your thoughtless words are breaking my heart
Most of what Google comes up with when you search for “age difference in relationships” is horribly punctuated. For a while, this concerned me greatly: what is it about women who tend to favor significantly older men (and this is the demographic who did most of the online writing i found on the subject, with the exception of one young gay man who was actually quite funny but i had to give up on after the third then/than error) that leads to horrendous misuse or lack of use of the comma? Were these awfully written message board posts some horrible foreshadowing of my future? That idea haunted me more than the usual gold-digger/father-figure/sugar daddy cliches, and became more disturbing to me than anything i might have been wondering about the potential psychological implications of my relationship choices, and eventually i stopped that particular Google habit. It was too depressing, grammatically.
Recently, at an all-female wine-oriented gathering, a woman i know just well enough to call a friend, whose husband is several years older than her, offered to get together sometime and share some of what she’s learned about age difference. My resistance to making plans with her had nothing to do with punctuation: she expresses herself very well in writing and in speech. I don’t doubt that she’s learned many valuable lessons about age and love and life, although i have found myself applying hierarchical labels to what people consider “difference,” and am slightly skeptical of anyone who places significance on a mere twelve or fourteen years (“Ha! My age gap could kick your age gap’s ass!” (which might be my irrepressible youth talking)). But i think my lack of interest is mostly because i don’t have any questions that can’t be answered or at least addressed by talking to c about them, getting it out in the open, and generally, moving on. There are of course discrepancies in attitudes about money, public drunkenness, Facebook, and the societal value of Youtube videos of laughing babies, but i’m not convinced that has any more to do with age than upbringing, income, gender, attention span, or any other variable. We’re lucky to live in a community where social stigma is pretty difficult to maintain, as long as your transgressions stop short of violent outbursts, destruction of property, and jail time, and even that will eventually be absorbed into the mythology of “things that happen in winter.” It isn’t completely necessary for our romantic health that the same songs send us down a spiral of adolescent nostalgia, so the fact that we tend to experience Jewel songs in completely incompatible ways hasn’t created any insurmountable challenges.
From what i’ve been told, relationships are hard, whether they’re with someone your age or not, monogamous or not, long-distance or not. So i’m not saying mine is perfect, or wholeheartedly recommending that all women in their 20s go find a single gray-haired dork to move in with. I’m actually only writing this because in my attempt to start submitting to and getting rejected by legitimate publications, the writing of a “query letter” has proven to be a major brick wall and this seemed like a better procrastination tool than watching videos of laughing babies (c is sitting at his computer, grumbling about photography contracts that need his attention and downloading The Band songs instead, having his own adolescent reminiscences. These are the moments that matter). If you found this blog by Googling “age difference in relationships,” i hope to god you’re impressed by my punctuation, because i know what you’ve been through. And i’d love to get together and talk about it sometime.
sounds like a whisper
According to the internet, the American Revolution is starting, and i’m addicted. It’s worse even than streaming The Office from Netflix, and less damaging to our monthly bandwidth allowance, and while i can imagine few things i’d want to do less than camp out with a bunch of men in their twenties in the middle of a city, i’ve started to feel distinctly left out of…something. I’ve thought about making a sign and driving to Anchorage to participate in the burgeoning “occupation” there, but there is a limit to how much money should be spent on gas in the name of economic justice. The internet tells me that Facebook is only a communication tool, that real change happens with face to face conversation, when we talk to our friends about it. Last night, i tried, sort of, but i ended up talking more about Facebook because the truth is, that’s what i know. Three out of the eight people present hadn’t heard of “Occupy Wall Street,” and the one who knew the most, second to me, only knew it because he lives with me and i insist on reading every mildly amusing or unusual status update or article out loud to him while he does dishes. Two of us are at least somewhat unemployed, three work for non-profits, and three for the government, and our ages span about 30 years. I attempted an inspiring speech, based on various blog entries i’ve read, about the importance of this movement. I held the interest of one person for about 30 seconds, and then conversation enthusiastically moved on to “things we were afraid would come out of the toilet when we were kids.” Oh well.
I’ve written here before about the strange way electronic media has of convincing you that you are or could be a part of something when really, you’re just consuming information, rabidly following one link to another, and the end result is a feeling similar to having just “accidentally” eaten an entire bag of potato chips in 30 minutes: headachy and overwhelmed and mildly ashamed. You go outside. You think about talking to the neighbors about the revolution, but that would probably be like the conversation about yarnbombing: exciting, in theory, for a day or two, but then someone accidentally gets a job and someone else has a baby and after a while, it starts to seem like a waste of good time and scrap yarn. Or like the initial outrage against a new street sign: promises that it WOULD NOT STAND for even a week, but, well, you get used to it. There are so many other things to do, like make food, go to work, or don’t go to work, chop wood, write about what you would do if you were going to do anything to the street sign. last year i wrote about those Obama emails telling me to “organize a rally in Denali National Park,” and a woman i rarely see and didn’t know read this blog told me a couple weeks later that next time we get one of those emails, she and i should just get together and drink some wine and talk about change. We haven’t even managed to do that, and Obama’s been pleading for a whole hell of a lot lately.
And so what am i getting at…i don’t know. Perhaps i’m just telling a pointless story about a group of lazy isolated white people who either have enough money or don’t but aren’t generally too concerned, which of course means something. I admit that i miss, at least occasionally, being part of a group of people who share the belief that revolution is necessary and the discussion is about tactics rather than legitimacy of belief. I also admit that, prior to two weeks ago, if you’d asked me where Wall Street is and i didn’t happen to have that one Sex and the City episode in mind where Carrie rings the bell to open the day’s trading of little floating numbers, which i usually don’t, i probably would have said Washington DC. My tendency to live in a financial fantasy world hasn’t changed one bit with the financial crisis; if anything, the disconnect between income and lifestyle has grown. So i guess all i’m really saying is that experiencing the revolution via Facebook is a little bit lonely, and a little bit delusional, and a little bit irrelevant, but most important experiments at least start out that way. Maybe i’ve romanticized my memories of public protesting the same way i romanticize other city things like sitting in coffee shops, and when i do that i end up wishing for my own mugs, my own music, my own solitude. Then i worry that i’m becoming too much of a curmudgeon for the revolution, and search for an article addressing that particular problem.
And then eventually, i make food or go outside, and do something else.
without bursting into anything
“I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel.”
-Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
But on the other hand, it’s been a beautiful weekend full of friends and food, woodsmoke and saunas and the glow of moonlight through the clouds, rain, cuddling, and sunlight. I subbed last week in a high school English class whose assignment was a reading on September 11, and i thought about sharing my memory of being in high school the day it happened, but there was no point, no parallels. There were soccer games that day. That was their primary interest, and the fact that they could get their school pictures taken with an American flag backdrop. Last night, we told our “where were you when” stories around the fire, and the 4 year old groaned in boredom, smeared marshmallows on her face while no one was looking. TV was usually involved in the memory. This morning’s replaying of NPR’s disaster porn footage brought c to tears, and he asked me to turn it off and then turned his attention on the broken toaster while i pretended to be a student. Hours later, the heating element on one side of the bread slot on the left, which hadn’t worked as long as i’ve been in the house, was fixed, and i’d had an unoriginal thought about narrative persona, which i wrote down in pencil and erased. Sherry Simpson asks if you are “content to be a listener, or must you be a storyteller, too?” She was writing about the stories told about remote corners of wilderness, places that tend to be harmed or irreparably changed by repeated storytelling. Memory isn’t always a creative force.
the sun breaking through
Poem
The immense sadness
of approaching winter
hangs in the air
this cloudy September.
Today a muddy road
filled with leaves, tomorrow
the stiffening earth and
a footprint
glazed with ice.
The sun breaking through
still warm, but the road
deep in shadow;
your hand in mine is cold.
Our berries picked,
the mushrooms gathered,
each of us hies
in his heart a small piece
of this summer,
as mice store their roots
in a place
known only to them.
We believe in the life to come,
when the stark tree
stands in silence above
the blackened leaf;
but now at a bend in the road
to stop and listen:
strange song
of a southbound bird
overflows
in the quiet dusk
from the top
of that tree.
I used to spend hours of every family trip to Cambridge, Ohio, wandering through the cemetery with a camera, an old Minolta that my dad had used when he was in high school to create black and white double exposures of the cemetery’s main gate with his friend’s face hovering in the sky. I’d look for anything vaguely reminiscent of Anne Rice novels, take pictures of it, study the names, try to ignore the cheery soccer moms jogging in pink leggings because they detracted from my very serious examination of Death. I learned where our relatives were buried, took pictures of the headstones, which were fairly nondescript and uninspiring, but paying attention to them gave me some legitimate reason to hang out in a small town cemetery. I wasn’t being creepy or annoying. I was searching for my roots.
One time, when i was in high school, on a gray late winter day, a voice called out from behind a mausoleum: “ARE YOU A GRATEFUL DEAD HEAD?” I looked up to see a chubby, poorly groomed man who i guessed at the time to be in his mid-30s (or maybe he told me?) with large frizzy hair that bounced around as he approached me in a sort of waddling gallop. “Kind of, i guess?” i said, because i kind of was. His face lit up. “Do you want to get high with me behind the mausoleum?” he asked, desperation oozing out of him. “No, thank you,” i said, despite being at the age turning down an offer to get high felt like some kind of subcultural suicide. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Arizona,” i said, which seemed to burst his bubble a bit. “Yeah, I didn’t think you lived here. You just don’t see people like you. It’s really hard here,” he said. I think my hair was dyed black and i remember wearing a fuzzy acrylic turquoise-colored sweater with patches on it.
He followed me around the cemetery for a while, and though i was flattered to be recognized as a member of some elite dead-head cemetery society, i avoided overt acknowledgment of any relatives’ graves. He asked where my grandma lived, and if he could come by and get me so we could have a beer later. I waved vaguely in the direction away from her house, said something about family plans, and avoided mentioning the fact that i was 17. I finally found an exit, and took a rather circuitous route back to my grandma’s house lest he follow me and show up in the middle of the night.
I spent a week in Ohio at the beginning of this month, and Grandma and i went to water the marigolds she planted on her husband’s grave, a double headstone that since 1984 has had her name on it, “1924- ,” which has always creeped me out. Once i asked her if it was weird, seeing her own name there, waiting, and i can’t remember how she answered, and i imagine her response was too pragmatic to fit my idealized version of morbidity at the time. She’s told me more recently how she knows more names in the cemetery now than in, say, the phone book, and i think she’s pretty much fine with that.
And i would have been too, if i hadn’t found the 50 year warranty for my great-grandmother’s coffin the night before. It was in a box full of old photos, cards, and schoolwork, ranging from the 1920s to 1980s, and was tucked inside the guest book from her funeral in 1981, and stated that “…Upon notice of it, (the casket company) will within ten days replace this casket if, at any time within 50 years after the date of internment, it has failed in any way to resist the entrance of air, water or any element found in the soil in which it was interred…” I found this guarantee quite odd, but didn’t think much about it until standing over the marigolds with a watering can, and had a sudden wave of vertigo, thinking of what was under me, and for how long, and of this strange custom of separating the dead from the elements, and was there a 50 year warranty on his casket too, and who thinks of this shit and how the hell would anyone know if a trickle of water slipped past the marigold roots and through a 26 year old vacuum-sealed lid? I wanted to believe it did, that time was allowed to pass in a sufficiently oxygenated way. What kind of people are we, pre-engraving headstones and guaranteeing caskets against the entry of the world? Grandma drove home, and i walked, past a small group of people sitting near two rectangles in brown grass surrounded by what i can only describe as grave kitsch: big plastic hearts inscribed with rhyming poems about leaving the world too soon, stacked picture frames in the shape of a cross. They drank from huge fast food cups and looked bored, didn’t say anything as i passed.
The next day, i walked through the cemetery again, to the old section where i remembered Blanche, my great-grandmother, her husband, and his first wife (Grandma’s real mother), are buried, all three under one headstone. I couldn’t find it. I paced the rows, people born as early as the 1850s with epitaphs like “his wife,” “his son.” No one plants flowers over here anymore. I got strange looks from a kid clumsily riding his bike in circles as i walked up and down, and finally gave up, frustrated that my memory had failed me but not sure what i would have gained if it hadn’t.
That night, Grandma and i ate salad and watched Jeopardy. I tried not to worry about who was buried where. We were still here, and they weren’t going anywhere, at least until the warranty runs out.
In a scrapbook in the same box, i found the telegrams she’d saved from her new husband during WWII. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which bits of history matter. 
I’ve become less concerned with getting to the tops of things. Or perhaps more accurately, more concerned with the combined effects of weakness and gravity, with the ways that proving a point can backfire. In the past year, i’ve turned around because my knees hurt, because the sky was too blue, because a slope looked just a little bit too vertical or jagged for my untrained non-technical feet. I don’t claim to have ever been particularly hardcore about anything—i just made a habit of scrambling up things without much thought, planning, or apprehension, and it has generally gone quite well for me. But i’ve lost some of that blind confidence, and gained an awareness of my own sometimes shaky knees, geological instability, and a vertigo that comes and goes with changes in the wind or a random passing memory.
I lost sleep during WFR class last year, trying to imagine how i’d put my own leg in traction with the things i regularly carry in a daypack (a journal, an extra sweater, a pound of cheese), and never even got as far as to speculate on the now more obvious question: what then? What good is a femur traction device if you’re still alone and no one knows where you are, other than to impress the rescuers who eventually come upon your creatively bound and dead body? I always imagined myself alone, because i so often am, doing admittedly not very strenuous things, but very clumsily, and i think of the countless times i’ve crab-walked down a muddy scree slope in a downpour, wondering which boulder is least likely to dislodge and why i consistently choose the most idiotic descent route possible. I read an Annie Proulx story last year about a woman who charges off on a solo hike to distance herself from her disintegrating relationship, to a place she knows well, and her leg slips, lodges between two rocks, and in brilliantly understated Annie Proulx-style agony, she slowly dies of thirst wishing she’d brought a cell phone. In February, my friend Gloria, a very physically adept older woman, snowshoed out her front door without telling anyone, not planning to be gone more than an hour, and spent the afternoon trying to dislodge her snowshoe from snow-covered rocks in a creek bed as a blizzard descended, imagining the embarrassing headlines describing her death. She returned my phone call 6 hours after she’d left the house, shaken and annoyed, after trudging back home on one snowshoe.
Yesterday on the mountain behind Toklat road camp, i turned around without a second thought when the ridge i followed turned to sharp rock outcroppings on one side and a snow drift on the other, near the top. For a brief moment, back on the road, i was disappointed in myself for not having at least tried, for being so easily deterred. Maybe it’s maturity or cowardice, maybe it’s an increased awareness of what i’ve described as the cumulative way that bodies collect memories, and as Charlie said last fall, “we don’t bounce like we used to, do we?” But it’s also a way of acknowledging that i don’t have to stand on something to know that it’s there, of accepting the mountainness of a mountain and also the limits of my earthbound feet.
when we talk about loss, we really mean time
- reflection, mid-april-ish
Of course, things do happen. With some regularity, I have bouts of time-induced panic, usually located in an alternate and temporally impossible reality occurring sometime around 1995 and relating to my blurred ethics about land ownership and matching sets of dinner plates. These usually give way to tears or compulsive cleaning. Sunday night, the house was surrounded by at least four great horned owls, two of whom flew from one spruce-top perch to another, calling to each other, while inside the house i read the first round of Facebook updates about bin Laden’s death and, as i tend to do, tried to connect the two. It didn’t work. The ski season ended, the first passerines arrived, my seeds sprouted, bears woke up, and as the sounds of water return, i find myself firmly planted in the house across the highway, away from the river. I have a student ID number and a combined total of 4 coffee grinders. Despite friends’ assurances that it wouldn’t last, c still makes my coffee every morning. I wrote about this last week at a pleasant, feel-good workshop offered by Peggy Shumaker at the library, the first even remotely literary event i’d attended in months (and not for lack of desire). Our prompt was to connect phrases and images to each other, a la William Kloefkorn’s “Connections: A Toast,” 12 connections in 15 minutes. Somehow, everyone who chose to read their resulting piece had written about breakfast. To make myself feel less like a domestic cliche among the literary women of Healy, i read my other piece instead, about my obsession with egg-veg chowmein in Chandigarh, which was based on a prompt from Brenda Miller’s “What I Could Eat.” It ended with a rather weak metaphor about disaster. These are things i never would have read, or written, without some sort of push to do so, and the push was quite welcome.
we spun gold clear out of straw
<insert here a long and well-composed rant about the destructiveness of the 40 hour work week, its negative effects on the political, creative, social, and intellectual lives of individuals, communities, and nations, how it strains relationships and alters the time bread is given to rise, and the way you’ve been reading the same book, sleepily, since january, but can recall none of it. how time and thought seem always backed up against themselves. how strange it is to become suddenly aware of the role you’re playing for money and how your interactions within that role are completely stripped of meaning when the money is removed from the equation, but i do spend a lot of time at the post office and so:>
There’s a counter at the post office where people leave their old magazines. Sometimes they stay in circulation for months, reappearing on the counter and on neighbor’s tables. Most people tear off their address labels before throwing them in the pile. Last week i found a stack of The Sun magazines from the mid-90s, addressed to a friend who once told me that one of her greatest frustrations with life in Cantwell was the lack of good vocabulary. They’re filled largely with stories of drugs and AIDS and race politics. My friend was married then, almost a mother (she spent years resisting it, building cabins with men and leaving them instead). The September 1996 issue contains an article titled “Get A Job: Why Welfare Reform is an Attack on All Women,” and the following sentences are highlighted in pink, like an omen: “They’re attacking these women, who are raising children and maintaining households, for not working. That’s an attack on our traditions. The work these women do is worthless, politicians say, but that’s the work our mothers did; that’s the work our grandmothers did; that’s the work that many of us still do. They sat these women will be working only when they go out and flip burgers. That’s an attack on women’s work.”
This woman is now a single mother, homeschools her 2 kids and makes art. She looks at me with a mix of pity and awe when i tell her about office work and how tired it makes me and i probably do the same when she tells me about her financial situation. But the fulfillment each of us gets from a day is quite different.
