One year ago today, our son came into the world not alive. After nearly two weeks of wrestling with our insurance company, and standing by as our doctor fought for us with Swedish Hospital in Seattle, who ultimately denied the termination of my pregnancy due to its Catholic affiliation, we spent several days at the University of Washington Medical Center. I heard the word "abortion" more times than I ever care to again, and saw it written in type on documentations with my name on them. I awoke to a hospital bed covered in...
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
For Grandma
I didn't realize how much of my house is an ode to my grandmother until she died.
Today, after writing her obituary and helping my parents bag her clothes and shoes, I walked through the door to find my china cabinet screaming her name - from the two sets of Lenox china I inherited from her and my grandfather, teacups stacked, to the fawn figurine that looks like something she and my grandfather might have had in their living room on Windsor Drive. In the bedroom, very near the bed, is her embroidered stool. On my refrigerator...
Monday, August 25, 2014
Summer's End
Summer's end, and so much undocumented. Astoria in July was, as always, like returning home. We spotted the maintenance man from the Hotel Elliott in the Desdemona Club playing video poker with his girlfriend. We saw, from a distance, the guy we talked to three years ago who had stumbled upon the town as we did, as so many people do, and never left. I sat and read Salinger's Nine Stories at Street 14 Coffee and looked up occasionally to watch the man we called our friend working on his laptop, not remembering who we were,...
Monday, July 14, 2014
Heat
I've been doing very little but complaining about the heat lately, but this morning as I rose and took an ice cold shower, it suddenly occurred to me that many of my favorite moments in life have happened during hot, hot summers, particularly in regards to Elizabeth. I'm positive (and she can vouch) that as these scenes were unfolding in real time all I could do was complain about how hot it was, but as life often goes, I look over my shoulder and they are only perfection. The peaches and pack of Camels we bought at the grocery...
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Untitled
I was born the day Diana married Charles, July 29, 1981. My mother was in the hospital with all the hullabaloo on the televisions, watching the royals and having me.
When Diana died, I was in high school and worked weekends cleaning my father's office building. He was a marriage and family therapist in private practice then. There were magazines stacked in the waiting area with her face on every cover. Diana had the kind of eyes you could look into for days. This must have been the time my obsession with her started, the time...
Monday, June 2, 2014
June
June has come.
My idea of this season of life, of what was supposed to happen, has been scrapped. I was supposed to be enormously huge at Freddy's wedding, I was supposed to be building an Ikea crib and figuring out when Elizabeth could get here to be with me during the birth.
None of that is happening now. Now, I am gallivanting around town drinking at breweries, enjoying the heat that comes with the change in seasons for the first time since leaving California, hosting good friends from out of town and staying up late into...
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Special Delivery
I received a case of baby formula in the mail today. It was more of a sealed box, like something you'd pick up in the grocery store if you had an actual baby to feed, but to me it might as well have been a case. Something containing a variety of formulas for different seasons of the breast feeding process. It was waiting quietly on the step like an intruder, and I took a good look at it, at the name on the label that wasn't even mine (but a version of my name that got botched along the way by whatever baby website was sending...
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