Posts from — June 2015

So this past weekend, Josh and I drove out to his old college in Iowa.  Yes, you read that correctly.  We drove.  It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.  Hop in the car, zip across to the Midwest, maybe even stop at some other locations and reminisce about our college years in the middle states.

My heart died somewhere near Chicago.

Somewhere near Chicago, my heart died in my chest when I looked at the odometer and realized how much longer we had until we arrived.  I started inwardly wheezing like the Little Engine That Couldn’t.  I know I can’t I know I can’t I know I can’t.

But we did.  And a little after 11 pm Iowa-time (midnight back home), we rolled onto the Grinnell campus and collected our keys and registration.  We unpacked the car and moved ourselves into a dorm room as if we were eighteen-year-olds, giddy to be away from home for the first time.

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We stayed in a dorm.  I realized about five minutes into the experience that I am too old for a dorm.  I am too old for a rickety bed that creaks every time you move.  (How do these kids have sex?)  I am too old to schlep my toiletries down the hall to the lightless bathroom and pee in a metal-walled stall.  I am too old to listen to people talking outside my window or in the hallway at 2 am.  I am like… so so so old.  I couldn’t even. (See, I can now speak like a Millennial.)

I luckily didn’t find the cockroaches until our last morning.

On the second day, I went back to the dorm room for a bit and overheard a conversation in the hallway about a bat that had been flying around our floor the night before.  A bat?  Did someone say a bat?

I tried to get more information about said bat for the rest of our trip, but no one else seemed phased by the bat.  I would be standing in line, chatting with someone, and I’d smile and say, “Hey, what do you know about the bat that was in Younker?”  And they would reply, “Oh, yeah, there was a bat.  What else have you guys been doing today?”

I really wanted to bring it back to the bat.  Because did the person realize there had been a bat?

I am too old for bats.

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It was my first trip to Grinnell.  It is a beautiful campus.  It’s small.  Like it’s really really small; Josh’s college was the size of my high school, and my college could have eaten Josh’s college as an appetizer.

There was a dining hall called Quad that made my heart ache — it looked like the Great Hall in Harry Potter.  And there was a coffeehouse in the basement of a set of dorms where we listened to his old professors play bluegrass music.  There were study nooks everywhere, and a junglegym of carrels in the library.  (In fact, if you Google “study carrel junglegym,” a picture from Grinnell’s library pops up.)

And then there were all the new buildings; a shiny student union, and a beautiful science center, and a sports complex.  It was this mixture of modern and haimish; the sort of place where you wanted to meet someone and hang out on the lawn.  Or read a book, tucked away in a squashy chair in a wood-floored room.

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I guess what struck me the most were the people.  Yes, I was arriving with Josh, this known entity, but I sort of had the sense that if I had shown up without him and attended reunion in his place, everyone would have embraced me in the same way.  They were that kind and friendly.

It was clear how much the people he knew from there loved him, and how much he loved them back.  Many he hadn’t seen in over 20 years.  I loved seeing him so loved.  I know that I should reach for a more descriptive word than loved, but that’s just it: I loved seeing him so happy.  I loved seeing him moved by being in this place with people who are really important to him.  It was so comfortable; so relaxed.  It made for a very easy weekend as well as hard to say goodbye.

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But at the end of the weekend, we had another 15 hour drive home; this time with rain.  A heavy downpour followed us through several states, and it was nerve-wracking going the last 200 miles.  But we made it home and collapsed into bed.

I have a few last thoughts but this post is growing too long, so I’ll end it here and ask if you have been back to your old school — college or otherwise — and whether it was for reunion or simply a visit to the campus.  I have a theory with this one.

Thank you, Dorje, for the photo from dinner.

Pretty much every birthday post has been called “Happy Birthday to Me,” so why buck tradition and name this post something else?  I mean, yes, I’m also lazy, but that’s beside the point.

Oh how I wish I could go back to 39-year-old me and slap her:

It’s my birthday, and I’m practically 194 years old.  I told the twins that I’m now an old crone, with shriveled up ovaries that don’t work.  Josh pointed out that my ovaries didn’t work back when I was 27, so this isn’t a new development.  “Fine, then my hands are gnarled and liver spotted.  And my hair is grey.”  They didn’t even look up from their nutella-slathered challah.  That’s how old I am.  No one even looks up from their challah when I talk because my voice is so frail that my words just crumble to dust in the air.

Now, NOW, I am old.  I am so old that all my grey hair is white and sticking out at odd angles.  I am so old that if I bite into anything too hard — like sandwich bread… or air — my teeth fracture into thousands of tiny bits.  I am so old that my body is shriveling and now I can wear Gymboree clothes again.  I am so old that I can’t hear anything if the water is running.  All I can do is say over and over again to the speaker, “You know that I can’t hear you when the water is running.”

I am 41.

41 hurts less than 40.  40 was exquisitely painful, and 41 is more like a pap smear than an HSG-of-a-birthday.  It’s like, yes, both have the pinch of the speculum, but 40 has the pain of the shooting dye while 41 is more like the poke of a swab.

This past weekend, I went to Josh’s college reunion, which I’ll unpack in a separate post.  But it’s bittersweet revisiting a college, even if it’s not your college.  It makes you think about running to class after oversleeping and ordering pizza late at night and highlighting textbooks and moving apartments every fall.

I don’t really want to do the college years again; it was sort of hard to not know where I was heading.  But it’s nice to pause in that space, to look around, to take stock, to remember.

That is the good part of a birthday, too.  It’s a time to stop for a second and remember every birthday before this one, and be grateful that I’m still aging.  (Even if I am also slowly going deaf.)

In a few weeks time, it will also be my blogoversary.  My ninth blogoversary.  I’ll be entering my tenth year of blogging.  Oh how odd!   That something I could create while lying on my sofa, dictating what I wanted on the screen to Josh (because I sure as hell wasn’t going to figure out Blogger), could still be around this many years later.  Still puttering around like its writer, feeble but constant.

Thank you for being here.  It has been a bit of a shithole of a year.  Sometimes Josh and I dissolve in slightly hysterical laughter as if we are this close to losing it.

There are the friends and family who get me through crap on this side of the computer.  And then there are all of you who get me through crap on the other side of the computer.  And this safety net; strung between reality and virtuality, holds me up.  So thank you for getting me through another year.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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It’s sort of amusing that this is the 40th MicroblogMonday because today is also my last day being 40.  Tomorrow I turn 41, and you might as well save your birthday wishes until then because today is about still being 40.  I am 40, damnit, and don’t make me age before I’m ready.

The last day of a personal year (as opposed to the calendar year) is so bittersweet because you know that you can’t slow time.  You know that tomorrow you will wake up and be an entirely new age.  And that is odd, you know, the idea that I will describe myself differently tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be for birthday celebrations.  Today is a last day celebration.

What is the perfect way to spend a last day?  What would be your ideal last day before a birthday?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored posts.