Slice of BFS’s Life (memoir)

10 posts

On the Passing of North Dakota’s Nicest Man

The greatest friendships in life are often the unexpected ones—the ones you didn’t know you could or should look for. The other kid on the playground you didn’t notice at first; the random post from a kindred spirit on the internet; each one the unique support you didn’t even know you need.

When you make a major move as Jessica and I did four years ago, you of course hope you’ll find new friendships in your new location. But there’s always the lurking fear that you won’t make any new connections—especially strong friendships. Having made major moves before in adulthood, we both knew how hard this could be. Most adults our age are already balancing their life around established friends and family, and oftentimes their kids. Adding a new friendship to that equation rarely happens: the “Yes, we should do something sometime” statements are all too often not followed up on.

So it was wonderful to hear that Jessica’s new job included a lunchtime group of the people who worked near her in the library: amusing lines and anecdotes were repeated for me when she came home at night, and she told me that much of the lunchtime chatter passed over jigsaw puzzles that were painstakingly sorted and assembled on the break room table. Jigsaw puzzles have driven me nutty since I was a child, but they took on a new light for me here—if they were part of what was making my wife happy in this new place we had found ourselves in, they couldn’t be all that bad.

One co-worker’s name came up repeatedly: Randy Rasmussen. He was older than us—old enough to be in our parents’ generation—though he came across as anything but a stuffy relative. A genial, kind, witty man whose leukemia had recently gone into remission, it seemed like he had watched every TV show and film ever made (he had even published four books about movies!). Need to know something about Orson Welles or a Hammer horror film? Randy was your man. Want to talk about an episode of Bewitched? Randy was most definitely your man: Elizabeth Montgomery was the most beautiful, elegant woman who ever lived, if you asked him.

While maybe not yet a friendship, this workplace acquaintanceship seemed the start of one—for Jessica and me. I had begun to know Randy better as well, since I frequently came in to eat lunch with Jessica and the rest of her lunchtime crew. And so the weeks and months passed, with us getting to know Randy better and better.

He talked about about his vast movie collection and how he organized it, noting that he was going through the bookcase devoted to his favorites—watching one movie a night—determining if they still deserved a place on those hallowed shelves. He recommended movies to me and Jessica, describing Before Sunrise as “the best movie of the 90s” (we watched it and rather had to agree). And he mentioned valuing his days more, since the leukemia went into remission—that he found them all the more precious now. One time, walking back from the dining center, he noted one of his favorite spots on the University of North Dakota campus, where the English Coulee ripple-roared over a small ledge of rocks. Though Jessica and I had paused over that bridge many times before, we did so again, savoring the sight and sound anew.

Why is it so many of the best experiences are shared? A thing you find and love alone seems a softly singing solo, while sharing that same thing with another seems to transform it into a glistening harmony.

I find myself sitting and remembering so many things like this about Randy. Having him over in the fall of 2019 to listen to an old radio drama, “Sorry, Wrong Number,” a gem I had never heard of before. Eating a Thanksgiving meal with him just a few weeks later. And going to watch Knives Out last January. The theater was empty except for our group and it felt like we were watching it on a big screen in our living room, joking and talking during the movie like we never would with a larger audience around us.

Hanging around those happy moments from a little over a year ago was the news that the doctors were not happy about Randy’s numbers, that the leukemia might be relapsing. It was knowledge we did our best to ignore around the times we shared, though it grew impossible to do so as the covid pandemic took hold and he asked us to drive him back from the leukemia treatments that seemed to make no difference—Randy was not improving. We offered to drive him in as well, wanting to do more for him, but he didn’t like to be a bother.

If that were one thing you could fault Randy for, it was that independence and desire not to be a bother. At the same time, how dare I push in on his desire for independence and privacy, things I very much value myself? But helping him with his appointments and keeping up with him periodically was all Jessica and I had to give to Randy, and it never seemed enough. It wasn’t enough, or he’d still be here.

Which makes me even more angry—in a world where there isn’t enough kindness, in a year that was all too short on kindness, why did 2020 have to add leukemia claiming the nicest man man in North Dakota to its list of horrors? Randy may never have accepted the title of “nicest man in North Dakota” for himself—he was too nice to claim it for himself—but a friend of ours bestowed it upon him and I have yet to hear a person dispute that moniker who even passingly knew Randy.

Now, even though Randy passed away over a month ago, the anger still returns. The distancing required of the current covid pandemic makes it seem he still has to be out there, like everyone else I’m not seeing in person at the moment. He’s just a phone call or email away, right? My mind prefers to think like that, despite knowing better. When I accept it, though, when I remind myself fully that he is gone and that we will never eat lunch together again, I find myself grateful that I even got to know him. In the small space of time granted by his leukemia’s remission, there was an opening for the glimmers of a new friendship, and I will never forget that.

And I will always remember you, Randy, when I start a movie… when I walk across the English Coulee… and when I think about the all too few days and minutes that life gives us.

On “City of Lakes” Versus “Minneapolis is Burning”

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Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

I lie down this past week and can’t sleep. Not from visions of little coronaviruses dancing, (well, mostly not, anyway): Minneapolis is burning. As the protests over George Floyd’s murder spread across the country, as politicians and society argue over what it all means, as people from outside of the Twin Cities may or may not be trying to co-opt true calls for justice, I can’t stop thinking about the Minneapolis I grew up in–the Minneapolis that I love.

My childhood home stands a mere five miles from the 3rd Precinct building that was burned last week. A year ago during a return visit, I drove through the same neighborhood: the drive filled with the warm ache of memory at the very street signs that seemed to scream Minneapolis to me. And the central location for much of the last week’s activity–Lake Street–is one I know well: I frequently drove down Lake Street while commuting to a substitute teacher job at Minnehaha Academy, the shop-lined urban streets slowly giving way to rows of houses and spreading trees and then a bluff, overlooking the blue and brown swaths of the Missisissippi.

There are a lot of Lake Streets across the country, but it’s particularly appropriate in a metropolis nicknamed The City of Lakes (there are 22 within the city limits). In the hot, humid days of summer, we would bike west to Lake Harriet or Bde Maka Ska (recently renamed from Lake Calhoun, its former moniker inexplicably taken from a notorious States Rights and pro-slavery senator from South Carolina in the early 1800s). I didn’t know then how lucky I was to be within biking distance of a lake with a public beach. I live near nothing like that now, and it’s not lying to say I miss it with the sharp pang of loss. And nothing against rivers, but there’s something about the expanse of a lake that holds the mind more peacefully.

Of course, there are incongruities to memory. Things excised, things brought forward–the mind and desire altering things in ways you don’t realize until reality presents the contrast to you with crystal clarity. During that return visit to south Minneapolis, the Washburn Park Water Tower was just as awe-inspiring as I remembered it to be (how many stone water towers have you seen whose curved bases are flanked by warrior statues?), but the hillside on my old block just wasn’t as steep as I remember it being. A long and gentle decline in actuality, my grade-school memories have equated walking or biking up that thing to Everest.

And then comes this past week, which has me remembering again how my family would generally bike west or southeast for family outings. We’d go north to visit my dad’s work in the downtown area, but there were areas we skipped between there and where we lived, taking Interstate 35W more often than not. I remember always having the feeling that the farther north we went on the residential streets, the more dangerous things got.

Where did I even get this feeling? It was more than the normal fear of leaving familiar surroundings. Was it family? The chatter of kids on the playground and on the bus? It’s one of those social and cultural things we just absorb without realizing it. I’m quite certain I did absorb it, too. A few years back, when my wife and I revealed we had driven down Lake Street on the way to the Mississippi, words were said to the effect of “Oh, isn’t that a little rough?”–an attitude and meaning coded to say it maybe should have been avoided, coding I had seen and heard before for lower income or more diverse areas.

Against the backdrop of my Minneapolis memories are a record needle scratch of hard realities and statistics. Whites are generally happy and healthy in Minnesota, but minorities are much less likely to be in the same boat (education rates follow similar trends). And in Minneapolis, police fatalities flip its racial demographics: in the past 20 years, Blacks make up about 20 percent of the population, yet they account for roughly 60 percent of police fatalities (whites are 60 percent of the population but only account for about 20 percent of fatalities).

So which is Minneapolis? The beautiful memory of my childhood? The burning city raging at its differences and inequities? (The dream or the nightmare, as Ibram X. Kendi stated in a similarly tracked article I was surprised to discover as I wrote this particular paragraph in this particular essay?)

For me–and I may be wrong–both exist. The beauty of Minneapolis is still there this week, in its places and in its people: from the shores of Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska to its residents coming together to help their community. And the darkness is still there, from its police terrifying residents off of their porches to “maintain order” to a semi loaded with flammable materials almost plowing down dozens of protestors on Interstate 35W (on the same site of a tragic bridge collapse nearly twelve years ago). Acknowledging the blissful side and not the other leads to a dysmorphic view, as unhealthy as one of those photoshop disasters where people try to make themselves look more attractive and end up with something completely alien. But is it foolish to hope we can change? That we can lessen the nightmare Kendi describes in his article?

We’re too far from any utopia to think it’s closely in reach… and part of our problem has been pretending we do live in a kind of near utopia. The fault lines this belief has created have kept far too many of us up late at night this past week–while lulling some others to sleep with judgmental thoughts for those protesting.

I cannot and should not go back to the security blanket of nostalgia and privilege, to the gentle hum of hammocks in tree-lined backyards and neighborhood games of kick-the-can: yet I can use those images to motivate me, to help me continue to notice the unevenness of the country I live in… and to act in ways that help bring the nightmare closer to the end. For everyone.

On Slowing Down Time…

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Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Photo by sinkdd on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A shot from The Descendants has really stuck with me. The movie was filmed in Hawaii and is filled with gorgeous images, yet the particular shot that stood out to me is in no way one of the most spectacular or important: it’s not a rise of green mountains or a sweep of verdant countryside falling gently towards a far-off beach. It’s just a small, roadside creek, with occasional drops of rain hitting its gray surface. The water’s surroundings are rough and non-descript enough that you could almost wonder why the director, Alex Payne, kept it in.

But of course, it’s there for a reason. The short segment, inserted between more hefty moments of character interaction, is the kind of pause a movie needs to create its mood, to get its viewer to think what they need to. It’s also what the characters of the movie need to do, in order to cope. If a story is going to center around a family dealing with a loved one (a wife, a mother, a daughter) being taken off life support, you can’t rush it around like some frenzied action picture. You need space.

That idea kept coming back to me. Sure, we all know the “stop and smell the roses” line, but I keep returning to that phrase from new angles. Seeing it as the concept of giving yourself space, I am more strongly confronted by the idea behind the cliché. Or maybe even more so when I consider it as an image: of sitting and watching rain drops ripple outward in a small creek. Not running to the next thing like we always do or staring at some screen (only half present), but just sitting. Witnessing.

Those times on the beach at camp, when I looked overhead and saw the Milky Way spilling its way across the heavens. That time I was driving by a lake on my way from high school, a lake I had seen many times before and that was so repetitiously calm and blue that I hardly glanced at it most days, but on that fall day it was somehow transformed into large waves and a surprising, pewter gray—we never think of gray as being beautiful, but it was alive under a glowing, cloudy sky, somehow its own source of light—and I found somewhere to park nearby so I could stand by its edge and just take it in.

I’m twice the age I was at those moments and they still feed me now.

They’re not my only moments I come back to—I have many of those—but I’m never going to have so many of them that I could never use more. It’s making me wonder why I don’t sit and witness more often, even as I struggle through the end of a busy semester, which has made it increasingly hard to stop, cope, and give myself space.

Maybe the most annoying thing about clichéd wisdom like “stop and smell the roses” is how hard it often is to follow.

On School Shootings and Stories That Never End

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Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Columbine happened not long after I graduated from high school, and it disturbed me to the core. While it wasn’t the first such mass shooting, it was the one that slapped me awake. Nor did it seem outside the realm of possibility for it to have happened in the school I had just graduated from. After all, there weren’t (and aren’t) all that many dissimilarities between a suburb in Minneapolis and a suburb in Denver.

The following year, I began working through my confusion in the way I knew best, by writing. I didn’t really know what I was going to say, just that something needed to be said. What can lead someone to go to a school full of people they know and try to kill them? What does this say about us, the society where this is possible? I was horrified by these questions and not particularly sure if (or what) my answers would be, but I was determined to try.

It took a long time to write my book. A long time. Part of this was needing to figure out my writer self, but part of it was finding what needed to be said. Community was a part of it, some wise part of me seemed to know (I knew it before I even realized how true it was). These things don’t just affect one or two people, but everyone: the school and its local area, the state, the country, even the world.

So I had to discover my fictional community and write stories about it. From one character and his relationships, I found another and another, until I found I was slowly uncovering an entire tapestry of stories, one that I could never completely reveal (or could be written about in just one book). But I had, at last, a book that suggested at that larger collection of untold tales.

In all these years since I began writing, things have only gotten worse. As the New York Times noted, the shooting in Benton, Kentucky, on January 23rd was the eleventh of this year. The eleventh, just twenty-three days in.

And we’re past that count now in February, aren’t we?

For all that regularity, however, we’re no better at dealing with these things. We may make our schools—those who work there and study there—undergo active shooter drills, but as far as actual prevention, or coping goes? If anything, we’re regressing. We are so inured to the fact of these things that we almost have our responses down pat. The battle lines are drawn, and it’s World War I trench warfare at its worst.

In all the tumult of one side denouncing the other, however, I don’t see as much discussion of the most important aspect of the problem. Gun control certainly is a part of it (and there is a possible bridge between responsible gun ownership and better regulation of these potentially lethal weapons), and mental health may be as well, though the connection between that and mass shootings is debated.

The thing we so often miss is what I uncovered in trying to write about these tragedies: community. And while I do see people tweeting and writing about the heroics of those trying to save others, and about the lives of those involved, those narratives tend to be buried (or used for further ends). Particularly the day-to-day lives of those affected, before and after the event everyone is so focused on. Because those stories never end.

Are these stories ever connected, too. We all live in communities, surrounded by other people, and each of us has a propensity for good or bad, love or hate. And try as we might, we cannot legislate love. We cannot dictate how people interact with each other, lest we become dictators ourselves. Boundaries or guidelines may be suggested by laws or constitutional amendments (or under some other organizational name), but how each of us relates to those others in our community is what really decides the outcomes of our stories.

I know, I’m tired too. I’m weary of the sudden spike in my chest whenever I hear of another shooting, knowing that we’re undergoing yet another trauma so common that it has become difficult to register.

Even as we hear about them, though, think on how you relate to those in your community, be it locally, nationally, or internationally. As you argue your point of view (goodness knows we all have them), think long on how you are arguing for it, and the implications of arguing for it. Because the root, the very root of these tragedies is anger and lack of empathy, no matter how one arrives there.

If you’re going to pull the trigger and kill another human, let alone many other humans, you must see them not like you, but as a problem worthy of hating and eradicating. That the only solution is their removal, as quickly and dramatically as possible.

The first step in response for all of us then, no matter how foolish, no matter how rose-tinted glasses it might seem, is to love. To reach out. Anything else is a step back into the abyss.

On What Absence Makes

Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Lake Superior from Grand Marais, photo by the author

While they do have a frustrating amount of truth to them, the main reason platitudes and clichés are so annoying is that they are downright obvious. More, they’re generally said when that obviousness is staring you directly in the face. So when I tell you what I’m missing in the following paragraph, know that the phrase “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” is making its presence known, and that I am wanting to punch that presence in its clichéd white teeth.

I miss water—open water. Water you can sit and stare at and feel small next to, something in the expanse speaking all the words ever written in literature right inside you, without the words ever needing to be said.

I had an embarrassment of riches in open water when I lived in Duluth. The city sprawls along a hillside overlooking southwestern Lake Superior, so pretty much anywhere you go you’ll see at least a smidgen of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world (so large it’s often called an inland sea).

That’s not to say I’m in an area without water: this year is the 20th anniversary of a major flood here in Grand Forks (I’ve driven across the bridge shown in the Wikipedia entry!). I like the Red River of the North where it is in its greenbelt and don’t need it to become an expanse again. But even though the Red River is a presence in the region that should not be ignored, it’s not a presence in the same way as Lake Superior is in Duluth. You can’t avoid noticing the lake in Duluth, but unless you’re right on the river here in Grand Forks, you’d be hard pressed to notice it.

Driving pretty much anywhere in northern Minnesota or down in the Twin Cities, you’re going to trip over a lake without much effort. Despite its slogan of having 10,000 lakes, Minnesota actually has almost 12,000 that are 10 acres or more, and if you count ones smaller than that, the number just goes up and up. If some of the info I’m finding is correct, North Dakota has… 35? And some of those are reservoirs or larger portions of rivers!

Some of this, I know, is the stir craziness of winter. I’ve been inside too much, I haven’t even been able to walk by the Red River much… and that’s enough to make me miss water right there. There’s a little English Coulee on the University of North Dakota’s campus, and it is a simple joy to stop and watch it tumble over a little rock dam with Jessica during her lunch break. Some of the underwater rocks have beards of algae, and one in particular sports a fu manchu look: not common among rock algae formations, in my experience.

Still, it’s not the same as being able to drive over any number of hillsides in Duluth and have the sudden and overwhelming vision of Superior fill your eyes. Nor is it the same as crouching at the edge of the water at Kitchi Gammi Park, feeling yourself as small as can be while waves wash against the shoreline.

Lester River enters Lake Superior on the edge of Kitchi Gammi Park, and it becomes a raging torrent in the springmelt. I can see its rapids in my mind even now, and I can see the surfing fanatics in their cold water gear, riding the crests caused by the river’s entrance. The lake has so many shades of blue: I can’t describe them all, but I can see them.

I’ve sometimes wished I didn’t have such a strong connection to Duluth, as it would make this move easier and less full of longing. But if one needs to move, maybe it is a good thing to have such deep roots to your old home, if it means being able to find its waters when you need them. Albeit with mind’s imperfect memory.

On Guilty Consciences for Somewhat Good Reasons

Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Despite my best intentions, this blog has been lacking a post in a good while, and it’s making me feel guilty. Which might be a little silly, after all, considering it’s been without a post due to health issues, a semester (and its requisite grading) ending, and yet another move to a better apartment.

But even though I have no delusions of grandeur about how many people may someday be reading this blog, I do want people to read it. Which means updating more on the regular. So I’ll be aiming for at least a weekly update, dear readers, because nothing has changed since I restarted this blog last fall. If anything, we’re in more need of focusing on good things: of talking about what is worth talking about, of looking at what is worth looking at.

Dogwoods on UND's campus, May 2017 — Photo by the author

I’ve been endeavoring to do just that these last couple weeks, with spring finding its ways to my more northern climes. New leaves have burst forth and reached their full growth, and the dogwoods in Grand Forks have made me realize just how many of them there are around town, so abundant is their color and fragrance. Their blooms will fall away all too soon (indeed, some have already disappeared), but in the meantime I am doing my best to notice them, capturing the feeling they evoke the best I can with the camera and photography hobby I’ve decided have lain dormant for far too long.

On the Importance of Learning of Tokyo’s Destruction by Godzilla

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Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

*A small memoir from a trip this fall*

It’s been a long week of teaching classes: you wake up, you do your class prep, you do your teaching, you do your grading, and you go home. At home is nothing in particular. Your wife is living four and a half hours away for her new job; you’ve moved the majority of your things with her. The apartment is strangely empty and strangely full of far too many things you need to pack before you can join her in a couple months.

The wind likes to whistle lonely in the evening.

Today you’re driving home after another day of teaching, but it’s a little different in that you will be picking up your suitcase so you can drive those four and a half hours to see your wife. The first hour is alright as you drive through the forests of northern Minnesota and the setting sun is turning everything golden. Then the trees go stark and two dimensional against the still glowing horizon; the only things with depth are the clouds in the sky. Then there is nothing but the tunnel your headlights carve along the route, a tunnel that is hours and hours long.

Even the waters of Cass Lake offer no comfort when you stop to stretch your legs: the wind blows too cold in your face for you to watch the lights in the water.

About an hour from your destination, still tired, your searching radio finds it, the song that will take you the rest of the way. “Oh, no! There goes Tokyo! Go, go, Godzilla!” Before your mind can think about how improbably wonderful it is to find this song out of nowhere (though is it even a favorite song of yours?), you’re singing, shouting along with the words.

You’re halfway around the earth from Tokyo, you’re in the middle of the flat beginnings of the Great Plains and the tallest thing around here are grain elevators, but what else would Godzilla have left to stomp once Tokyo and the other great cities with skyscrapers are nothing but rubble?

You’re on your way, you’re almost there.

BFS Update: How This Fall Just Needed to End and My Cat Is Plotting My Doom

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Humor Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

So I spent the Fall of 2016 just wanting it to be over. Going in, it was already guaranteed to add some more white hairs to my once gloriously red goatee—full class loads as a college professor of writing have a tendency to do that. But then this wonderful year just kept wanting to give:

Here you go, your your last living grandparent is going to pass on. Here you go, your wife is going to land a dream job in a city 4.5 hours away, and while the job is wonderful, it’s also going to require you moving during the aforementioned busy semester—once for her and many of your things in late October so she can start the dream job, and once for you with the rest of your things after you finish teaching your classes for the semester. Oh, and did you notice that? Here you go, you get to find an apartment in a strange city and live apart from your wife for two months, even though you two are pretty much inseparable!

But wait, there’s more! Just when you think you’re all done, grades turned in for all of your classes, both moves completed, sanity about to be restored, here you go… a stupid neighbor will leave a window open in the second floor community room of your apartment building (during a winter storm, no less), causing a pipe to freeze and send water everywhere. Sure, it won’t be directly over your apartment, but it will make the carpet in much of your living room swampy and squishy, and the management for your building will take over a day to get a water extractor in (it being the day after Christmas). A dehumidifier will take two days.

Good times, am I right? See you later, 2016, I don’t miss ya. And it certainly explains the dearth of blogginess around here the past couple months. Yet something more is troubling me, something that makes the events of the past few months pale in comparison: my cat seeks my doom.

Don’t believe all the cute pictures Jessica/the Celt may show you of our cat, Rosie, nor the picture below. She may seem quiet, shy, and altogether adorable, but she is crafty—she plays the long game in seeking my demise. With our living room unusable and our office full of boxes and objects rescued from the living room, Jessica and I must live in the bedroom. And even though we have two (not just one) kitty beds in this bedroom, this is not good enough for our seemingly innocent feline named Rosie. Oh no, she must lie all day on my side of the bed. Not just an hour or two: all day.

What? I'm just lying here innocently, I'm not plotting your imminent demise. — What? I’m just lying here innocently, I’m not plotting your imminent demise.

She’ll grudgingly accede for me to take the spot back when Jessica is home—though I have had to pick her up on more than one occasion—but if I get up to do something? Perhaps to put something away? Perhaps to let the maintenance men in to work on the living room rug? Spring, spring! Lightly does the Rosie leap from wherever she lay before, finding my spot on the bed, curling up so cutely, so innocently, that surely no human could possibly try to move her!

This obviously is leading in one direction. My permanent removal! Rosie had a month to grow accustomed to having an entire half of a queen-sized bed to herself, and she does not want to give it up. Every time I have to move her, she looks at me with those big, kitty eyes, tearing my soul in two… and she knows it.

Soon, I’ll be forced into sleeping on a couch I am too tall for, or on a not very comfortable airbed. Soon, I’ll be so tired my mental capacity will deteriorate, my paranoia reigning supreme, and I will be relegated to the funny farm. Soon…

And Rosie will have her half of the bed all to herself.

On Seeing My Grandmother as Herself

Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

In defiance of (or alignment?) with Twitter’s character limitation, I wrote a long chain about my grandmother, who died early in the morning a week and a half ago.

Something about a Twitter chain feels poetic, with the need for each line (or tweet) to hold its own but feed into the next. It made me want to post it here as well with a couple of additions, where the whole thing can work together outside of Twitter’s sometimes frustrating interface for reading reply chains (and maybe a little editing to work better in this new context).

Grandma Herself

So… my grandmother died last Wednesday. Jessica and I have no remaining grandparents alive.
But there’s more I wanted to share about my grandma than that frustrating bummer of a fact.

She felt like a stereotypical grandma in many ways, giving big smooches on cheeks
(and occasionally pinching them),
and she made good food (I still use her pancake, lasagna, & spaghetti recipes).

But the thing I want to remember,
the thing I wanted to share,
Is her taking painting classes.

About eight years ago, Jessica and I chatted with her about how they were going, and
she was so vibrant talking about them,
so awake and alive,
and she joked about her differences of opinion from her instructor.
she had certain ideas about what she wanted to do, and she was quite firm about them:
she wasn’t backing down!
It’s the most her I ever remember her being. Her her. Not my stereotypical image of a grandma, but herself,
through and through.

Childhood memories are spotty, and I only knew her for less than half her life,
but I’m certain of it.

I’m happy to say I saw more of her this weekend.
One universal good thing about all grandparent funerals I have witnessed:
learning more about them.

This weekend, we heard anecdotes & stories about her I’d never heard before,
Saw pictures I’d never seen before of her as a child, a teen, and in her twenties.
It was the her we saw when we talked to her about her painting.

I love what I saw then and I love this memory.

I will always love it.

We need to see more of the people around us—friends, family, strangers.
Go out and create something, everyone. Connect with others. I’m so glad my grandmother did.
My only wish is that I had shared more moments with her.
But I think we would think that about most people,

if we saw the real them.

I Don’t Think You Know What a Reservation Is…

Humor Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

When you take a trip, particularly an airline trip, it’s common to be nervous. I’m sure there are some travelers out there that don’t have imaginations like the Celt and I do, who soldier through airports and car rental lines like nothing bad will happen, but, by golly, I have to believe they’re few and far between.

There’s a reason this Seinfeld clip is funny. Because it’s true, and it happens.

Reservations get lost, people. Airplanes get over-booked, airplanes break down, car rental companies accuse you of damaging a car you did not damage (*ahem* that’s a story for another time), you name it. It happens. And boy, did it happen to us, almost two weeks ago. The Celt and I were traveling to Vermont and… *shudders* so much happened. So very much.

First, we got up at 3 in the morning, because the airlines charge you a little less of an arm and a leg if you fly before even morning birds are winging from tree to tree and singing. Then, we stood in the fog, waiting for a cab that kept not arriving, even though I had made a reservation a few days before for an early pickup. Why? They had misplaced the reservation, they said (see Seinfeld clip above for the second time). Then we waited some more for a cab that was “on its way,” waiting and waiting as our flight time grew closer and closer and as we grew more and more nervous. Just when I was about to go get our car and drive to the airport–outrageous airport parking fees or no–our taxi arrived. Squealing tires through the fog and fifteen or so minutes later, we arrived, just when they were boarding. But we made it, and what more could go wrong…

Right?

Oh, but our plane in Chicago had a mechanical failure, so we sat for an hour while they investigated and fixed. The Celt and I kept calm, read books, tried to ignore the cramped nature of ever-shrinking plane seats and leg room. And luckily, they fixed the plane and we made it to Vermont’s Burlington airport. We had made it, and what more could go wrong…

Right?

We approached the car rental counter with some nervousness (Seinfeld clip reference #3), but surprisingly enough, nothing amiss here. The line was short, the reservation was ready to go, and we had a nice, little red Toyota Yaris to drive (admittedly a little clown-carish when you saw a Big Frickin’ Swede get into it). I had driven through the area before and we had printed out directions, so we were home free. We ate and then enjoyed the gorgeous Vermont mountain views as we drove to Montpelier. The B & B stay was going to be no problem. I had talked to the owner many times in March and we had made a large deposit on our stay. We were home free for the two weeks, right?

Wrong! *laughs sadly, deprecatingly* So wrong, Mr. Big Frickin’ Swede. So wrong.

No one was at the B & B when we arrived. No one. There was a note for current people staying and a cell phone to call, but the husband that it belonged to did not pick up (the B & B is run by a husband and wife team, of sorts). Backtrack from the country outskirts of Montpelier to somewhere we could get wifi and find some more numbers to call. Finally reached the wife, who was out of state and told us… they didn’t have our reservation listed. Oh, she could remember me from all our discussions in March, but she just didn’t have the reservation listed anywhere (Seinfeld clip reference #4).

Long story somewhat short, they stuck us in another room that night (not the one we had reserved, someone else was in it. …Seinfeld clip reference #5). The Celt and I were panicking, since all the hotels and B & Bs in the area were very, very full, and we didn’t particularly care for how this was going. The husband returned later that night and assured us they would make everything right, as “This has never happened to us before!”

Despite these assurances, they kept talking about how we could stay with them for the whole two weeks, but there would be some nights (okay, every night for a week) where they would have to move us to other rooms in the B & B and two NON-consecutive nights (!) where they wanted us to stay at another B & B because they were booked fully. You know, with people that made reservations after we had (is this really Seinfeld clip reference #6? Egads).

This continued over three days, thanks in part to the wife being out of town (and wanting to play hardball) and her being the one that runs the show and the husband trying to appease us whenever we talked to him. Three days, while I reminded them of my reservation for one room for a whole two weeks (#7). And I reminded them of the massive deposit I had made back in March for one room for two whole weeks (#8). Finally, finally they did the right thing and let us stay in the one room I had reserved (#9), something that was a little essential since 1) we were on vacation for part of our stay and 2) I was attending classes for my degree and the Celt was doing her own coursework online: we couldn’t be moving all over and into rooms that didn’t have anywhere to study.

At the end of our two weeks, the husband said he’d love to have us stay again… after charging us the rate quoted to me back in March (this rate despite our staying in a smaller, cheaper room our first night and having to deal with all the junk they put us through… oh, and Seinfeld clip reference #10!)

Did I mention I was sick for the last week of our stay, coughing and hacking and trying to breath while staying at this place and going to class?

Yeah, it’s good to be back home.