Autumnal Awakening

 If you have never read Kate Chopin, let me highlight a little about her and her book "The Awakening".  Chopin wrote feminist literature in a time where all that was required of women was to be feminine and play their part.  Chopin couldn't play her part as her husband died and left her penniless so she wrote and she wrote about what interested her and what interested her was women living a life bigger than they were currently allowed to. In "The Story of an Hour" the main character dies of a heart attack upon learning that the husband she thought was dead was really alive.  Boom, dead.  That is a fun story to read with 16 year old students.  In "The Awakening", her main character has an affair with a younger man (scandal!) and then commits suicide by walking into the lake with her heavy dress' pockets filled with heavy stones.  No weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth like Flaubert's whiny Madame Bovary.  Just a straight walk into a cold lake with heavy pockets and a heavier purpose.  In between the affair and the death part, the character experiences her awakening.  Her sense of purpose in the world and what it meant to be a woman in her time and place.  I find that as I live up north for the first time in decades, I too am having some kind of awakening here.

Younger man?  My person is a younger man! (highly recommend).  Suicide in the sea? No, thanks.  If I am not 98 and wizened and holding a sharper tongue that I do now, I don't want to know. Three hairs left on my head and four on my chin sounds about right.  (I imagine my person reading this right now and sighing.) No, my awakening is coming with the splendor of autumn all around me.  

The splendor!

Texas does spring really well but there's nothing to say about fall down there.  Hot until November, sweaty til December, two brown leaves fall down, and it's over.  The visual cornucopia of reds, and oranges, and yellows of autumn in IL just batters my eyes until I want to weep for the stunning beauty of it all.  It is afire!  It is resplendent!  It is glorious to behold and I am beholding it! I am driving to work and want to beep my horn for the joy of the tree-lined streets of yellows and orange and red. I do not because we only beep our horn up here for impatience or anger, not joy.  I want to stop and take a picture of every tree I am finding beautiful, but that is every tree!  The prairie grasses also change color!!!  Who knew?!?!? 

This little guy tried to turn every color!

It's not just the visual either.  It is the pleasure of kicking through leaves and hearing them skitter ahead of you on the sidewalk.  The crunch as you step through them.  The sweet smell of decaying leaves and grass and somehow a little apple released and swept into a nose used to dusty grass and ragweed.  The crisp taste of apple cider that matches the crisp feel in the air.  The air that feels clean and bright and crisp all at once.  Where a soft layer is all you need and all you want.  You want to feel that fresh fall air fall over you.  Autumn is assaulting all of my senses and I am awake!

I know.  I know all this autumnal beauty is the precursor to winter. I remember. I know that both the sky and earth will be grey and muted and dead. I know the sun will barely rise before it sets and I will hibernate in the house and eat all the carbs and feel pale, and lumpy, and misshapen.  I might wear the same hoodie for days and feel that scurvy and rickets are only a day away if the sun doesn't come out again soon. I know that the air will be biting and brutal.  I know the snow will  a pain to clean off of a car and scary to drive in. I know and yeah, I know.  None of that matters because after 30 dormant years of no fall at all, I am having an autumnal awakening of epic proportions.  I am so excited about this autumn that I would hang up one of those "Happy Fall Y'all" signs and mean it.  If my kids were here, I would drag them into the woods in matching flannels to have a picture taken.  But only after we picked apples and sang some kind of autumn song and sipped cider and carved a pumpkin and had a leaf fight and smiled. (I am picturing my kids reading this and thinking how glad to not be here right now.)

If you are in a place that does autumn like this, get out there and have your own awakening!  Smell it, see it, feel it, taste it! It is too good to not carve some time out to revel in it.  Let it wash over you until you are smiling at leaves and grinning into the wind.  If you live in a place that is still flesh-eating hot, I am sorry.  I am trying to send you some of my autumn through my words.  If it isn't working, come and visit me next autumn instead!  We will crunch through leaves and eat apples and wear flannel and behold all that is autumn and feel really, really happy inside.  Oh, we will also smile while singing at autumn song, so come prepared.

Side note: I have no idea what an autumn song is, so come really prepared.

Sigh.

It's All Good

I guess because I am in a new state and working towards making new friends, I am thinking a lot about the first friend I made the last time I moved to a new state.  I was much younger then and working my first full-time job at a Harvey Hotel in Dallas.  I am not sure if I had a title other than Office Helper and I gathered faxes, filed, made copies, sent things UPS for guests and answered phones.  I do know that I did not have a desk and spent most of my day standing in the small copy room in my JCPenney dress and hose and heels.  Most people who came in would give me a smile and make their copies and go but one person from Accounting always talked to me.  I remember Mark wearing a brown suit and peach shirt and tie a lot and I remember him always commenting that maybe one day I could also have a desk.  It was never mean-spirited, just a pleasant way to remind me that I didn’t have a desk and it soon moved us onto other things to talk about.  Three months later, I was promoted to Accounting (despite claiming in the interview that I was not good at math) and sat next to Mark for the next eighteen months and that was it; first new friend made.

We were young and dumb and poor and working hard to prove we were real adults.  We talked about everything and nothing and I proved I was indeed bad at math as Mark proved he was really good and started to climb the management ladder.  We soon grew from work friends to meeting out.  We drank and danced and Blue Oyster Cult raged in the background.  The thing I quickly realized with Mark is that if you were his friend, his circle of friends became yours as well.  He would talk to me about his other friends like I knew them and by the time I met them, it was like I had always known them.  He was welcoming, caring, and constantly upbeat.  He created this world of interesting, funny, caring people and if he knew you, you got added to this world.

Mark is a giver.  Like the most generous person I know.  I really know this because at loose ends, he let me live with him in a one-bedroom apartment for eight months.  We had both moved onto different jobs and he traveled all week and home on the weekends.  I slept on the couch when he was home and when I did finally get my own apartment, I declared I would never sleep on a couch again.  Mark taught me not to be sad on a Friday night with nothing to do.  It was a night for a party of one.  We would go to Eatzi’s and buy a healthy dinner, a bottle of wine, and either ice cream or cookie dough and eat/drink it all while watching a movie and talking through most of it.  (The party of one came in when I realized I could do this on my own as well).  We lived together and still went out together and the only time I remember Mark being mad at me was when I couldn’t lift an entertainment center up three flights of stairs with him and we had to flip it end over end to get it up there.  

Mark is gracious.  He has sat in lawn chairs at a table to eat lasagna I made and didn’t tease me about it until years later. He brought me to Easter at his Nonna’s house with his entire family, who, like Mark, took me right in.  Except for Nonna.  She did not like the look of me and any time I asked anything, she would reply that “there was more sweet tea” in the kitchen.  I drank a lot of sweet tea that day.  Mark went trick-or-treating with me and my kids when Will was very tiny and cried the entire time we were out and it was not much fun at all.  He went and stayed and said it was “all good.”  Because he loved me, he loved my kids and they loved him and Uncle Mark has been their friend too.

Mark is funny.  We did couple-dinners once a month for years with other friends and our table would drink a lot of wine and laugh and laugh.  Laughter until you can’t breathe.  Laughter where tears pour out of your eyes and you look around with blurry vision and think ‘this is life.” Laughter where other tables close by either hate you tremendously or wish that they knew you and were laughing too.  Mark’s humor is a lot of self-deprecation, saying things you wouldn't think would come out of his mouth, making the best out of the worst, and just his delivery.  There is only one time I think his humor failed and maybe the only time I remember being mad at him.  We ate a lot of free cake at the hotel we worked at and after a year of it, I looked like I ate a lot of free cake.  I was describing the bathing suit I had just bought and said it showed my stomach.  Mark, a forkful of cake an inch from his mouth, wrinkled his nose, sneered, and said “Girl, I have seen your stomach.”  As I write that, I realize I might still be mad at him for that.

Feeling cute, might drink some beer, high-kick a bee....

For thirty years, Mark Miller has been my first friend and my always-friend in Texas.  He has been there in all of my good, bad, dramatic and I know he always will be.  He will call me and talk about this or that or anything and I will laugh and do the same.  Recently, he texted to ask if I had a few minutes to talk. I was instantly nervous.  I thought it must have something to do with his parents.  (Side note: no matter how many times I move, his mom sends me a Christmas card and handmade peanut butter eggs at Easter and I love that woman).  I guess I forget how old we are and that bad news can be about us now too.  I called and listened to Mark tell me he had cancer.  Probably renal cancer with a tumor and nodes and other gross cancer words.  And I froze thinking about how this wonderful, beautiful person could be filled with this.  Alternating between tears and laughing, he explained what had happened, what would happen, and when.  He is, of course, upbeat.  He will have his kidney removed on Monday and more treatments after that.  “It is what it is,” he says.  I want to instantly fix it for him.  I tell him maybe being down a kidney will equate to a good 5 pound weight loss.  I ask if he needs me to come down to Texas and he tells me he has all the good-intentioned, overbearing women he needs right now.  

So all I have is my words to tell Mark, and everyone, what a joy he is in my life.  What a difference his friendship made to an out-spoken, brash young girl from Buffalo.  I hope that everyone has a Mark in their life and if you don’t, I will share mine, because if anything, Mark has shown me there is always room for one more friend.  And if you do have a friend like Mark, you remember how special that is and how good this world has been to you.  I told Mark I would call him every few days and tell him weird things that happen teaching middle school during his recovery.  This week alone, a student told me he was allergic to my talking and I tucked my dress into my underwear and didn’t notice until I was out in the hallway.  I really hope that when I do tell him that story that he sneers and says “Girl, I have seen your legs.”  I won’t be mad this time; I will laugh and be thankful that he is there to listen and keep me humble.