Visions

I have two recurring visions. The first I've had since the beginning of time. This one makes sense since I'm a true pedestrian and I've never had a driver's license. I have the recurring vision of myself walking through a crosswalk and getting run over by the car blowing through the turning lane. Run over is probably not the most accurate way to describe what happens. It's not like a stampede, or the feeling of getting trampled into the ground. It's more like I take one step over the curb and suddenly every part of me is breaking to pieces.

The second I've had for the last two years, since getting married. It isn't always the same. Sometimes, I am reaching for a bottle of shampoo in the shower and my wedding ring slides off, disappearing down the drain. Other times, I am washing dishes at the kitchen sink and my hands get too soapy and I don't even notice my ring is gone until everything has been washed clean. Whatever the vision, my hand always gets caught in the drain. The sink gets smeared with my blood. I tell myself I could never be happy with another ring because it wouldn't be the ring given to me that rainy afternoon when it was too small to fit my finger (since it once belonged to his mother), and instead of waiting for it to get sized, I crammed it over my knuckle until my finger turned purple.

This evening in the grocery store, I was looking for a bottle of red wine. I selected the bottle, and as I was walking back to the cart I remembered the time I had dropped a bottle of wine in the grocery store several months ago, and how I had jumped back because of the glass. I gripped the bottle, refusing to let it slide in my hands, and as I placed it in the shopping cart with the tenderness of one placing a baby in a cradle, the elderly woman behind me somehow lost control of her Merlot and it shattered to pieces on the ground.

Getting older is strange. Some days, I feel overwhelmed by decisions. The longer I live, the more aware I become that I am not really in control of anything. I'm sure this is obvious to the rest of the world, but it's never been obvious to me.

I was in the drugstore the other day, and I became paralyzed by the wall of facial cleansers. I couldn't sort them out. I know I'm supposed to care about anti-aging products these days. I know I'm supposed to use SPF. In the end, my husband found me and kindly pointed to one (most likely at random), and I felt relieved. I didn't have to stand there any longer. I could leave the store and we could finally go to the next thing because the facial cleanser seemed like the right one. I just needed a little push.

• at 9:44 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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On Hospitalization

I had never gotten to the point where my body said there was something wrong, so wrong I needed help, as that night earlier this month when I could hardly sit still or stand up or do anything at all. My husband took me to the ER. It was my first time at the ER, and they took my vitals and drew blood and told me to sit in a chair. The place was packed, but all I remember was an elderly woman in a wheelchair sitting near the sliding doors, begging one of the too-young-looking girls at the front desk to call a cab to come and pick her up and take her back to St. Francis. No, one of the girls said, you need to stay until the doctor looks at your arm. But the woman in the wheelchair said her arm was fine, that a doctor had already looked at it, and she wanted to go home to St. Francis. She sat near the entrance begging for a cab for the entirety of the five hours my husband and I were in the waiting room.

At 10:00 pm, I took off all my clothes and changed into a hospital gown and climbed onto a bed with wheels, a stretcher, whatever. An ultrasound technician wheeled me into her room (an IV had been inserted into my arm after many attempts at finding a vein due to dehydration), and by the time she was done with my tests she had invited me to see Barbra Streisand with her and to find her on facebook. I'm not entirely sure how that came to be, but my husband heard the tail end of our conversation when I got wheeled back to the examining room where he waited. I was on drugs.

When the doctor came, he commented first on my glasses, and then looked at a screen by my head and said, "Wow, you have Pancreatitis. Most people who have Pancreatitis are really sick. You look really good."

This is me pumped full of drugs with an IV stuck in my arm after five hours of dry heaving in the ER bathroom. I was absolutely drenched in cold sweat.

I spent three nights in the hospital. My roommate was an elderly woman named Jean, who ate all kinds of food during the day (my body was still unable to digest food for the majority of that time and the smells of chicken and hearing the words tapioca pudding were too much) and had a slew of visitors, other old ladies and children and grandchildren, who came to sit and talk with her in shifts. Jean was there for shortness of breath, but she seemed to be doing OK. I got up and wheeled my IV behind me every time I had to use the restroom, passing her bed on the other side of the curtain. We said hello on occasion, but most of the time I didn't feel well enough.

I sat in my hospital bed and opened my calendar and canceled every appointment I had that week, every lunch date, everything. I woke up several times each night during the course of my stay to the sound of a nurse asking if I needed more medication, to the feel of a needle drawing more blood, to people shouting in the halls (one man in particular complaining of being discharged before he was ready). I used to feel the need to be completely on at all times and I would worry obsessively if I failed. I wanted to say the funny thing, to wear something surprising, to act appropriately for the occasion, to make everyone like me. Even as I started getting sick, I would pretend I wasn't sick, and instead of just canceling that dinner date and staying home, I would run to the bathroom afterward. I reached a point, however, where it didn't matter if anyone in that hospital saw me naked, if I smelled bad, if Jean and her friends could hear me puking into a basin from the other side of that curtain. I reached a point where it didn't matter that relinquishing control and submitting to something like this was absolutely necessary, I would do it; that the thought of surgery has always scared the shit out of me, but it was going to happen and it was the only way I was going to get better. And it did.

• at 5:44 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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For Elizabeth

I am the same size in pants, shoes, and rings. I told you this last night, this recent discovery of mine, while sitting on the lawn in this heat, and that somehow it makes me feel balanced. You said only I would think of that. 

Balance in my life, this thing that has kept us going for over half our lives, 18 years to be exact, whether you're living in Montana or Florida or France or Mississippi or New Orleans, that started when we were 13 years old and in Mrs. Wiseman's class here in Bellingham, wearing the same shoes. I think about those shoes all the time now, obsess over them, I just mentioned them in your birthday card, and how they were ugly shoes (suede loafers, weren't they?) but we loved them, mine black and yours brown. We both turn 31 this summer, and in two summers will mark 20 years, and not the kind of friendship that other people experience, where they don't talk for years at a time or leave each other and come back, but the kind of friendship that is like your arm is really my arm, my leg is really your leg. Do you remember earlier this summer when we discussed how we will celebrate our Golden Anniversary? 

Last night, we started talking about the passage of time, how I saw your cousin's daughter at a baseball game this summer and she was a kid, in kindergarten or the first grade, and I was genuinely taken aback because I remember a Christmas party at your house, where she was a baby, being held by her mother, maybe two years ago (wasn't it last year?). I never thought we'd be old enough to talk about the passage of time like this. 

We have been given this shared history, remembering all of the people and places with our shared brain, and we now move forward into 31 years, and into anything and everything that comes speeding toward us after that.

• at 11:31 AM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Don't Rain On My Parade

Something happens to me when I listen to Barbra Streisand. I take her music, the really old stuff, and I try and listen very hard and feel it all, every bit of it. What I find funny is the lyrics to many of her songs have so much to do with loving her man forever (no matter what) and the devastation of being the one left behind, and all the while the irony lies within the stories; that the likes of Robert Redford and Omar Sharif couldn't manage to pin her down.

As of late, I feel the weight of forces in my life attempting to pin me down (distinction: the love of my man does the opposite). I am opinionated. I am disgruntled. I don't want to be told how to think or what to do. I don't have the time to be bored.

Thank you, Barbra, for always being there.

• at 4:33 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Brothers and Sisters

I come from a close family. It has always been this way.

My parents left town for the weekend and my husband and I have been watching their dog. Last night my brother and sister-in-law came over for a BBQ (nothing out of the ordinary for us). At one point in the evening, we were sitting in my parents' livingroom discussing food preparation for a camping trip we're scheduled to take next week, when the conversation changed shape. We started talking about having children (not always the most comfortable subject for me, but somehow easier these days) and my brother said something about how he would find it hilarious if Shannon and I were pregnant at the same time. We talked about my parents' new house, the house they are in the process of building, and how we will spend time together there, and how our children will have the priviledge of knowing our parents, and how they will grow up playing with each other (as close as siblings, my brother said). And then I got hit by a sack of bricks with the recognition that my brother and sister are among the people my husband and I will spend the rest of our lives with, and we will share many evenings like this one, where nothing monumental will happen, but we will eat and drink and sit on the floor, and we will live in different houses and there will be babies and children, but our fragile lives will move forward, together, as quick as the days that have passed since our weddings.

• at 3:48 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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For Dreamers

I thought I knew all the tricks in Wes Anderson's book. From explosions of classical music to the like-candy-from-when-you-were-a-child colors, from the placement of wacky props in just the right places that simultaneously feel like a private joke and manage to make each frame a miniature masterpiece, from the child geniuses that speak like no child you've ever met, from the inevitable slew of fragile creatures wearing pajama sets and immaculate bathrobes, uniforms, lots of uniforms, weathered fur coats, preppy plaid sweater vests and pointed collars, little stocking caps too small for their heads and custom-made suits from another time and place; Anderson's world is recognizable to all who love him, not to mention the fact that he can't seem to escape the thematic thread of familial abandonment (absent fathers, domineering mothers, infidelity, divorce, death), and his writing is so good that his signature dialogue is dry as a bone and makes you squirm and laugh and sometimes pee your pants a little.

But this new movie, this Moonrise Kingdom, has a surprising way of getting under your skin.

Here we have all of the signature pieces, including, as my husband noted, each and every frame of film somehow completely perfect and more beautiful than ever, and the product emerges as a more mature and evolved Anderson, unabashedly exploring the adventure that is first love. There is an innocence to his young protagonists that is so charming you sort of want to die, an endearing innocence different from the more worldly characters in his previous films, a concise meditation on youth, and there lies a universal truth at the heart of this film that, as a grownup, you just want to sit there and go back to when you were twelve and had a crush on the boy who lived down the road. Moonrise Kingdom is putty for us dreamers. And if you're willing to go there, you won't want to come back. 

• at 8:46 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Happy Father's Day

I think parenting is an impossible job. Not having children of my own, I can't imagine the responsibility it carries, and in my particular case, the living up to the familial lineage of love that has come before me from the Mullica side and Pries side, and now the Sturgill side and the Campbell side, and the time and sacrifice and patience it requires every day from the very first. It seems the most important key is time. I don't know of a perfect human being in history, but all any kid wants is a parent who wants to be with them. It seems the deepest longing of the human heart is to be known.

I can't think of a time in my life when my father hasn't pursued time with me. Most recently, in these past five or six years, it's been the mutual pursuit of the breakfast date. I feel privileged as an adult to hear my father ask for my opinion, or share with me something profound that he has experienced, or something small, or anything at all, and tell me I am among his friends.

But there were so many other moments, thousands of early moments, where he read to me before I went to sleep, where we danced together in the living room listening to Tower of Power. He taught me how to play card games like Spite and Malice, and board games like Scrabble. He made me fall in love with day trips and Sunday drives, although I could never share his love for eagles and mountains. If I have the tiniest bit of him in me, the way he hated ATM's for the longest time and didn't want to use them because they took away from human interaction, the way he has always been able to both tell a good story and listen to someone else's story (whether it be good or not), the way his time is never his own but instead an extension to others, if any of these small things that make up Randy Pries could ever begin to take root in me, I would hug everyone I know and never be able to contain my gratitude. Sometimes I feel like I want to keep him to myself like a secret, and in other moments I feel guilty to have him so present and invested in my life, like I am hogging his goodness from the rest of world and all of humanity would benefit from him being scattered around. There are days when I just can't believe I know him. Then again, he's always been there. 

• at 11:38 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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