na foine ting


Wednesday, September 28, 2005
 
I miss Paul.

Becca found this today, in old files. Nothing I remembered having, and a treasure, considering who he was, how things were, how they ended up. A letter, written on stationery from a hotel in England. He'd just come from Germany back to the UK, which meant he'd been holding onto the stationery for a while. Maybe debating writing, my invitation to do so, to break the natural barrier of virtual and real.

It's an earlier voice of his. I had forgotten about his sense of humor, that play that so rarely came out, and came out very likely oftener with me than anyone.

I miss him. I want him back. I want to know what happened to him, and that in the final few days I didn't fail him.

**




***

Ironic, in a way, that I feel responsible and that I didn't do enough, and I was poised to write to someone I'm fond of about how there's no way to ride a death to the grave and not feel that sense of inherent failure. No matter how well it goes, if such a thing can ever go well.

I still regret not doing more for Jon. Or doing the wrong things.

I still remember his parents' needing so desperately to know that I'd been good for him, that I'd made him happy, cured him of his virginity, been some bright star in his sombery gray sky.

I hadn't, you know? I did love him. We did actually fuck, the once, and it was stunningly mediocre and yes, if you must know, I regret that too. I didn't love him enough, and however happy he needed to be to avoid killing himself, I certainly didn't get him there. I may have contributed, by creating contrast, to his isolation. In some moments, I think I may have been the cause.

It's impossible to be the one left standing and not feel guilty. For being alive, for being luckier, stronger, healthier, less crazy, take your pick. It translates, inevitably, to this feeling of somehow having failed.

We did, in our various cases, all we could. In my case, far far less than you.

And there is another critical difference, one I'm not afraid to point out.

She knew you loved her. There was no question.

With Jon, I'm not sure I can say the same.

When you measure yourself, if you have to make that bitter, terrible measurement, think about that. However you felt, however much, she knew.


**

If I had to go through it a second time (which left me asking in a cosmic sort of way what I might not have learned the first time around, that I needed to do it all again?), at least I had that to hang onto. I had a few exchanges with Paul, before the end.

I made fucking well sure that old British bastard on his mountaintop, taking his last breaths alone, yorkie to his fucking mastiff, I made fucking well sure I'd told him how it was, how important he'd been, how much I cared about him, inappropriately or otherwise.

I made fucking well sure there was no question.

Maybe that was the lesson.

And damned if it wasn't marginally easier, the second time around.


**

I played my first league game since I broke my foot, last night.

Nothing I'd really planned, although it was a Tuesday, and I called Ryan on the phone and he said, yeah there's a game at 10:15pm, which is when I'd planned to be at the rink for pickup, and we contentedly dissed all the team leadership and bitched about a few other things, and I really miss him, come right down to it.

But he was busy, so I went alone to the rink. Not that I'm ever alone at the rink: Slo was there, and I skated around with him and the big black guy in the Bruins fleece; I forget his name, and then Brian A was there too. There's never really 'alone' in hockey, which is one of the things I really like about it.

Brian A's on some big national team, and coaching some juniors team up in Canada, and still coaching down here. He stopped long enough to shake his head over my stride. A year or so ago, he whipped my ass up and down the ice several billion times, teaching me to skate European style, or so he called it. It resulted in a sudden increase in my speed, probably because the mechanics were better suited to my strong but admittedly kind of stumpy legs.

"I reverted, didn't I?"

My transitions are smoother, almost back to where they were before the break. I was going from backwards to forwards to forwards to backwards, and he was just skating along. Shaking his head. "You reverted," he said. "All that hard work, for nothing."

I could tell from the tone he meant all his hard work, not mine. "When are you going to Boston again?" he asked, like somehow he could fix the damage between now and then.

The scary thing is, it's Brian. He probably can.

We talked about Boston hockey, we talked about his hockey, the Jr. Sharks kid he was coaching skated along with us and occasionally threw in his twobits. Brian said he'll teach me how to check, since apparently they play check hockey in Boston. He volunteered his Jr. Sharks student to help. "You get to kick my ass," I told the kid cheerfully. He looked me up and down, and nodded pleasantly. "Cool."

Brian A had nice things to say not about my hockey skills or skating -- more headshaking, more of the disappointed sighs one expects to get from a parent not a former coach -- but about my work ethic. "The whole beginner division's gone to hell since you left," he said. "I saw the stats. There was a significant drop in the quality of play."

"Brian," I said, "if you look at my stats at all you'll see as far as quality of play goes I was hardly a contributor," I said.

He shrugged. And in his subtle way, moved from personal trainer chat-up banter to the real conversation. "you brought integrity to the ice," he said. "It's a mood, and everyone catches it." He shrugged again. "Your team called me to coach them again," he said. "I told them no."

Maybe he was buttering me up because he knows I'll pay him $40 an hour to learn to push off the top third of my edge and not the flat. Again.

But I also know he hasn't coached the Hounds since I left, and they told me they asked him. So, you know.


I asked the AC, the other AC and the C if I could play tonight. Somehow at 10:08 I still hadn't been invited into the locker room. Finally JJ came out and saw me and went "hey, Kate, what the hell? What are you doing here?" And I said

"Pickup," and added "but I'd love to play with you guys. I told Chris I wanted to."

"So come play," he said.

"No one's told me to."

"I'm telling you," he said, in a sort of very un-JJ emphatic sort of moment. "You coming?"


They put me on D and I wore my Hounds jersey, and as I got out and warmed up and said hi to everyone I realized how badly I'd missed it.

Not the Hounds, really, although Pants was there and I'd really missed him, and it was nice to play D with Scott, who can really share the ice, and same with JJ, not just side to side but back and forward. He plays deep, I play more back, we cover diagonally, nice and smooth.

But it wasn't them I'd missed, or the Hounds, just league play. The banter back and forth, and where it's fun and you're laughing and you give their struggling beginner player who just got the puck a little bit of time to carry it past the blue line, since you used to be there too. And then the jostling and getting into the corner with some guy who must have mistaken me for some other girl, since he shouldered me like I wasn't going to cross check him right back.

I realized, afterwards in the locker room, that I'm fond of a lot of these guys.

But in the end, with a few exceptions, guys who are friends like Ryan, Erik, Pants, it could be any team. I could walk onto the ice at that level league play and have that experience pretty much anywhere.

It's the beauty of the sport, and why, while crossing the country, I'm not really leaving at all.


**
Monday, September 12, 2005
 
All right. I caved. I caved and admit it and now I'm glad I caved. Last week I had an unsuccessful wrestling match with IE over Blogger, and between that and Chris' recommendation, downloaded Firefox.

Now it's like... well, crap. Think of all the time, effort and annoyance I could have spared myself if I'd done that a fucking while ago.

Why anyone is using IE anymore is beyond me. Firefox is amazing, in the transparent way an application should be when it's being a useful, well designed tool.

Yeah, I know. Software as tools. Go fucking figure.

*

Today Becca and I discussed how many lemons we'd need to keep us in Lemon Drops until we leave, which looks like it will be around October 15th.

Moving is stressful. Fun, an adventure, but stressful. It requires a great deal of communication, good humor, and many, many mixed drinks.

*

I went to see Tori Amos in concert last night.

It's the first time I'd ever seen her live, and I was completely unprepared for how incredible it would be. I thought I'd sort of outgrown her, sort of looked back on my days of bawling to Tori Amos with a certain embarassment. Even though those days were really only a few months ago.

Well, and then there was bawling for the first 20 minutes of the concert last night.

She's amazing. It was an amazing concert.

I'm really glad I went.

*

Almost as good (is that heresy?) was her opening act, The Ditty Bops. Neil mentioned them being a favorite of Maddy's, and Maddy has exceptionally good taste.

I'm not sure who to really compare them to; they have their own sort of sound. Go and check out their website and download a song or two. Maddy's right: 'Sister Kate' is fabulous.


*
Saturday, September 10, 2005
 
Today Gavin had his sixth birthday party at the park, a very low key affair with just a couple of his buddies from school, one or two parents, and dumb games I made up that the kids tolerated mostly because if they got through them then they could smash up the pinata.


*


I had this moment recently where I had a pang of guilt about how I represented my mom in the book. As a slice of who she is, representative but highly damning.

I talked to her the other night and all the guilt went away.

My shrink explained to me, and I keep forgetting: my job is to be the shitty daughter. I do it without trying, and I do it well. It's what's expected, and any change on my part will only rock the boat. I need to accept my role, embrace it, and understand no one does it better than I do, and it's precisely what my mom wants of me.

My filling that role for my mom has little bearing on how I relate to the rest of the (relatively sane) world.

So there's some real freedom in that, once I give in to it.

You know?


*

My friend Chris is blogging, or if you will, Journaling.

Chris is wonderful, and his writing thrills me and getting the link to his blog was like a birthday present I wasn't expecting (particularly since it isn't my birthday).

Adore him, adore his writing.

Yay.


*
Friday, September 02, 2005
 
Briton Finds Venomous Centipede in House


I read this today, and had to laugh.

This poor guy. Nine inch venomous centipede, and he thinks somehow he's had a close encounter with something really significantly scary.

In Western Samoa, there's two kinds of centipedes.

There's a little red kind, about two inches long max, that moves like lightning and can kill you with a sting, depending on your level of allergy and how much panicking the people around you do before they get you to the hospital.

The other kind of centipede you find in Samoa is big, and brown, and ranges from a paltry eight or nine inches on up to a good foot and a half.

And my friends, when you're a kid only four or so feet tall, a foot and a half of centipede is a lot of damn centipede indeed.

We found one of these monstrous bastards in the laundry hamper one day. Or rather I found one, and alerted my mom and everyone else in a radius of a mile or so with a lot of screaming. My mom, who cut her teeth on third world insects with five inch flying cockroaches in Burma a decade earlier, arrived, and did the first sensible and obvious thing, which was to slam the lid of the hamper back down.

Then she did the next sensible and obvious thing, which was to put the laundry in the washer. With soap.

On HOT.

We sat by the washer, breathless and exhilarated, imagining the centipede, all 20 or so inches, banging around in there with the soap and towels and panties.

Eventually the washer came to a stop. My mother carefully, carefully lifted the lid, and peered inside. There was no evidence of the centipede, so she went and got a pair of tongs from the kitchen and fished around in there a bit. I guessed from the sudden leap backwards and the clatter of the tongs to the floor that she'd found him.

She banged the lid of the washer back down, and punched the start button in a somewhat frantic fashion.

"He's still alive," she said.

Three washes later, the centipede continued to undulate sluggishly, down at the bottom of the bin with the by now very, very clean clothes.

There was nothing to be done but to get Claus Winkler and the gardner. "Bug!" my mother yelled out the back door. They came along by and by, expecting the worst and duly armed with cigarettes, scotch, and a machete.

The gardner removed the still-writhing centipede from the washer with the tongs, while Claus looked on and smoked thoughtfully.

"That's a damned big one," he said, and took a drink of his scotch.

We all paraded out to the back stoop, where the gardner set the centipede down on the cement, and hacked it into twenty or so inch-long pieces with the machete.

The ice in Claus' glass clinked as it melted.

One by one, most of the pieces of centipede crawled off the cement and away.


Put that in a baggie, you silly Briton.
You ain't seen nothing, nothing at all, I'm telling you. Nothing.

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