January 31

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 blood, and was transferred to a hotel bed to sleep for the rest of the day. The next morning we were driving back to Bellingham, and the morning after that was The Superbowl and my Mother's 60th birthday, and the day the world found out that Philip Seymour Hoffman was dead.

The days that followed were full of medication and walks outdoors with my father and hibernation. My milk had come in, and the only relief I found was in cold cabbage leaves on my skin. I took pills and drank wine, and our house was covered in vases full of flowers from people I didn't have the energy to thank. I returned to work shortly thereafter, where it seemed women everywhere were finding out they were pregnant. I was mortified by the awareness that people were uncomfortable around me, that they were looking at me as the girl whose baby had died.

We named our son Clark. When his due date came around in June, we had a small ceremony for him in my parents' backyard and buried his ashes beside a newly planted tree. My mother placed a small clay bird over the place he laid. My father shared some eloquent words, none of which I remember. Someone gave my parents a blue knit diaper cover fit for a baby born at 20 weeks.
I have never been able to look at it.

In October, I went on a writing retreat with a good friend of mine to Arch Cape, Oregon. My grandmother had just passed away, and I wanted to compile some of the essays I'd started over the past year into a manuscript about loss. I was in the midst of writing about some of the darkest days I'd had after losing Clark, when I peed on a stick in a single-stall bathroom in a tavern and found out I was pregnant. My friend and I shared an order of chili cheese fries and a slice of chocolate peanut butter pie, and I borrowed her phone to call Robert. I tried to write during the days that followed about what it felt like to be pregnant again after losing a baby, and then I came home and haven't written a word since.

We have returned to the same doctor, and taken early tests and we have been cautious. We found out early that we're expecting a daughter, and we found out she is developing a functioning brain and has a skull that is covering her entire head. These are all good things, and we are grateful each day for the miracle of growth and the fact that all signs point to health. We will love her wholeheartedly and love every moment we get to share with her on this earth. But the fact that I am pregnant does not mean I am fine, nor does it mean that everything that happened before is behind me. It will always be with me, and the name Clark will not be foreign to our daughter, and his imprint will never leave its mark on my broken heart.

• at 3:17 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

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 are black and white photos of my grandparents and my uncles, almost obsessively everywhere. On a shelf in the living room, a gold framed photo of my grandmother holding my father as a baby. By the front door, a framed set of two photos on the wall of my grandparents from the day they got engaged, presumably 1952. I had come across the images as slides while digging through old photo albums at one point in time, and when I lived in Seattle I had taken them to a shop, turned them into prints, and have carted them with me ever since.

My grandmother was a difficult woman to communicate with. She had lost her hearing pretty badly several years ago and used hearing aids, but it was difficult communicating over the telephone when she lived in California. I would call her each year on her birthday. I would write her letters, but now I wish I had written her more. I will never forget calling her on the morning of my wedding, telling her how much I loved her and how my most vivid memory of her and my grandfather had been collecting leaves on the sidewalk on Windsor Drive. I don't know why I decided to thank her for that memory on that particular day, but I did. And I cried, and she could hear me.

When we moved to Washington in 1991, I can remember waving goodbye to my grandparents from the inside of the moving truck. There were many visits, many day trips, restaurants, news on all the ladies my grandmother called "The Club Girls." My grandmother knew how to wear red lipstick. In most photographs, she is not smiling. There was something intimidating about her, yet she, like me, kept up with all the people in her life and forged friendships that lasted for what seemed like multiple lifetimes. There was fierce loyalty. There was love and pride for her family. When I look around my house now, I see her everywhere. There is no possibility that my love for antiques could have come from anywhere but years of shopping with my grandparents, in the longing I have for that house on Windsor Drive. Nothing made my grandmother happier than having everyone together at the house. No celebration was too much. Perhaps I've inherited that from her as well.

You should have seen the look on her face when you were born, my mother said. Last week, when I went to visit my grandmother, her eyes were closed. She was sleeping and appeared to be dreaming. I could see her eyes shift beneath the lids. I held her hand and she would not wake up. I didn't know it then, but she had already suffered a stroke and I would not see her eyes open again. I've got to believe that although she loved her children and grandchildren more than anything else on earth, the look on her face this morning while surveying her eternal home must have knocked it out of the park.

• at 5:40 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

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, wearing the same tweed blazer.

Our favorite bartender from the Voodoo Room told us she was moving to Seattle and it was her last week, and I can't describe what it meant for us to get there in time to see her and say goodbye. On my birthday, we went to Mary Todd's Workers Bar for breakfast. I ordered an egg sandwich with ham and Robert drank a beer with breakfast for the first time since he was twenty-something in Arizona. The bartender was a bear of a man named Bjorn, and he was remarkably soft-spoken and kind. A drunk fisherman was sitting at the bar and I talked with him about my problem with seasickness. There was a jukebox in the corner and I played The Beatles Birthday song for myself. When we drove away at the end of the week, past Annie's Tavern where we went with Stephen Weber the year before, past Coffee Girl and the old pier, past the gas station where we stopped on our way home from our honeymoon and I made meat and cheese sandwiches from crackers in the little cooler in the backseat of our rental car, I cried.

Autumn has always felt more like the New Year. Last week, I saw the first hint of tiny red leaves on the sidewalk downtown, Robert has started his new job, and we will soon go to Port Townsend to celebrate our wedding anniversary. In a few days, a friend from Idaho who worked with me at Third Street Market, the boy who will forevermore still be in high school, stocking beer in the afternoons and telling me his girl problems, will get married. The day after that, I will see The Beach Boys at the Silver Reef Casino with my parents, and in October, I will return to the coast with a friend of mine for a week-long writing retreat so I can properly document the past several months of my life. I will look ahead and not behind, I will not think about how old my son would be, or wonder what the two of us would be doing today at a park instead of me sitting here with my coffee mug by the window writing about the things I've lost.

• at 12:07 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

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 store that first summer in Idaho. Reading Lucy Grealy to each other at night in the trundle bed. Sharing a fitting room at the antique mall and trying on every piece of clothing we could find. These are the only things I remember about that August.

And then my trip to Oxford, Mississippi to visit Elizabeth at school. I was afraid of flying, but determined I'd get to her. What I didn't realize then (and how can we, in the moment?) was that my solo Amtrak trip from Spokane, Washington to Memphis, Tennessee would be one of the most blessed experiences of my life. When I got there it was March, but I had never experienced such humidity. The first day, we walked from her house to the Square, and she told me it was okay if somebody pulled over and picked us up, not to worry because everybody was friendly and it wouldn't be like hitchhiking at all. We were wearing embroidered tops and mini skirts.

That week in Oxford, I bought Barry Hannah lunch before I even knew who Barry Hannah was. 

We went to Graceland. We went to a place called "Graceland Too," which was a slightly sketchier version run by a crazy old man who followed us from room to room. We went to Holly Springs, and I marveled at the trees. We found a rope swing. We took photographs of ourselves standing in front of storybook mansions with white columns, we tried on fancy dresses at boutiques and pretended we'd come back for them. We went dancing in Clarksdale at the bar Morgan Freeman owns. We rode in the back of a convertible and screamed. 

There is a chance I will look back at this summer too, and forget all about the heat. In fact, I am certain I will. I have been complaining to Elizabeth over the phone about it, and looking ahead to an Astoria trip at the end of the month to escape it. There is a chance all I will remember about this summer is sitting at the park with Robert during this season of our lives together, when we are still young, picking roses and blueberries from the bushes outside our house, playing Scrabble on picnic tables and drinking coffee and driving around town hitting up the used bookstores in the minivan we bought for three-hundred and fifty dollars.

• at 12:14 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

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 around her death, because that's when we want everyone most, that's when people become more than just people. To me, she looked like my mother and my mother always had that same kind of grace, and that must have been another thing that mattered.

My mother recently took me on a weekend trip to La Conner and Snohomish to go shopping and to get away. We ate fish at a pub. We stayed in a house on a bluff that was shaped like the bow of a ship. She brought a picnic basket in the car with scones and strawberries and coffee and cream and orange juice (she said she remembered I always liked orange juice). We walked barefoot and I noticed how our feet look exactly the same. We slept in, and sat out on the balcony in the morning and ate and drank and watched everyone below. We saw a couple with a West Highland White terrier, the kind my Grams always had. My Grams, my mother's mother, always had a dog. I'd known her to live alone ever since I was born, ever since her divorce.While we were shopping in La Conner at a thrift store, I found a string of knotted pearls on a mannequin that looked like the one my Grams always used to wear, and I bought it for two dollars. My mother said she had the original, and that it was stained with makeup that she will never be able to wash clean.

My mother took me to see Dionne Warwick perform at a casino in Anacortes a couple of years ago. Dionne Warwick talked about Sammy Davis, Jr. like he was just another guy to be talked about, and my mother and I both cried when she sang Alfie. I was disappointed to learn much later, while reading Burt Bacharach's autobiography, that Dionne Warwick didn't sing the original version, but it was sung by a woman I had never heard of named Cilla Black. I always thought it was Dionne, only Dionne. I was the youngest person at that casino, fully aware of the legend, fully aware that they just don't make them like that anymore, wearing a big fur coat and singing along to all the songs just like everybody else.

All the while, the legends of my generation seem to be Will and Kate and that mischievous little Harry. I don't remember where I was when the royal wedding part two took place, probably fast asleep in bed. I don't understand what's happening with all the little miniature hats with feathers and bows cocked to the side on every royal family member's head, or what Kate has to offer in the spellbinding department. She doesn't have the kind of eyes you can look into for days, is what I'm saying.

My mother and I talk often about the places we'll go, about how one day we'll end up on the streets of New York together even though I hate flying, because it just seems inevitable that we will. Every place we travel together feels like an adventure. In La Conner, we saw a tugboat coming toward us, slowly chugging along the water, and she started singing Don't Rain on My Parade, which made me laugh because she sang it kooky like Barbra, but also made me feel it seemed like something of my own theme song. This past year, I was just beginning all of it, flushed in early pregnancy, making jokes about eating for two at Thanksgiving dinner, soaring well into the second trimester, to suddenly being told by a doctor, by several doctors, that my baby was without a significant part of skull and brain, to wearing a purple maternity dress with shoulder pads that I had bought at the Salvation Army (while laughing it was "so Diana") as I stretched my hand out to take Communion at church, just two days after waking from the operation.

My mother and I were at the froufrou University Village shopping center in Seattle the night before the scheduled termination of my pregnancy. There were others with us, we had just eaten dinner. I had worn makeup for the first time in weeks. It almost felt like a normal night. We walked and we shopped. My mother bought me a black makeup bag, I'm not sure why I wanted a new makeup bag, and sometime after my water broke. I kept walking, moving forward, looking at all the beautiful racks of clothing until everything was wet through and through. I whispered calmly that we had to go back to the hotel, and she was the only one who existed. I have never been closer to my mother than in that hotel bathroom, when I took off my socks and shoes and everything else and it was all just a pile of wet clothes on the floor, because I suddenly felt like I was dying and everything was coming out of my body, not knowing whether it was water or blood.

• at 9:54 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 1 comments

Read More

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 the night giggling like a child. Now, I am reading a fat Salinger biography and eating baked potatoes, listening incessantly to David Bowie, and back to being bad at bowling (I was only any good when I was pregnant). I am cutting off all my hair and feeling better than I have all year. I thought I'd be a wreck about now.

This is what I have learned about myself: I am obsessively appropriate. Thank-you cards, etiquette, bringing flowers to dinner, observing holidays, celebrating when celebrations are called for, surrounding others when they need a friend. This is how I live my life. But today, we sat and looked online at different urns for our baby's ashes. I did this without feeling anything. I did this as if I was looking online at Amazon to order a new book, or Urban Outfitters to find a birthday gift for Robert. We found one. We checked it off the list. And how do you appropriately send an email to your parents and your brother and sister-in-law, asking them to gather on the baby's due date to bury the ashes by the new tree in your parents' yard? I sat and typed the email to my family, and I added additional information about upcoming events. I added that we've planned our Astoria trip for the end of July and how about we all gather to celebrate my birthday before we leave? I composed an email where I invited my family to the burial of my baby and to attend my birthday party in practically the same breath. Please join us. Just another event in our lives. No biggie. And how can I be thinking of gallivanting and my birthday dinner in light of the other thing we have to face? And am I betraying him by not taking this whole thing more seriously? Am I betraying him by not crying or talking about what's actually happening, by sitting here and simply checking him off the list?

The answer is, I can't do it just yet. I have to think about the trip my mother and I will take next weekend to go antiquing, I have to think about my sister-in-law's graduation party, and about Father's Day, and about the birthdays of loved ones that will arrive before the due date. I have to think about work, and I have to go on walks and be outside and read my fat Salinger biography just a little bit longer.

• at 8:26 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 1 comments

Read More

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 it), and tossed it in the trashcan.

When you lose your baby, you need to remember all the people you told you were pregnant. You need to get rid of things like date books (I had written every week along the way in mine, including important milestones. In case you were wondering, I'd be at week 33 right now), all the books around the house that have photos and illustrations of the pregnant body (it turns out my baby didn't look like the babies in those anyway), and cards of congratulations get mixed with the cards of sympathy when you pile them all in the drawer of your kitchen hutch. In my notebook, there is an entry that reads: "Hid baby books, picture of first ultrasound on the refrigerator, the notebooks on the bedside table that contained letters I'd written to him." In my junk email folder, I have ample correspondence from BabyCenter (whose most recent email reads: "You're in the home stretch!"), Mothers Lounge LLC, Destination Maternity ("Happy Mother's Day! Promo code for a Free Nursing Cover!"), Motherhood, and Huggies Brand. I was getting email from all of the above, and I thought we had taken every action to stop anything baby-related from filtering through, but apparently someone didn't get the memo in the baby formula department.

I'm going to be brutally honest here. All is not well. I was feeling poorly a few months back, and a pelvic exam from the doctor at the end of February resulted in "everything looks fine, you have the stomach flu." No, I did not have the stomach flu then, and I do not have the stomach flu now, and I am still experiencing the cyclical physical reminder that yes, this happened to me (in case I had somehow forgotten), and it is apparently something I have to muscle through, like everything else. Today is one of those days where I have stayed home for this very reason, waiting to hear back from my doctor (feeling like I am somehow bothering her, this needy girl who can't just get on with it, because didn't this happen months ago? Shouldn't I be better by now?), listening to Billie Holiday, and receiving baby formula in the mail.

I have found something else in my notebook that I just can't shake. It makes me feel like grief has messed with my mind, and left me grasping. This, from March 8th: "At work, I reach for a box of old forgotten granola bars, and all I've got is: 'The last time you ate one of those, your baby was still okay.' "

When I was pregnant, I had two dreams about my baby. The doctor asked at one point if I had any inkling about gender, and by that point I had already had two dreams (the only dreams I would have during the pregnancy). In both, he was a boy. In neither, he was a baby. He was a toddler or maybe a bit older, it wasn't entirely clear, and he wasn't entirely in my reach. I was never holding him or feeding him or doing the things mothers do with their children. It was almost as if he wasn't mine at all, more like I was watching him from some distant shore, like a mother watching from across a soccer field or peeking from behind a curtain at a ballet recital. And in my dreams I had nothing to worry about, he was well cared for, strong, a cherub, pale skin, pale hair, looked like Robert not like me, and perfectly whole.

• at 4:18 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 2 comments

Read More

Untitled

And poor C. quotes to me, ‘Do not mourn like those that have no hope.’ It astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Something happened yesterday that set me off again. It doesn’t really matter what it was, only that I have been made aware, once again, that in a matter of minutes and with little warning, I can be catapulted into a tailspin of the old aching, with all the old symptoms. Early on, it happened in the J.C. Penney when we were trying to find the men’s section to buy jeans for Robert and I turned the corner, mid-sentence, to run smack into a rack of little boy suits.

It’s like a good whack to the head. The best example I can think of is when Billy Crystal is out shopping with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally and they run into his ex (“6 years later, you find yourself singing Surrey with a Fringe on Top in front of Ira!”).

Yesterday, while in this state, Robert and I were shopping at the grocery store. It’s always the most mundane places. Robert sent me to get a head of lettuce and he walked away with the cart, and I picked one, then went on to find nail polish, then a bottle of wine, and suddenly I couldn’t find him and I was rushing the aisles searching. All the old feelings came back, the fear of being alone, the fear of being left.

I have entered into this way of living where I need flowers and chocolates in the house, and I only drink evian. I don’t know how long this will last, but for now instead of feeling badly about it (when there are poor people who have no water, why must I demand evian?), I’m trying to just let myself be. If any of the flowers begin to die, they have to be removed immediately. I’m constantly watching, constantly tending to them. I’m picky about the music I listen to, and it seems to have more importance, more weight? I’m concerned about cleanliness. My OCD seems to be at its peak.

Everyone keeps saying, “You’ll have another one.” But what about this one? What about this one that I carried for four months and knew intimately, even more intimately than my husband knew him, as my body started to grow? If you were sitting beside your healthy child and someone said to you, “If you’d lost this one, you could have tried again and gotten another,” how would that make you feel? Would you have loved the other child any less? Of course not. But you never would have seen this child grow into the person you see now, the person you can’t imagine your life without. And heaven forbid, if you were put into the position where you had to make the decision to stop the heartbeat of that child? Could you imagine yourself sitting in a dark room where a needle is slowly sunk into your belly and there is only silence because two technicians are trying to locate the place in which to insert the poison?

I keep thinking about the video I watched of Barbra Streisand singing “Happy Days are Here Again,” and the entire time you can just see all the emotion on her face and she’s crying, and you don’t really believe her. I feel like that’s me, singing “Happy Days are Here Again,” but now I have this story, this thing I’m lugging around, and have to release it every day, or I have to figure out how to live with it, and I’m still trying to figure out which.

• at 11:56 AM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 2 comments

Read More

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
• 1 comments

Read More

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
• 1 comments

Read More

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

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More

Silver Linings is the Real Deal

If you have any love in you heart for Robert De Niro, this is a no-brainer. May I first say (because it's important) that he wears red checkered pants and track jackets and little cardigan sweaters and striped pajamas, and he is hilarious and heartbreaking and the rawest I've seen him in years. I'll also add that this ain't no Meet the Parents, but there are moments you'll be chuckling because he is just so good in that Dad role (and countless moments when you don't know whether to laugh or cry). Also, it's rare to find yourself watching an up-and-coming (yet already somehow beyond-her-years-accomplished) actress give Robert De Niro's character the what's what in such a way that the beloved veteran stands speechless. Jennifer Lawrence absolutely grabbed my balls. And I believe she will grab your balls too, because she absolutely nails it. She's wounded and a bit dangerous and you're afraid of her, but you want to hug her at the same time.

Bradley Cooper was my biggest concern, and the reason why I almost didn't watch the movie at all (I know I'm not alone in this). But I will tell you a miracle happened, and somehow, without my consent, he had me believing him at one of the earliest scenes of the movie, where he reads the entirety of A Farewell to Arms in one sitting and proceeds to go on a rampage (to his parents in the middle of the night) about Ernest Hemingway and unhappy endings. I honestly can't imagine anyone else playing his role (I'm serious), and I will admit here to everyone who reads this that he completely won me over big time. All of the supporting characters are charming (even a little Julia Stiles), and the movie screams the question of what it means to be "normal," how we're all suffering because we're all of us human beings, and it's even got some dance moves. My heart if full of love for this film, and I can't find the words to express how much. See it for yourself and I promise you'll know why.

• at 12:16 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

Christmas

Most years at this time, I just want everything to slow down. Christmas is a week out, and everything is happening too fast. I haven't stopped to contemplate it, and I've been in a hurry to get things done. Maybe this is what happens. I told Robert Campbell the other day that I wanted to be around Christmas things. I guess I wanted to find a mansion all decked out in trees and tinsel to walk through and take my time. It's embarrassing, but my actual words were, "I want to see Santa."

My aunt sent me two old matchbooks this week with my grandfather's name etched into the covers. I started thinking about those great Pries holidays in California with all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and that green ceramic tree my grandmother had in the entryway of their home on Windsor Drive that had incredible multicolored bulbs. I bought a tree similar to it at a thrift store this year for seven dollars and some change. We now spend our holidays in Washington, or in Las Vegas where my husband's parents live. I suppose a lot has changed. Hasn't it?

This will be our last family Christmas in my childhood home. When we drive up Ridgemont hill to my parents' house, I think about my bus driver, Ed, and I think about walking up that hill for all of middle school. I hated that hill. At the end of my parents' cul-de-sac, there is another hill where my brother and Stephen Dutcher would sled in the winter when they were in the first grade. I think of all the people who have left and moved away. I think about how old we all are.

Elizabeth is in town for a few weeks. I hold onto these times together like nothing I can describe. When you have a person in your life who is such a part of you, and you manage to spend most of the year catching up on the weekends over the phone, or sending emails with a couple of lines of important news during your lunch hour, it's really quite something to be able to get together over a bottle of wine, or to walk into her parents' house, door unlocked, on a Sunday afternoon and take off your shoes and throw down your bag and share a blanket on the sofa. But soon she will be gone, and our next reunion won't be until the summer, and the summer always takes too long. Slow down, slow down, slow down.

I am listening to The Beach Boys and The Carpenters and some Doris Day and Frank Sinatra, and I am listening to as much as I can. Every time I listen to a Christmas song, I feel like I'm not appreciating it enough.

The very nature of Christmas is in the anticipation. It's the story of the world waiting for a really important birth, the most important birth the world has ever waited for in the history of the world, and it is a story about everything changing forever. Christmas is major. There is a lot of emotion in it. There is a lot of feeling, and beauty, and it's almost overwhelming if you really sit and think about it. And every year, it happens faster than you think.     

• at 7:24 PM
• Posted by Anne Campbell
• 0 comments

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More

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
• 0 comments

Read More