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