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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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