“The pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all.” — Sophocles (from my journal, May 25, 2008)

“AAAGH! I just dug myself a deeper hole! [Referencing social ineptness. Next to this is drawn a circle, filled in with blue ink. An arrow points to the circle and is labelled "My Hole"]. (From my journal, May, 2008)

“Kea born today. The hospital: there this time for a good sake. Vancouver. Cowfish. Thunderstorms.” (May 24, 2008)

Someone New

Set aside all I’ve said about sadness and self-loathing and picture a field in high late spring as we pick across it looking for slight archaeological scars. To the west above the reconstructed fort wall there is a humid sky more like August than May and something is happening with the clouds up there. But it is still sunny down in the field. Dandelions and clover have taken up defensive position against the outlines of former foundations. Around the perimeter, whitewashed clapboard buildings–all, sadly, reconstructions. Bees and other heavily buzzing things emphasize the weight of waiting. Time is going slowly in Fort Vancouver, where we have come to beat down the flames of my passion for local history. David and I decide to leave, to beat the inevitable things happening in the sky. We get on the motorcycle and ride back to Portland.

We decided to stop and shop for a cowfish at the eponymous pet store on Northeast Broadway, which is a random, simple thing to do when one is waiting. My phone rang then, and it was Aileen. She sounded normal, which is in so many ways surprising and improbable that I assume at first that nothing has happened. Indeed, though, she said their daughter was born about twenty minutes ago and would I like to come see her?

Imagine then, as the late spring day heats to the breaking point, Mr. Pencil and I arriving at the maternity ward, carrying helmets. We are giants compared to the baby. She is enormous compared to us. I’m not sure which is the truer statement.

In Which I Have Body Image Problems

Aileen was pretty much back to her (willowy) pre-pregnancy weight–the scamp!–within four or five minutes of giving birth. Something like that. Meanwhile, I was inflating. Corticosteroids have the charming tendency to lay down fat deposits on your face, your neck, your upper abdomen. To make up for this insult, they also make you ravenous. I watched the angles of my face disappear, I grew a slight double chin, I ate like an elephant, I felt lumpen. Bodily processes were altogether too erratic to stick to any sort of meaningful exercise routine or a reasonable diet.

When my girlfriends came over for a slumber party (in the ironic, light shit on fire, heavy-drinking sense of the term) in mid-May, I had to beg out of the “Naked Ladies” part of the evening (roughly, a real-time clothing swap, useful for disposing of unwanted garments). I couldn’t stand the way I looked in anything. I couldn’t stand to look at myself. As the weather grew warmer and I had to wear less clothing at any given time, I grew tenser and more disgusted with my shape. It wasn’t a monstrous outward change; people weren’t pointing and snickering, but it seemed like an additional indignity I shouldn’t have to bear. I desperately needed some new clothes, but buying something in this current size would admit the permanence of it. Still, we girls had fun: we drank and slept all together in the attic.

But at least the steroids were working. Until one day in mid-May, when I was co-working at Higgins’ and watching a hummingbird* outside his window and suddenly I had to bolt because my insides mutinied. This was the beginning of a malaise that did not end by itself. The doctor said it was time for something new: 6-Mercaptopurine.

Chromosome 18q

One, but not both, of my parents passed a gene to me that leaves me unable to metabolize 6-MP correctly. The other gave me a normal gene in this regard. I’m not sure who to blame. Specifically I lack the Thiopurine s-methyltransferase enzyme. From Wikipedia:

This gene encodes the enzyme that metabolizes thiopurine drugs via S-adenosyl-L-methionine as the S-methyl donor and S-adenosyl-L-homocysteine as a byproduct. Thiopurine drugs such as 6-mercaptopurine are used as chemotherapeutic agents. Genetic polymorphisms that affect this enzymatic activity are correlated with variations in sensitivity and toxicity to such drugs within individuals. A pseudogene for this locus is located on chromosome 18q.

As a result, dosing me with 6-MP is an action-packed adventure. When 6-MP doesn’t get metabolized correctly, it hangs out in your body. Sometimes it likes to weasel its way into your core bits and give you bone marrow toxicity, which sounds bad because it is. It can kill you, so it’s better to avoid it. So, for me, the new drug meant biweekly stabbing trips to the clinic such that I could be monitored, very carefully, for the lurking death. Not to jump ahead, but everything went fine. The pharmacists gravely handed me my pills, shaking their heads in sympathy (”It’s strong stuff,” said one. “Lots of severe possible side effects.”). It’s hard not to feel nervy taking a drug that’s used as a chemotherapy drug for leukemia and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It has a list of adverse reactions that fills pages.

Grounded

In May, I waited for the other shoe to drop (it didn’t) and collected layers of fat. To pass the time, I laid around in our attic: I read twelve books. It became evident that my yearly goal of 50 books wasn’t going to work out. I was going to blow by that. I busied myself with the Athenian tragedians, Steinbeck, local history, this year’s Booker- and Pulitzer-winners. In the interstices I studied math. I had signed up for calculus at PSU’s summer session and needed to be ready.

In my insomniac throes (thanks, again, steroids) not directly occupied by other mental exercises, I thought and thought and thought. I reflected continually on my boorishness. I mused about how I could try to be kinder, more thoughtful. I chewed on my difficulties like cud.

While being introspective in the attic, I even started thinking about flying again, my ironic Achilles heel (ironic in that travel is pretty much my favorite thing). Grounded, grounded! Always grounded! My sweet friends and family asking how soon  now, when can I, how am I doing, have I made progress. No! No! If only yes! I call around, trying to drum up insurance coverage for a specialist. No dice. I fret. I reminisce. I who got to England once by boat, to live there**. My journal entries, between notes of duller things, became rant-ish:

[Regarding England]: Everyone spoke of going home for the holidays, of toing and froing internationally as if this were possible; not for me. For me, I waited for them to come to me. Immobile; a blur of drunken things that passed for experience… I have not been back. How could I? As if by irony my bed there under pitched slate in my aerie apartment in that divided 18th century mansion: directly underneath the approach to Birmingham International. Storms all that winter, always wet, me sleeping right under that roof right under the planes. Screaming sounds of turbojets. In the night waking from one nightmare into the nightmarish sound of low-flying aircraft fighting gales. To the pub, to the pub! A pint for sanity! Such names–see! I want to go back!–The Green Man, The Newt & Cucumber, Gun Barrels, various Swans (White or Black), the same with Horses. The dawn before I left I’d been up all night and we–Matt and Jon and Faisal and I–were on the grounds of some frosty country house at dawn and I saw my first English robin. It was a friendly bird and it followed me, hopping, and sang. I want to go back.

Here I am eight months later and still grounded. No breakthroughs. Still stymied, still frustrated. Not everything resolves. Not everything ends.

–

* Higgins lives four blocks with me and is beset by, practically plagued by, hummingbirds. I, however, have never seen a single one on or near my own property.

** The saga of England, getting there, graduate school, being stuck there and the correlated damage are beyond the scope of this post. Perhaps another time.

Tags: 2008, attics, babies, Crohn's, reading, reflections

Sometimes the grandest of efforts have somewhat deflated outcomes. Take, for example, my grandly conceived, labor intensive, engineering miracle of a holiday ornament project this year. I decided I wanted to make something interactive, something that had a kinetic three-dimensional quality, something that could involve letterpress.

Thus, after twenty or thirty hours of slicing and hemming and swearing and starting over, I had what I thought was slightly genius: do-it-yourself holiday orreries! A kit for everyone! Packaged up and tied with a bow! Flat pack! As efficient as Ikea.

But what I didn’t count on was just how careful one had to be to put these together. And how distracted groups of people can be. And how not everyone wants to spend forty minutes on Christmas day flexing fine motor skills. And tiny brads embedding themselves in rugs.

My goal was to create something entirely self-designed that didn’t use adhesives and could be packaged and mailed, if need be (it wasn’t needed, of course).

Wrapped up and Ribboned; Text is 18pt Caslon Old Style

The Contents of the kit: two large strips for the outer rings, three inner orbits, a comet, a star, four brads, a hanging frame for a solar body and a hook

The concept was a framed orrery that had three interior orbits. Those orbits can all rotate independently so they can each have a different plane of orbit.

The Outer Ring; Text again is 18pt Caslon

I spent an inordinate amount of time designing the joints that connect the two outer circles.

Detail of outer rings

Detail of Connections/Joints

I used 10pt Univers and Garamond Bold to create inner “orbit lines” with hyphens and other theoretical planets with “0″s.

Detail of 2 of the 3 inner Rings, showing letterpressed Dashes and Planets

Almost put together now.

Completed orrery, with central body (around which things rotate!)

All Done!

I had the recipients create the image on their own central bodies. Ours is a Pencil, which is fitting.

Tags: christmas, craft, holiday, Letterpress, ornament, papercraft

The following is text from an actual email I just sent. Someone was adopted. I’ve never spoken to this person before.

Dear E—–,

I am sorry for the delay in responding. I wanted to recheck some facts first. I think I can help you–and I will try.

There are a lot of secrets in that part of the family, during the early 1900s, and I only know what I know: what other family members have told me–sometimes conflicting accounts–and what I have been able to find in my own research.

Joseph Fister  a.k.a. Joseph Wilbur is a man of many mysteries. Mostly what I know about him personally is unconfirmed: that he changed his last name to Wilbur and fled to Colorado to evade the law–some even say he killed a man; that he left in the middle of the night taking all of the family’s money and was never seen again.

Adding to the confusion is a multi-generational re-use of names. The death announcement you saw for your Aunt Pearl was–likely–actually for your great-aunt Pearl a sibling of Joseph’s. Andrew Jackson Fister, Joseph’s father, a man with a great name, had a correspondingly great number of children. Most of them lived out their lives in Lander, Wyoming, where you can still find a significant number of Fisters in the phone book.

Joseph Fister had a daughter named Pearl who was given to an orphanage in Denver, as you suggested. She went to North (or was it South?) Denver High School and the head of the orphanage helped her attend nursing school. She gained her certification, lived for some time in Cripple Creek, Colo., then moved to San Francisco. Soon after, World War II started and she joined. She trained in Montana (even being involved with ski patrol, which I find very intriguing) and served in England. In Liverpool she met Victor A—– P—–. They settled in Minnesota and had four children.  His end was tragic.

The eldest daughter from this union is Frances M—– P—–. I have digressed this far because I am Fran’s eldest daughter, Fran being the eldest daughter of Pearl (who is in turn the eldest daughter of Joseph Fister).  Pearl is my grandmother; Joseph Fister, your grandfather, is my great-grandfather.

It is important to note that Pearl (who I believe to be your aunt) is very much still alive. I saw her just a few weeks ago. She is 94 years old and lives less than a mile from me. If this had been even two months ago I would tell you that she is doing fantastically in all ways: she has kept awake and alive all these years, even using a computer and keeping very up to date on politics. The past few months have not been good ones for her, and she is starting to show signs of early decline. We worry.

Joseph Fister was indeed married several times. Of these I am sure most of Frances Fry, my mother’s namesake and my great-grandmother. It is my understanding that Joseph and Frances Fry produced Pearl, C—–, A—– and I—–. He remarried twice, but my information was that he married a Marie E—– and another Frances. I’m not at all sure of those marriages. Even Frances Fry is an enigma. It is very difficult to learn of her origins, except for Pearl’s suggestion that her childhood was “dark,” that she might have done something “unforgivable” at a rather tender age.

My hunch is that I—– might be your mother, but she is a deeper mystery than anyone else for me. Pearl, who at the best of times releases family details in fractured vignettes, will not speak of I—– except in cryptic snatches that suggest ill will between the two. But at the same time Pearl’s decline is marked by paranoia, peppered with stories that didn’t really happen. I’ve heard her tell of traveling to a hotel in the mountains in her childhood and her parents “giving” I—– to a couple, never to be seen again. I know at least part of this isn’t true: my mother has met I—– (many, many years ago). And sometimes Pearl seems to confuse I—– with C—–.

Even so, I know very little about I—– I only know she exists because I’ve been told. I can find no trace of her out in the world. I am very curious.

I, too, would love to know the exact dynamics that drove the family apart. Pearl seems to carry a certain amount of hostility and stays buttoned up about family matters. She has suggested that her mother (possibly your grandmother?) was physically abusive, saying “she didn’t yell, she hit.” I’m sure it causes a good weight of sadness to be separated from your family and sent to an orphanage. I can only imagine.

But Pearl does tell wonderful stories about the Grand Junction area. The Mesa, she calls it, where she lived as a small child. They lived in a dirt-floored shack, essentially, surrounded by sheep ranchers. She collected a cigar box full of arrowheads. She still knows by heart a chili recipe she learned from a hermit that lived nearby. She had a horse named Cloverleaf. She spent much of her life trying to get back to the high desert, which is something I seem to have inherited.

I spent a few nights in Grand Junction last year, curious about the area. It is certainly beautiful; I drove down to Arches and Moab in Utah and back. I wish I knew more.

…

Your Second Cousin?
Lyza Danger Gardner

Tags: family, genealogy, missed connections, mystery

“There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

– Walt Whitman (from my journal, April 19, 2008)

I am married to a saint. This is a blessing as you’d expect, except when it causes me to detest myself. At first it was merely wonderful, in the original sense of the word. It filled me with a joyous wonder. He always does the thing one is supposed to do! He honestly doesn’t resent anyone! He puts himself last! He suffers on behalf of others!

I, however, come from a legacy of selfishness that ran a brutal unbroken streak until I hit twenty. My boyfriend at the time, also shatteringly polite (I have a type and it’s not just angular cheekbones and spare frames), told me: “You are selfish.” He wasn’t one for wasted or flung words (or, really, words at all, in English), so this was like having an anvil or piano dropped on my psyche. It was an absolute truth. I was selfish. I was horrible. I had been a horrible child. Even now I hate to think about my childhood, not for shock of its traumas and loneliness but from how odious a wretch I was. I wasn’t murdering small animals or anything, but I was definitely taking the last cookie on the plate.

So I decided to get better. This is not a goal for a week or a season, but one of de-programming oneself entirely–years and years of work. And I am better. I pledge that to you. But I am not a saint.

Right around the first week of April I started thinking too much about this saintliness. April. That’s when the magnolia tree finally flowered, the doctor gave me an answer, we considered the oreodont, and I started hating myself just a little bit.

The Year the Magnolia Paused

So, first, there’s this deciduous magnolia tree in our yard. It is not your ordinary deciduous magnolia tree, because, first, there are no ordinary deciduous magnolia trees (though certain evergreen varieties are forgettable). I can’t get beyond thinking that magnolia trees are a downright miracle–call me treacly if you will–blooming those dainty petals right there against the background of bare sticks before the tree has leafed out or the winter has even given any sort of indication that it’s okay to embark on such a delicate project. It seems very risky and bold.

Our magnolia tree was a secret. We bought our house mid-winter, when all of the trees in our small but complicated yard were in their cold states, admitting nothing. I had my hunch, my hope, when I saw its outsized buds, but I wasn’t vindicated until March of that first year. It blew up satisfyingly like popcorn and then juiced our sidewalk with banana-peel-slick leaves that the neighborhood joggers swore over as they flailed past. Its flowers were pure white.

As it turns out, it’s not just my obsession. A visiting arborist, ostensibly here to deal with our needy oak, our flagging black locust, begged us to let him groom the magnolia. It was, he said, not just any magnolia. It was the best specimen in the entire neighborhood. Everyone knows about this magnolia. He remembers our house not for its aged abundance of leaning, difficult, intrusive, scarred trees, but for this magnolia. If he was not allowed to relieve it of its overabundance of watersprouts and bring more light to its inner places, the world we be a sadder place. How could we deny this?

Last year my anticipation of the blooms started early, in December. In early January, before I knew how things were going to unfold in my life, I watched it from the second-story hallway window and felt satisfied. I fancied I could just see the earliest buds. In late January, after I knew how things were going to unfold in my life, my outlook changed a bit. By the time the magnolia bloomed, I promised myself, this would all be over–analysis, surgery, recovery. It would be an after-gift to my foreseen suffering.

But by mid-March I wasn’t settled. I was still making unplanned appearances in emergency rooms. The winter buckled down and the last week of March was the coldest ever on record. The magnolia, which had been desperately close to bursting forth, waited. Finally it dared to open up, during the same week that I had my own fate sealed.

The Human Radiator

The first day of April involved jettisoning everything inside me. This was the third time I’d endured this and it had lost some of its horror. For those uninitiated in bowel procedures, it goes something like this. Eat mostly nothing for days leading up to this day. Then liquids only. And only certain approved liquids. At noon or so on the day before whatever it is that will be done to you is to be done, you whip up a half gallon of powder-based drink that is part industrial poison, part cosmic punishment and part antifreeze. You drink this and it causes your food tubes to ditch their contents post haste. You spurt with gusto. I’ll hearken back to that antifreeze reference because it is apt. I had noticed during previous experiences that I got uncontrollable chills. So very cold. This time I took my temperature and it was 94.8F. You move so much fluid through your system so fast that you turn into a human radiator. For a few hours I was liquid cooled.

The second day of April was both the saint’s birthday and another trip to the hospital. This one was planned. Routine: change clothes, IV, drip, roll into procedure room. This time, due to recent improvements in panic level, I didn’t have to be as sedated beforehand and I remember every single thing until they flipped the sleep button and every single thing after they did whatever they do to wake me up again. Seriously, it went like this: Asleep, awake, Dr. Gravitas shows me an alarming photo of my insides and said it meant I had Crohn’s, unplugs me; I dress,  then take Mr. Pencil to a birthday dinner at a Peruvian restaurant and an evening at the current installation of Cirque du Soleil. It was a rather unique day.

On the third day of April I started to take the right drugs for my confirmed condition. And suddenly I felt great. Maybe that was just the steroids, but I also think it was the glowing absence of misery.

Consider the Oreodont*

Really, it was sudden. One day things hurt and I was exhausted, the next I remembered why it was I liked to be alive. Most of these things that make me happy were included in the superbly-timed trip Mr. Pencil and I took to Condon, Ore., the following weekend. Like someone who starved of input I started up my vacuum again. There were magical things in the north-central wheat hills of Oregon. Immense wind turbines that had a sentient feel to them. The faintest tug of spring, followed immediately by an arctic gust. Weather that kept us guessing. Ghost towns and railroad sidings, and much landscape of nowhere.

I wanted simultaneously to be an expert at dryland wheat farming, a geologist, a master of American History (I was reading a pre-release review copy of a book about the women in Franklin Roosevelt’s life and I was taking it very seriously), a commentator, a competent photographer. I spent an hour picking through small rocks at the visitor center at the John Day Fossil Beds, considering my paling memories of college course about such things. We hiked and looked for lithified, ancient leaves. I bought a book about local botany and started to try to identify everything. We probably saw wildlife–we always do on these trips. I looked out and took things in. I drew bad pictures of ponderosa pine** in my journal and sketched down proportions of minerals in the local basalt. I was very, very happy.

Why Am I So Bad?

But at the same time, a niggle. A little distracting thing I kept trying to bury, the kind of blemish angsty rock stars sing about. Why couldn’t I behave myself? The selfishness, the obliviousness to human nuance, was coming back! I panicked! I caught myself acting boorish with sudden, alarming frequency. I kept accidentally insulting a hotel clerk or alienating an acquaintance, missing cues and interrupting. With David I was safe from these blunders but my interactions with everyone else were weird, forced. I found myself feeling uncomfortable even around close friends. Awkward silences and stutterings. And more than anything, I just kept saying the wrong goddamned things. I would hear myself talking, it was like an out-of-body experience. I’d be staring at myself at a party, watching myself spout utter idiocy at someone, waving my own metaphorical arms wildly at myself to get my attention, to shut myself up. And yet I would keep going like an unstoppable mudslide of stupid. This is an awful fate.

“Why am I so bad?” I wrote in my journal in mid-April. “Why am I so bad yet at the same time cursed enough to know that I am bad? How can I be good?” The entry trails off into a piqued mess of pen strokes.

My husband continued to behave impeccably. He was tireless when I was tired or sick, bringing soup and patience. He herded and soothed both sides of our family with a shephard’s mastery. He said gracious things to hosts of dinner parties and asked thoughtfully after vacations and home improvement projects. I did none of these things, or when I did I managed to sound insincere. To sound insincere when one is sincere is an awful fate, too.

To distract myself I kept on reading. April was Julius Caesar and studying the structure of poems, a tedious bout with Theodore Dreiser and several escapist novels. But maybe it was in the aim of spiritual self-improvement that I read, towards the end of the month, Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. In any case, it didn’t work. I didn’t improve.

I’d managed to avoid awkwardness in my teen years. But it struck like a childhood disease, like chicken pox, relatively low in threat for children, but a dire situation for grownups. I was sick with it, feverish, 30 years old. And nothing seemed to help.

And the magnolia? It didn’t end like I’d envisioned. It was too cold, the winter had been too cruel. The buds had been blighted before they could even open up, damaged, sick. Within a day of their frail unfurling they bruised brown and fell off. What I had been waiting for all winter was just a pile of dead petals.

–

* See photo.

** Ponderosa pines (pinus Ponderosa) were so named by David Douglas (of all people) because they are heavy–ponderous, if you will. I noted this in my journal right above several stick-fishes*** and the word ANADROMOUS**** in all caps, underlined.

*** Can you describe simple drawings of fish as stick-fish?

**** Anadromous fish live in the ocean but spawn in fresh water. Think salmon.

Tags: 2008, april, Crohn's, magnolia, metaphor, month, oregon, reflections, selfishness, Travel, woe

A quick break from end-of-year musings to revisit a slightly more real world. I had an interesting conversation with Pete Forsyth at the Green Dragon during Beer and Blog last Friday (I know, that’s a mouthful; I don’t talk that much about the tech junkets I go on, but they are frequent and often cleverly-named). We spoke of a concern dear to my heart: the licensing required to share a photo with Wikipedia. In a nutshell, to give your photo to Wikipedia, you have to allow unlimited commercial use of the image. This can be tough as Coca-Cola can now paper billboards with my photos to their heart’s content. But it’s not a simple issue.

Pete wrote a thoughtful post as a result of this conversation and its comment thread made me think deeply. I’d be interested in your general opinion, too. It is such a muddy issue that I had trouble coming up with a coherent comment, a snip of which is below:

I am attached to specific photos not because of the weight of commerce they entail, but because of the personal nature of their expression. Releasing them into the wilderness always makes me feel a bit exposed, a nakedness I can handle in terms of college students working on term project collages and poor post-rock bands who need images for CD covers but yet take umbrage when metaphorical uber-corps have unlimited raping access. Yes–this is my own insecurity.

Am I right to feel this way? Maybe not, even if it is somewhat culturally natural. Is it reconcilable with my goals here? Probably not. Mostly now I am confused, somewhat ashamed of my own desire to hoard my own images.

OK, now go read the post.

Tags: commercial, copyright, licensing, Photography