This was going to be about how we relate to each other

We have a good friend over. We haven’t seen him in years. We talk, we laugh.

Okay, okay: I laugh.

BOOM. The neighbors slam their window shut.

In college, I had a friend who would say ridiculous things to crack me up, just so he could shush me (and make me laugh harder).

My laugh? It’s loud. Fact.

Not everyone is cut out to be my friend.

Still, what if all our neighbors want is some sleep? It is, after all, 10PM on Saturday night. Isn’t banging the window shut adding to the problem? Can’t they close the window without slamming it?

To be fair, maybe they can’t. I’m not sure we can.

I’m worried about passive aggressive neighbors, when we all just need to clean our window tracks.

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When you cut me off

I’m driving. The road is open in front of me.

You’re stopped across from me, waiting to turn left across my lane.

There are no stop signs. There is no light.

I drive.

You sit there, in your car, signaling your impending left turn.

And then, just as I pass the point at which it’s no longer safe for you to turn in front of me—

You turn. In front of me.

You cut me off.

And I just want to know:

Why?

Were you distracted? Oblivious? Thirsty for adrenaline?

Or did someone wrong you today?

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For Sale: Saturday Morning Gathering Place

You have a dining table that seats eight. A couch with spacious seating for five. A comfortable rug. A yoga booster.

Not to mention the beds: The kids’ beds. The guest bed. The fold-out couch.

And yet, on weekend mornings, your little housemates clamber out of their organic sheets, across the furniture, and into the only place that will do: Your bed. Which happens to be where you are. Pretending to sleep.

You could embrace this. You could say to yourself, “This will only happen for so many years.” You could think about how adorable they are, how sweet it is that they want to play with you, how contagious their energy is.

But there’s an elbow in your kidney and a couple toes pressing on your eyes, and—is it even 6AM?—you can’t bear to check.

You. Need. Sleep.

Introducing: The Saturday Morning Gathering Place.

A bed, like parental beds should be.* Designed by parents who’ve been there.

Triggered by jumping children, the bed expands three feet on each side. As you roll away from the epicenter, you’re protected by a rising barrier that keeps the kids in, and you—safely cocooned—out of their reach.

It’s a bed. And a bomb shelter. A haven from the missiles of children’s toys. A sound barrier against screams that Gertie took a doll from Josephine and against screams for the perverse joy of screaming, filtering all sounds except those indicating legitimate terror, mortal danger, or a need for emotional support.

Yes, you’re still a good parent.

Now available at your neighborhood furniture store.

Give them their trampoline. Give yourself rest.™

*Down blanket sold separately.

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Home awaits

One day, we drove to a part of town I hadn’t visited before. I hadn’t seen photos and didn’t know what to expect. The highway here isn’t surrounded by trees alone—you see houses, hills in the distances, buildings—so you know if it’s familiar or not.

It wasn’t familiar.

On the short drive home, I thought about how each of us in our little boxes on the hillside* can venture out into the world, turn right, left, up, down, and around, experience all sorts of things, and then, directly or roundabout-ly, find our way home.

Home.

Not just to the general vicinity we come from, not just to people who speak our language (though sometimes that feels incredible enough), but to the exact place where our people and our things await our return.

We take this for granted most of the time, but isn’t it a miracle? You leave something somewhere, you go far away from it, and often (most of the time, if you live in a safe place), when you return, it’s still there. After minutes. Hours. Sometimes after years.

It may not be exactly the same, but it’s there.

And even if it’s been only hours, are you ever certain you know what you’ll find? Have you ever had surprises, like a package you didn’t expect, a person you didn’t expect, a home that looks different from how you left it?

(In the most innocuous-but-annoying version of this possible, my then-16-year-old brother and friend X went into the bedroom of a mutual friend Y who was out of town and spooned it—meaning, COVERED EVERY SURFACE WITH LITTLE PLASTIC ICE CREAM TASTER SPOONS—and then filled the room with balloons. When tired friend B got home, he opened the door to his room, closed it, and went to sleep on the couch.)

On that drive back home, we reached an area I recognized. And I felt what I feel every time I return to a place I know after being away: an exhale of relief.

And a small start of surprise every time we make a turn, and what I think will be there is, actually, there.

*Song lyrics by Malvina Reynolds

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When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple (hair) to get my oil changed

I’m in a car dealership, waiting for an oil change since apparently cars now alert you when it’s time to go in. (I drove late ’90s and early ’00s cars for so long, I’m still getting used to this concept. A’s car, which is newer than mine, even tells him when his tire pressure is low, though I think it only kicks in when the pressure gets dangerously low.)

I’m sitting in the coffee area next to a Filipina who is also a US citizen through her father. She joined the Air Force to see the world. She’s been a nurse (and now manager) for about 40 years, and at the same hospital where A had his surgeries and hospital stays for about half of that. She used to work in cardiac surgery and spent a good half hour geeking out about how cool cardiac surgery is and telling me about how they do heart transplants and double-lung transplants and fish out blood clots, and how some of the procedures require inducing hypothermia to slow metabolism so patients don’t die when their hearts stop pumping.

She talks till they call to tell her that her car is ready.

The subject matter is frankly a bit morbid, especially the transplant part, because you have to wait for someone to die in a way that doesn’t damage the organs you need and hope that they’ll be a match.

But for a few minutes, she shares something she loves in this world, and I learn something new and understand a bit better how this world works.

She leaves.

A few minutes later a woman in her 70s sits down. Short white hair with a cloud of magenta on top. She says, A lot of my friends dye their hair—brown or black—so I figured, why not. She does a different shade each time. Her hairdresser worried at first that this woman wouldn’t be happy with it, but now is into it (the hairdresser, too!). She says, I’m not dead yet. When I turned 70, I got a couple tattoos.

There’s something fascinating about this particular choice: Even as she changes her hair color, she’s embracing her naturally white color because magenta hair works on white hair in a way that it doesn’t in dark hair. It’s striking.

And these interactions, these choices, these things strangers share with us, whether through conversation or through a physical choice like hair color, give so much food for thought: Are we doing work we love? Are we taking time to notice the people around us? How do we want to see the world and our lives as we grow older? And how do we see ourselves today?

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

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Sharing cells with your 16-year-old self

My friend from high school and I have a tradition: We call on each other’s birthdays. His is in the fall. Mine is in the spring. No matter what, we talk at least twice a year.

This year, on my birthday, I asked, How long have we kept this up? What, almost 20 years?

Yeah, he said. [no big deal.]

Then, Yes! You were at my 16th birthday party!

And somehow “16” was much more jarring than “almost 20 years ago”. We were 16. Sixteen. 16. Who’s sixteen these days? (No one in my life.)

Sixteen was a universe ago. An age. More than half a lifetime. We didn’t know what the point of high school was. (I’m still not sure about this.) We didn’t know what we’d be doing after. We didn’t know what we’d be studying or where or when. We hadn’t yet traveled much. We hadn’t yet hung out thousands of miles away, in New Orleans… and even that was 11 years ago. Whew. We hadn’t yet had Chinese food or gone to the restaurant where A got food poisoning. We hadn’t gotten married or even met the people we would marry. We had yet to have any of these twice-annual birthday phone calls.

I don’t find birthdays traumatic. I don’t feel old. I want to be (and am) trying new things. Making new friends. Exploring career options. Getting better at a variety of things. I haven’t settled on what I want my life to look like. I don’t feel constrained in ways I don’t want to be.

But still: 16. How can we share cells with the 16-year-old versions of ourselves? How are we the same human beings? Who were we at 16?

I thought about it. And realized:

16-year-old Ophira? She would have been totally cool with much of my current life.

She’d have been cool with learning to be a good partner. With exploring career interests and being independent and figuring out how to stay independent rather than fitting into a poorly-sized box. With getting stronger, trying new types of exercise. With playing at improv. With dancing. With writing. With talking to everyone, all the time.

Which is comforting. We take all these turns in life, we make all these decisions, but we are always the ones making those decisions. Any time I look around and choose what looks like the right thing to me, any time I look into something I care about, I am being true to myself. “Myself” is just what I am. Underneath the titles and the age and the current style of hair and glasses and the bite splint I wear at night and the crappy clothes—okay, those could really be better. Underneath all the surface things that are signs of “Ophira in 2019” is just Ophira. Ophira who likes to read and explore and talk to people and learn new things and be active. Ophira who gets that she doesn’t always frame things in productive ways and wants to learn to do better. Ophira who loves to dance. Ophira who laughs at most everything in a way other people still notice.

(Seriously, I thought I’d passed this stage of life, but just the other week, three people in my improv class commented on my laugh because I still can’t keep a straight face.)

And people still feel comfortable around me, even though I’m pretty sure I bring the awkwardness to the yard sometimes.

How was I was already fully myself so long ago?

I have nothing outside my physical self in common with the person I was then. My relatives may be the same (plus new additions since then), but none of us live in the same place as before and few in the same place as each other. I interact regularly with zero of the same people outside my family. I’ve moved multiple times. I’ve studied different things. And yet, I am the same person.

I guess this is what people mean when they say to look back on what you did and loved as a child to figure out what you might want to explore, what skills or qualities you want to focus on, because there are certain fundamentals that aren’t likely to change even as everything else does.

I’ve noticed this in other people, too: A still likes taking things apart to see how they work; he still needs to break things down to their most basic level to truly understand them (which is what makes him a great teacher).

There’s that beautiful quote from Steve Jobs’ commencement speech:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

I’m in my mid-30s, and some of the dots are finally beginning to converge. Just knowing that they can, that all of this random jumble of life experiences, of interactions and lessons and reactions and choices, can produce something useful and interesting (if only to me), makes it exciting to find out what comes next.

Happy year of birthdays, of discovering what comes next, to you.

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Life evanescent

Everything comes in phases. Everything is temporary. Everything ends.

We’re not always aware of this.

Consider childhood: Children are so immersed in life that everything lasts forever. Each tooth is loose for ages before it falls out. Summers are endless, in a beautiful way. Pain feels endless in the moment, too, until it passes. You’re never going to be a grown-up (for better or worse). You bask in your teacher’s glow (or suffer under her glare) for eternity.

So it seems like being aware that things end should be liberating when it comes to bad things. Doesn’t my friend find her difficult job situation manageable now that she knows she’s leaving soon? Didn’t A and I find long-distance much easier to handle when we had travel plans to see each other?

And it also seems like this awareness should be painful when it comes to good things. Moving away from good friends. Finishing a delicious meal. Life, in general.

But maybe it’s not so straightforward.

“This too shall pass” is agnostic: it applies to the good, the bad, the value-free. But awareness that “this too shall pass” can, sometimes, be a gift, even in good situations.

I don’t always remember that everything comes in phases, but when I do, this is what happens:

Detachment. I can step out of the moment and remember that this is just a moment in time. Whatever is happening around me or to me or by me is happening, and I can observe it, decide what it means to me, decide whether and how to react.

Appreciation+Focus. When I recognize that I’m in a good moment, I savor it. This, I think. Pay attention to this. Remember this. There’s some combination of focusing and zooming out to appreciate, letting the beauty wash over me.

Patience. When I’m in a bad moment, remembering evanescence makes it a lot easier to wait it out. To be okay not trying to fix everything, to accept that some things won’t work the way I want them to, but hey, they’re temporary.

Engagement. Knowing that this moment is just a moment makes it so I sometimes choose to engage, to be in the moment. This is not the same as appreciation: gratitude and appreciation require a certain amount of detachment, a meta-awareness of the the moment. If you’re truly engaged, you can be enjoying yourself and know that you’re happy, but you aren’t actively appreciating the moment in that moment.

I wonder if it’s the case that good moments are only truly good because they’re moments.

And then I wonder if all this talk is just confirmation bias—we are stuck in this world of phases and moments and evanescence, we need to believe we’re getting something out of it, so we try to make it a good thing.

Well, then. Good luck to us.

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Sounds of a beautiful morning

The sun is shining. The birds may be singing, but I can’t hear them. What I can hear is a dog barking. And the highway. So many cars on the highway. Oh, the pleasures of being able to look out the window and check traffic. There’s a drill going now. Here’s my partner chewing on some grapes. Aaaand now he’s chewing slower and giving me the side-eye.* The guy upstairs just dropped something. And always in the background, the un-disable-able clicking of the keyboard on my laptop.

Have a beautiful day.

* Reading aloud as I write.

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Dreading the end of chemo

About a month before A’s last chemo infusion, I suddenly realized that all the things we’d been struggling with before cancer—improving our communication, sorting our work situations, figuring out our priorities—all of those problems were waiting for us when treatment ended. They’d be there, whether or not we were ready to handle them, and we’d have to deal with them. And with all the mail that had arrived in the intervening months that we had ignored. With all the trivial and significant things we’d put on the back-burner. At that point, it felt like a lot of things.

I dreaded the end of the treatment. I wasn’t ready to deal with our problems, those lingering, patient yet insistent annoyances and struggles and obstacles and insecurities and inconveniences and irresponsibilities and well-the-math-doesn’t-quite-add-up-there-does-its. I didn’t even have time to process the preceding months—I’m still not quite sure I’ve done that—and I was totally unprepared to deal with real life.

How strange that this happens. That cancer is so horrible, and cancer treatment potentially even worse—so much physical, emotional, psychological suffering; such a risk of unknown yet incredibly serious side effects; potential death due to any infection, even borne within your own body, during low immunity—and yet, we dread the end of it.

Cancer puts everything else on hold. Nothing is as important as doing everything we need to, everything we—and family and friends—can do to get ourselves through it. Therapy. Reading. Conversations. With luck, a lot of support. And neglecting normal responsibilities just as much as we can, which often means completely.

Cancer gives us purpose. There’s a problem, and (if we’re lucky) there’s a plan for how to solve it. We always have the option to go off the beaten path, but as long as the patient is well enough and the doctor has solutions for problems that come up, there’s a prescribed route. Appointments, biopsies, scans, blood tests ad nauseum, chemotherapy, rinse and repeat.

Someone else sets the agenda for us.

And then it ends.

The social worker A spoke with when he got a second opinion said that the couple of months following treatment might be when we’d need the most support (because we would have to actually adjust back to whatever normal life would now look like) and have the least (because we wouldn’t have any unless we made plans for it since people assume you’re done when the treatment’s over).

In the months after chemo ended, I had occasional overwhelming feelings. Resentment about my small life. I didn’t leave the county for a solid year. Me. Who other people see as a world-traveler, a language-learner, an always-up-for-an-adventurer. The COUNTY. I was only semi-on top of things at home, always dropping some balls (often to do with paperwork and keeping the house fully, actually clean and not just haphazardly vacuumed/swept). A, even with cancer, traveled much more than I did in the year after he was diagnosed: he had work trip after the lymph node biopsy but before the results came in, and three more brief work and personal trips in the months before I also ventured out of town.

And there I was. Home. Running errands. Buying food, making food, cleaning up after food. Doing the bare minimum. Nervous about actually getting a grasp on our finances. Nervous about writing, and about not writing. Nervous about making a career for myself—about succeeding and about failing. About letting other people down. About keeping myself small. About how our relationship would be. About what the new normal would look like and how we would even get there.

The worries I had before, plus the worries triggered by cancer and months of chemo, multiplied by the months they lay dormant.

I don’t think I should have to write that of course we were incredibly relieved, joyous even, when A finished treatment; when his immune system came back; when his follow-up PET scan was clear.

But, as always, real life is a bit more complex. The good—the end of treatment, the clear scans—requires incredible emotional work to enjoy.

And then, of course, there’s all the paperwork.

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