makes me wonder how this man could be my dad, could be so full of life and dynamism , and that my mom committed suicide.

Together, they were dynamic, too. Perhaps they were too dynamic. They had some epic fights. Their love was not marked by complete fidelity. They took revenge on one another. They carried on their affair for five years before getting my dad's divorce finalized and were married.

My parents were elicit. They were separated by 17 years of age and by a lot of education. My mom graduated from high school in Omaha married and pregnant with my brother. My dad graduated from high school in small-town Belmond, Iowa, went on to earn money working hard labor so he could go to a junior college, then got a bachelor’s degree in teaching history, and then went on to be one of three students to get a scholarship to law school.

My dad’s motives for going to law school were not pure and justice loving. He went to law school because his brother-in-law, his first wife’s brother, had decided to go to med school, and my dad wasn’t going to be bested. They were both small-town, country boys. And my dad was determined to show he was just as good.

At 78, my dad is still motivated by competition. He doesn’t have so much to prove now, but he still likes to show a young lawyer that he’s got it in him. With my young, liberal sensibilities, I like to think that competition is a bit crass, and cooperative endeavors are more palatable. But at the same time, it’s also just a difference in our generations’ wording. My dad has worked with a lot of people to get a lot accomplished. Sometimes a person has to be stronger and pushier than others would like to get things done. As we’ve seen with Hillary, when a woman does it, it’s bitchy. When a man does it, it’s the mark of success. But it's success all the same.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve tired of judging my dad. I did that for so many years. I judged and critiqued everyone in my family. What else where they there for? They seemed to have done everything, and only through critique and full appraisal of them could I find my lessons, how to live the life that is authentically mine and not in anyone’s shadow. And yet I find myself absorbed and enamored with them. I grew up a lonely child, but I also grew up full of my dad, my brothers, and my sister. When I had their attention, I was on top of the world, and when I didn’t, I carried them with my on all of my adventures. Even now when I practice yoga, I often find them dancing uninvited in my head, but I do not wish them away. I have learned to treasure the people who dance in my heart. Memories can fade, and so I try not to waste a moment while they are alive within me.

I look now at all the times when my dad’s flame has teased us with its extinguishing. He had his first heart attack when I was seven. At the time I was attending a private, Christian school that my mom had started me at in preschool. A minister from the church affiliated with our school visited my dad and tried to save him. My grandma kept me with her while my dad was in the hospital. I wondered if I would have to live with her, if he would die. He was already old enough, 48 years older than me. She was even older, 57 years older than me. If things got any worse, I’d be living with my dad’s parents in Iowa, then in their 80’s, which seemed too ancient an existence to even be comprehensible.

My dad pulled through, while my grandma died six years later, leaving my dad an even bigger solo presence in my life. There was another scare when I was 14, and my dad had his second heart attack. He took both heart attacks seriously and changed his diet to a strict vegetarian diet and exercised religiously. I was extremely relieved that my dad made it, and that it would continue to be he and I and not me and who knows who raising me.

But I was still a teenager. I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of living with him. He could be obnoxious blaring classical music to wake me in the morning. Teasing me in ways he found playful was sometimes his form of entertainment. My dad was not an expert parent. He never read a parenting magazine. But he raised me full of passion.

When I came home hanging around with two guys I knew when I was 12, my dad warned the guys that the only way they could be assured of not getting AIDS was to masturbate and leave the girls alone. My dad was a horrible cook; he never cut the oranges that would allow me to stay on the soccer team; and he didn’t help me with my homework. My dad didn’t monitor what I watched on TV, and he didn’t limit my TV watching either. He marveled at my ability to make weekend plans. I kept as full of a social calendar as I could just to get away from being inundated by living with a man.

Sometimes I found not having a mother extremely unfair. Sometimes I wished my dad would re-marry, would give me someone other than him to live with. He found ways, though, to try to make me happy. As a lawyer my dad would rave at any perceived injustice I shared with him. When Albert Gorby and I did not get along on the bus, my dad told me to keep a log of each action Albert took to torment me. That way, if I ever lost my temper, I’d have documented proof of what Albert did to provoke me. This all seemed like a perfectly natural course of action for me to take, and I was glad my dad understood.

When it came time for me to go to college, I wanted to go away to Seattle. I had never been there, but it seemed cool and was far away. I was mad at my dad. He’d obviously done something to make my mom killed herself, though I hadn’t figured it out yet. I tried to figure it out through writing. I interviewed everyone I knew who'd known her about my mom and wrote a column for my high school newspaper about her suicide. I’m sure no one in my audience could relate, and perhaps I was horrifying them. But I needed to work it out of my system. And I felt that I needed to get away from my dad to do it.

Somehow, by some stroke of luck, my brother Tom was visiting from Iowa City about the time that I was deciding which college to go to. I thought maybe I’d go to the University of Iowa, compromising a bit since I only had the little I’d inherited from my grandma to help pay for college, and my dad had suffered financial losses that had led him to file bankruptcy and for us to leave our big, beautiful home that we’d shared with my mom and to move into a condo off a highway when I was 16. That was a great loss I didn’t forgive for awhile either.

Tom encouraged me to consider a small college. He said I should be a big fish in a small pond and mentioned Cornell College, which was close to Iowa City where he’d lived for the past ten years. He put everything in such a way that I thought it was my idea to go to Cornell. I got very excited about their one-course-at-a-time and felt nonconformist to be considering such a unique system of education. I thought I might even be able to show my dad that I was just as smart as him if I could table math and science for awhile and focus on one-course-at-a-time.

When my dad took me for the college visit, we got on the Interstate and headed east and drove for hours talking. I kept asking my dad, “Shouldn’t we look at a map?” but he kept saying he knew where was he was going. I was always surprised and a bit annoyed by how much my dad thought he knew. But he drove us straight to Mt. Vernon, getting off at the Highway 1 exit just before Iowa City. We stayed in a hotel in Cedar Rapids and found a restaurant that we would later frequent every time my dad visited me in college. But before I made the decision to go there, I was shocked when my dad seemed to pull a route to a cemetery out of his sleeve, where he showed me the graves of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather who he suddenly revealed met at Cornell. I realized I’d been set-up, but I fell too in love with the college to care.

I can still remember the English teacher who sold me on the college experience at Cornell. He talked about how they took students on a theatre tour of London during their 3 ½ week class. I couldn’t believe that a college class could actually go to London, and the more I learned about what they did and talked about in an English classroom in college, the more I couldn’t believe this was real. My dad chatted up the senior who gave us a tour of the campus. It looked like what I’d always thought a college should look like without ever having visited one, aside from Nebraska's biggest university. It was only a 4 ½ hour drive from home, it was beautiful, I had family roots there, it seemed manageable and stimulating, and I was sold. Even though I had a boyfriend who I liked, and he was staying in Nebraska for school, it seemed like a great idea.

When it came time to leave for college, I was much more emotionally complex than I could have ever expected. I couldn’t believe I was leaving my dad. I didn’t know if he’d be okay without me. What would he be without me? I don’t think I even considered that I didn’t know what I’d be without him. I’d fought with him so much my senior year in high school. I had a serious boyfriend to whom I transferred a lot of love, and my dad could do nothing but annoy me. I hated the condo where we lived, even though I had the basement to myself. It didn’t feel like home, and I resented the change in my life. My dad said that maybe this was nature, that parent and child must war before the child leaves home just so they can leave the nest. I hated how my dad seemed to have a stupid answer for everything.

But on the day I left for college, I was filled with so much more than hate and resentment. I had just returned from a trip to San Francisco paid for my mom’s aunt, who I barely knew. I stayed with my mom’s cousin who worked as a scientific researcher in Stanford, and she was generously determined to show me what life held outside of Nebraska. She told me that Ronald Reagan was not the hero my dad touted and that he was a horrible man who had invented a lie called the trickle-down theory which was not real. The rich stayed rich, and the poor got poorer. But my dad loved Ronald Reagan. My dad was also Ron, and as a child, I had imagined that my dad was just as capable of being elected as Ronald Reagan. I didn’t know why Margaret had such a vendetta against Ronald Reagan, but I wanted to find out more about what the problem with Republicans was all about.

Margaret had gone to school at Grinnell College, in Iowa, so she tantalized me with praises of an intellectual existence outside Nebraska, my dad, and Omaha’s Republican influence. After doing well in college, she’d gone out to San Francisco, and still there, she introduced me to Japanese food, the subway system, and the beauty of the hills. She told me that the world was corrupt and that being a scientific researcher was the only ethical profession she could think of. She thought not even teaching was a suitable career because even then you’re grading and evaluating people. She had a beautiful home, which she owned with her husband, who was a very kind man and also worked at Stanford and was much less bitter than her. They had shelves full of books, and she assured me they were more important books than those that shelved my dad’s library.

I came home amazed by San Francisco, resentful of Margaret, who had never had children and refused to watch anything but documentaries. I felt belittled by her but also impressed by all that she had shown me. Mostly, I felt confused. I loved my dad and Omaha and didn’t want to hate them or leave them, but she made me feel like the more I learned, the more I would want to move away. My boyfriend also told me he loved me for the first time in the 10 months that we were dating when I left for San Francisco. Now I was home and leaving Nebraska, my dad, and my boyfriend. How would I make any of it last? I asked my sister to help my dad and I drive my stuff to Iowa. I didn’t want to fight with my dad, and I didn’t want to be alone when I said goodbye.

The goodbye was hard, sad, and made me cry, yet also made me feel weird for being curious about this new chapter. I wanted to succeed in college and make new friends, but I was also so tied to home. I didn’t want my boyfriend Clint to forget about me. I had a four-year plan. I would study Psychology and English so that I could become a lawyer or psychologist or both, and then we would get married and live in Nebraska.

I drove 5 hours across Iowa and into Crete, Nebraska, once a month for 5 days when we had our block break in between classes so I could refresh and continue my relationship with Clint. They were intense weekends full of passion and eventually fear. As the year went on, Clint became more social than he’d ever been. He couldn’t call me for my birthday in March because he was pledging and wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone outside of his fraternity that day. By the end of the year, he finally agreed to drive across Iowa to see me, even though his parents wouldn’t like it, because he was out of school before me, and he would help me move home.

By the time he got to Iowa for the first time in May, our relationship had become imbalanced. I’d invested so much in him and his college environment and was livid at how much I’d put into him while being a studious bookworm in college, and now he was seeing my environment for the first time, a seasoned partier seeming completely happy despite the distance between us. Our relationship didn’t last over the summer, and I was heart-broken but free.