Home Again, Home Again

We took my grandmother to a Mexican restaurant last January to celebrate her 92^nd birthday. An enormous sombrero was placed on her head and our table was suddenly surrounded by a circle of wait staff singing Happy Birthday in Spanish, an indistinguishable birthday dessert topped with a cloud of whipped cream and a candle placed before her. My grandmother has been mostly deaf for as long as I can remember, relying on a pair of hearing aids, and in the midst of all this commotion in her honor, she sat reading one of her birthday cards and didn’t look up once.

She now lives in a place where the aids call her Millie, a nickname she always hated, and I suppose it’s for the best she can’t hear them. Mildred, a California bred mother of three sons who lived in the same house on 2812 Windsor Drive in Alameda with my grandfather for close to fifty years, was the kind of woman who had always been petite, and in the black and white photos that are now framed (almost obsessively) all over my house, wore cardigan sweaters and button up suits and crisp collars, and had broken her nose one evening after leaving a restaurant, taking a spill while holding hands and skipping down the sidewalk with me when I was four.

My grandparents had always been older, even when my brother and I were quite small. Our family moved up to Bellingham in 1991, and my grandparents came to visit us often during those initial years. I can’t remember if we were still living in California or if we had moved to Washington when my grandparents stayed with us and our Cocker Spaniel, Midge, was found chewing one of my grandmother’s hearing aids under the bed. It was a visit down to California, when I tried on one of my grandmother’s rings and couldn’t get it back over my knuckle, my Uncle Don attempting to slide it off with a stick of butter, and my father eventually had to take me to a jeweler to saw the thing apart. I remember sitting with her in department store fitting rooms, my brother and I small kids amidst piles of clothing and Grandma in her undies. I remember the Nutcracker Ballet in San Francisco and how I had complained of the crashing cymbals being too loud. The BART train, and how she had explained to me that part of the tunnel ran under the Estuary. My grandfather’s coffee mug that had looked like a blue jean pocket with his name “Bob” stitched on it. When I went to visit my grandmother recently, I asked her if she remembered that mug, and told her we had both married men named Robert, and she looked at me and said “your hair is so black.”

She moved to Bellingham several months ago after living in California all her life, after doing Meals on Wheels every week with her sister, Wilda, after years of telling us all she wanted was for everyone to be together again. When she first moved, the family had gathered in her room and she had interrupted someone to say, “Anne’s skin hasn’t seen the light of day.” We told her that same day I was pregnant, that her first great-grandchild would be born in June.

These days, she talks about “Tommy being in an accident,” while my Uncle Tom is at home in California doing just fine, and about how she had a hard time finding a parking spot at 2812, and I keep thinking about how my Grandpa Bob used to say “home again, home again, jiggity jig” every time he pulled that station wagon into their driveway, and how I now sit in my grandmother’s room and watch the aids, two girls much younger than me, as they strap something around her back and lift her from her wheelchair by a machine I’ve never seen before, wheeling her into the other room in order to lower her down to use the toilet, and how I’m no longer pregnant because four months in my baby didn’t make it, we recently received his ashes in a cardboard box in the mail, and that I just want to return to 2812 with her and Grandpa Bob, on that autumn day when we collected the reddest leaves in a single plastic bag.

• at 10:26 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Ode to Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman died two days after my pregnancy was terminated. It was Super Bowl Sunday. I was standing in the bathroom, still high on pain medication from my operation, and my husband had opened the laptop in the living room to find the news of his death announced to the world, amidst all this excitement about football and food. My husband said some kind of “oh no” that alerted me to the fact that something was wrong and I had no patience to find out what it was, seeing as I had just weeks before sat in an ultrasound room, wherein the technician left us and returned with a doctor, just as we had confirmed that our son’s name would be Clark, just as we started talking about camping and Star Wars and all of the things we would teach him, wherein the doctor handed me a box of Kleenex and said, “Oh God, this is so hard” and started crying before she could even spit out the news. I had the feeling that nothing could surprise me since the worst had already happened, but if something was wrong I needed to know and I needed to know immediately.

I sat on the sofa and Robert held me as I sobbed. I was wearing a dark purple dress with gold buttons, a maternity dress that had reminded me of something Princess Diana might have worn in the 80’s. I had purchased it at the Salvation Army anticipating a growing baby, and although the baby was gone, I had worn it that morning to church. Although it sounds narcissistic for me to say it out loud, somehow losing my child and my favorite actor within days of each other felt like a personal attack, a cruel joke, that the universe was out to get me, and although I’d known many who claimed to love Philip Seymour Hoffman, I didn’t believe anyone could possibly love him like I did.

I was a late bloomer, and it took me a long time before I really started appreciating good film. All of my celebrity crushes were the typical pretty boys like Chris O’Donnell (when he married Caroline Fentress in 1997, I was a sophomore in high school and I remember reading about it in a newspaper at an airport in California and crying because my chances were over). I came from that special time in the 1990’s when Jared Leto’s blue, blue eyes first appeared on My So Called Life and Leonardo DiCaprio’s face was posted on the bedroom wall of every girl I knew. It was later, after college, after living in Seattle, when I started writing seriously and looking to everything around me, that I really allowed myself to enter completely into a film and let it actually break my heart. It was around this time when I watched all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, and started seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman everywhere. I was living in Idaho when the movie Doubt was released in theaters, and went to see it with a good friend of mine whose voice actually sounds like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s, which was one of the reasons I wanted to befriend him in the first place. I was in a poetry workshop with him and I knew nothing about poetry, but my heart stopped when I first heard him read a poem because I felt like I already knew him. When Philip Seymour Hoffman spoke onscreen, it was always a freezing of time and space moment for me. There was something beautiful and complicated about him, something I felt I understood in my soul, and although it’s ridiculous to feel like we know celebrities on a personal level, and impossible to imagine they could know us, I always found myself waiting with bated breath for his next film to come and save me.

I dreaded that moment at the Academy Awards (the show aired exactly one month after Philip Seymour Hoffman's death) where they pay homage to celebrities lost. As the faces scanned slow and painful on the screen, his was the final one, as I knew it would be. There was also a tribute to Judy Garland and The Wizard of Oz, and while cherished scenes from the movie and that legendary yellow brick road rolled, and that perfect rose of a nose of the young Judy Garland appeared, I started crying and couldn’t stop, and I didn’t know why until the next morning when my mother and I met for coffee, and she told me she had cried while watching the Judy Garland tribute because during our time in Seattle for my hospital visits, she had heard Somewhere Over the Rainbow playing in a drugstore and it had reminded her of Clark. It will forevermore be the song that reminds me of the baby I lost, and of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and as a human on this earth I know the possibilities of the afterlife are infinite and there is no way for my mind to comprehend what may or may not be, but it gives me some peace to imagine they’ve somehow met up there, and I just have to wait a little bit longer.

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow why oh why can’t I?

• at 5:37 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Notes September-January

In this same notebook, I have written notes from our trip to Astoria last September: "Stephen Weber arrives and takes an oyster shooter, I beat both men at two games of bowling at Lower Columbia Bowl." The Astoria trip was a getaway of our favorite kind, and one of the best trips we'd taken in a long time. About a month after returning from that trip, we found out we were expecting a baby. We had gone to the grocery store one day and I'd thrown a pregnancy test in the cart. It was a Fred Meyer and Robert had bought a belt in the men's clothing section. When we returned home, the buckle broke for him immediately, and I went to the bathroom to grab the receipt from the wastepaper basket. I took the pregnancy test, and the result was positive. I came out and said, "I'm sorry about your belt, but the good news is we're having a kid." There is a blank page in my notebook after my account from the Astoria trip, then, as if no time had passed, a note from January: "I thought my baby would be an athlete. I won two games of bowling last September in Astoria, and I played my best game of mini golf to date on my brother's birthday last December across the Canadian border." I wrote those notes days after finding out my baby wasn't going to live.

The first time I heard his heartbeat, I knew he'd be a soldier. It was found immediately, loud and persistent, and the look on the doctor's face was the look of satisfaction, of pride, that everything was good and strong, as it should be. The first ultrasound at 10 weeks showed arms and legs swimming, waving, and we laughed because here we had quite the character; our baby was already hamming it up for the camera. I remember asking the tech at that time if she could see the right amount of arms and legs, if it was a human, if everything looked as it should on the screen, and of course it did. This was first time mother stuff, the jitters of someone who hoped her body was home enough for a child to live and grow.

My father has this ongoing family joke about me that has to do with my ability to escape tragedy. When I was living in Idaho and taking the greyhound bus back and forth over the pass several times a year, every time there was a setback due to weather, or an accident reported on the road, I was always on the bus that had just managed to squeak by. We were living in the San Francisco Bay Area during the time of the big earthquake in 1989, and while everyone else in my family had felt it, I happened to be riding in the back of a carpool minivan coming home from piano lessons, and I hadn't even known it had happened. After the news about my baby came, my best friend since the age of thirteen said to me, crying over the telephone, that she was sorry she hadn't prayed every day for my baby's health, but that it was me, it was my baby and there was no question in her mind that of course he was going to be healthy.

And suddenly you're speaking with a social worker in Seattle and she's asking you what you'd like done with your son's remains, and she's asking if he has a name, and you have paperwork you need to fill out. Suddenly you're filling out paperwork and you're slightly drugged for your nerves, and you see this line that absolutely stuns you, and you are even confused for a moment because you can't believe what you are doing, and it's asking for your relation to the baby, and you forget for a moment what that is, because you always wondered if you even had the instinct in you, and now you know you do because you couldn't save him, and all you can do is look up at the ceiling in that small enclosed room and close your eyes for a second before writing, for the very first time, "Mother."

• at 8:22 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 1 comments

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The Pillow

We had some good friends from graduate school come and visit a couple of weeks ago. In our tiny house, we have a spare bedroom that's practically connected to our own room and there's a futon in it for guests to sleep on. My parents recently gave us the futon, and before that our guests slept on the floor in sleeping bags because we're too poor to buy a futon ourselves. When our friends left to drive back to Spokane, they folded the sheets and pillowcases and put the futon back to its original shape. I washed the sheets, but left the pillow there with its case and I haven't been able to move it. It's our one extra pillow and it's the most uncomfortable pillow in the world. We tell our guests to bring their own pillows, but we leave that one there for them because it looks like something a little extra. That pillow has stayed put for two weeks.

It has something to do with the fact that our friends are moving to China and I am attached to them. The way it plays out in my mind is they move to China to teach for a year or ten months or however long they're bound, and then they move to Thailand or somewhere equally as unobtainable to me and forgo coming back to the U.S. because they will have gotten rid of most of their things. It has something to do with the fact that my family moved from Northern California to Washington when I was ten years old and my mother tells stories of how my grandparents would come to visit for a week and the night before they'd leave to go home I would cry and cry because it was just too sad.

I had a conversation with my sister-in-law recently and she hit the nail on the head. She was talking about how she and my brother are people of the future, and how they are always planning their next vacation and the next step in their lives. They are thinking ahead to when they will buy a house, when they will have a kid. They map things out for themselves and I've noticed they rarely look back. There is something admirable about their forward sense of motion, especially since life has a way of barreling into the days ahead and there's nothing we can do about it.

I have always been a person of the past. I have a floral tin in one of my dresser drawers with a piece of masking tape on it baring my grandmother's handwriting that says "decorations small tree." I open the drawer and look at it when I am missing her. It's hard for me to throw away cards and letters. This thing between me and the past has a lot to do with the second-hand clothing I wear, the music I listen to, and the antiques that pile in my house. I look at the things I own and replay the stories of when I bought them, who I was with, which vacation we were on. I hunt consignment shops for things that have been owned by people before. Things that are made now don't seem to compare to things that were made then. I am intrigued by old diners that have passed hands and the architecture of buildings that have been standing for a long time, and I'm sure all of this has something to do with the way I sobbed when my parents sold the house I grew up in, and how I still can't go to that side of town. It has something to do with the fact that it's been four years since graduate school, and Idaho has remained a major part of me. I haven't since experienced the kind of wind that hits your face like an Idaho October, the early snows, the way the trees grew close together in East City Park, the walk that covered those few blocks from my apartment to Robert's when we first started spending time together, and I think often about that first hot summer when my parents drove me over the mountains with all of my things and Elizabeth came and stayed with me for a week to help me get settled. We slept in my daybed from childhood which pulled into a trundle bed, and read Lucy Grealy to each other at night before falling asleep. I sold that bed for twenty bucks before moving back to Bellingham. I am not naive enough to expect things to stay the same, I've lived too long for that, but I certainly wouldn't mind turning back for one last look.

• at 12:34 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Retiree Day

Robert Campbell and I talk a lot about retirement. It's something that happens when you get married: you know for certain you'll retire together. And when you marry someone obsessed with Airstreams, dive bars, and the notion of driving across the country nice and slow and documenting the entire thing, you know you've hit the jackpot.

I've recently changed my work schedule to be on "restaurant time" (a miracle for an office job), and we've thought a good deal about our Mondays off, and how we'd like to spend them as if we were retirees. I've met people who say that work is the ultimate, and that they love it and live for it and wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they weren't at the office. Since we talk so much about retirement and my heart is elsewhere, I will never be able to relate to that mindset.

We've got other things to do.

We're going to sit at the park we've found where airplanes fly overhead as they take off from the airport, and I'm going to finish my Barbra Streisand biography and drink coffee in the mornings on the floral sofa in the living room (of which we stuffed in our minivan a few years back to take across the ferry after purchasing it from an old Bed & Breakfast in Port Townsend). I'm going to plan our Astoria trip and gather blueberries from the blueberry bush. I'm going to actually work on my writing (and stop feeling sorry for myself and using the excuse and that I can't write because I sit in front of a computer all day at work), find a ribbon for my typewriter, ride my bicycle on the road along with traffic (without fearing I'll fall over), write letters to the people I love and watch films while everyone else is at work, because going to the movies on a weekday afternoon is just about the most decadent thing I can think of.

• at 11:21 AM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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Goodbye, 916 36th Street

Saying goodbye to a house must happen in pieces. I said goodbye to my childhood bedroom when I moved out for college and my little brother painted over the pink walls. He moved into my old bedroom for a short time before moving into the room off the back of the garage for a much longer time, and then both upstairs bedrooms became guest rooms. After he moved out, three of the four rooms were left empty. Two became guest rooms and one my mother's quilting room. So if I started saying goodbye to my childhood home in the year 2000 when I first moved out, tell me why I broke down when my mother stripped the faded wallpaper from the walls in the bathroom across the hall from my old bedroom, the bathroom my brother and I shared all those years, a good five years after I had already left?

The house now belongs to someone else and according to my mother, they are in love with it. The new owners are apparently my age with two young children (apparently people my age have two young children), which means my parents are packing up the house they've lived in for twenty-three years this week. I am still trying to figure out what my problem is, since most of the furniture has changed, the carpets are all new, my dad has put new knobs on cupboards and new blinds on windows, my parents have a different dog now, drive different vehicles, and wedding photos hang on the walls from my wedding, my brother's wedding.

There are no babies yet, but the babies will never see this house. The babies will only know the new house. And certain things about this house haven't changed. The bush in the backyard (I can't forget to ask my mother what kind of bush) will continue to change color to an orange that all but sets it on fire come autumn and we will miss it this year, though my mother admitted to me several months ago that when they started building the new house and she knew it would be the last time she'd see it change, she took a photograph of the bush turned orange so she would never forget what it looked like. The tiny tree my grandfather gave our family shortly after our move to Bellingham in 1991 is still planted in our front yard, right there beneath the window of the office where my mother sits to do her work, but it has since grown to be a much bigger tree, and my grandfather has since passed away, gone more than ten years now. Will anyone know the significance of that tree? That tree, which was the small token from my grandparents, who stayed in California where we lived as small children, and came to visit several times a year until they became too old to travel; my grandparents who lived in their home for fifty years until my grandfather passed away and my grandmother could no longer live there on her own. That house in California with the orange trees in the backyard.

2812 Windsor Drive is the address I'd spout off right now if you were to ask me where my grandmother lives (not the Elder's Inn where she actually lives, never), and I am positive 916 36th Street will be the address I tell you five years from now if you were to ask where to find my parents, because that's the sort of person I am and that's the sort of person I'll always be, because I have known about this move for a long time and I was positive I said goodbye months ago when the process began, when I first saw the plot of land by the lake, when our family gathered there on Christmas to see the progress and it was raining so we were wearing boots and scarves and the house was still bare bones and freezing as my parents walked us, their grown kids with houses of our own, through the beginnings of rooms barely held together by boards of wood, describing to us in detail what would be where, showing us all the spaces for closets and fireplaces and where the stained glass window would go, and at some point during all of this I started crying and I squeezed my mother's hand because, as always, I could see all of it at once.

• at 9:41 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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916 36th Street

I entered a new stage of saying goodbye to my childhood home today: the life passing before my eyes stage. As I become increasingly aware that the house is actually in the process of being sold, different things have happened that have surprised me, and today it was like my grandmother died all over again (because she had inhabited the rooms, because she always came in through the garage and put her leather purse and her keys on top of the washing machine, because she sat in the living room in the chair with the straight back because it was most comfortable to her). The holiday meals came rushing back, years and years of them, with all of us around the dining room table which was only made bigger with the leaves my father put in for special occasions, right there in front of the china hutch lined with pieces from my grandmother and my great-grandmother on my father's side, and other pieces I had purchased for my mother while attending graduate school in Idaho. Every time I returned home from any place I have ever lived, it was always up that same hill, into the same driveway, through the same garage door (in the immaculate garage which was a Pries family trademark and a joint effort from both of my parents), and we have always had a dog, different dogs (mostly Cocker Spaniels), but there was always a dog there at my feet, and water glasses in the cabinet above the dishwasher so I could pour myself a drink. Now I think about the key on my key ring, the key to home, and how it won't be long until it no longer fits in the door.

I once heard it said that the best part of a vacation is planning it, and that the vacation itself is never actually as good as you think it's going to be, but I have never been able to live my life that way. The planning is hard, the weeks leading up, the saving of the money, the wondering how it will go. I just want to get through the preliminary stuff and be there on the vacation. I want every vacation to be the best vacation ever. I have always wanted to make everything really good, and my greatest anxiety comes from worrying I'm not appreciating whatever it is enough, that I'm letting something go. I think about everything that happens afterward. I can never stop thinking about any of it. I lived years of my life in that house, I returned to it, I moved away from it again. I experienced moments in its rooms that I will never forget (because today Elizabeth reminded me I have an amazing memory), and all that really matters is I can say I experienced everything fully and it never once disappointed.

• at 10:35 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
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