The World Shines (for Krista)

I'm sorry, but this deserves a "Well, GODDAMMIT!": my friend and colleague Krista, who is smart, funny, sweet, creative, and sassy to beat the band, has been diagnosed with breast cancer--invasive ductal carcinoma, to be exact.

I know this because Krista has been Tweeting her heart out about her diagnosis this afternoon (brave, brave, BRAVE, mon amie!), and has also posted a message to her blog asking people to share some of their favorite things so she has pleasant stuff to think about as she deals with what can only be called some seriously crapwad news.

It so happens, my dear Krista, that I've recently gotten into the habit of adding to the daily summary I write each night a few notes on whatever made me happy throughout the day. This is generally a random, ragtag, not-exactly-puppies-and-balloons kind of list, but it shows me that sometimes glee pops up in totally unexpected forms, and sometimes from ridiculously simple things.

So Krista, here are a few bits and pieces from my lists. If I could bundle them up and send them to you by mail, I would, because I sort of think they'd pop out of the envelope in a huge, delightfully messy, pleasantly chaotic jumble, like a much cooler version of one of those fake cans of nuts with a spring-loaded Slinky snake inside. But I'll mail you some restorative San Francisco chocolate instead, and will give you these moments right here:

• The driver of a plumbing van playing a harmonica with his window rolled down while stuck in traffic on Gough Street the other day
• Listening to "Wait Wait--Don't Tell Me" on my iPod at the gym and laughing so hard I had to put down the weights I was trying to hoist
• Discovering the cheapest Bulleit Manhattan in SF at Bar ($6! For Bulleit!)
  
• Standing in the patch of bright afternoon sunlight spilling through my kitchen window and onto the floor
• Watching the wedding montage in "Up in the Air" for the second time
• Finding multi-colored popcorn at Rainbow Grocery (even though, alas, it all pops out to be the same color--which is probably some sort of "Kumbayah" lesson for us all from the food world)
• Getting a free box of Girl Scout cookies from a client who'd bought multiples
• Watching the band geek version of OK Go's "This Too Shall Pass" over and over (and over and...). I can't NOT be wildly, stupidly happy every time I see this.

Cheap top-shelf bourbon, harmonica-playing plumbers, and marching band-filled pop tunes can't keep the world and its sometimes-sucktastic realities at bay forever, but for a little while, damn, do they brighten things up.

We're with you, Krista, all the freaking way.

"dark though it is"

As one almost must in cases like this, I turn to Elizabeth Gilbert.

Not her new book--its topic a million miles away from me right now--but rather Eat, Pray, Love, with its dog-eared pages and the notes I made in the margins when I first read it three years ago, right around this same time. (April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot? Au contraire; it's February.)

Last night, it was Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies that I pulled from my bookshelves, because I love Anne Lamott, and will happily do my best to lose myself in her words at any time, and because things last night had not yet stepped off a cliff with both feet. I read until I fell asleep, thinking, after I turned my lamp off, of the final words of the W.S. Merwin poem with which she opens the book ("we are saying thank you faster and faster/with nobody listening we are saying thank you/we are saying thank you and waving/dark though it is").

But now, come morning, an unhappy chat behind me, I'm off that cliff, and it's Gilbert, not Lamott, I need most. I can't shake the vision of those paintings of Jesus in which he has two fingers in the open gash in his chest, right over his heart. At the risk of sounding utterly sacrilegious, I know the feeling today, my man: something in me that was intact has torn open, and I can't ignore the wound, much as I'd like to.

So I return to Eat, Pray, Love.

Being the annoying completist that I am, and now faced with an unwelcome surfeit of free time clamoring to be filled with distractions, I will, of course, read the damn thing cover-to-cover all over again. Maybe twice.

But for now I flip through and read the passages I marked last time, thinking Yes, thinking Remember that, thinking Know that. You made it through--and out--before. You will certainly make it through again.

With my fingers over that new, sore, achy, messy wound, then, I keep reading.

Et tu, April?

There's a line (attributed to Plato here and there, but who knows) that I run through my head on repeat when things get a little (or a lot) sucky in my world: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle."

I've called upon those words a lot in the past few weeks, what with the discovery that I owe a staggering amount in taxes (staggering amount paid in estimateds last year evidently notwithstanding), the sudden and unexplained disappearance of the latest garçon, and continued slogging to make up for the slowness of business over the past few months.

And here's what really blows: this month in particular, it seems like Plato is more right than ever. So many people in my life, relatively speaking, have been socked with crap lately. One client is in the midst of a sad and painful separation. Another is contending with a very serious and totally unexpected health issue. My cousin, whose father-in-law recently died after a battle with leukemia, found out today that her 6-year-old son has cancer.

I could go on, but I'll stop the litany there, because I think you get the point.

In a client's office yesterday, I stood for a moment in front of the vase of daffodils set on the reception desk and leaned in to inhale. I had forgotten how daffodils smell: like newness, like starting again, like spring. Like some vague--if frequently un-keepable--promise that sooner or later, things will turn around and the loss and falling and failing and sadness will stop.

Because the receptionist was away from the desk, I lingered longer than I might have otherwise, with my face basically in the bouquet. I breathed in that smell, said a silent Please, and then walked away to lose myself in work. Because how much power can daffodils have against the world?

Hate Is a Very Strong Word

But it doesn't quite cover what I felt when I was pulled out of sleep at 3 a.m. this morning by the idiots in the building diagonally behind my house playing Rock Band.

In those first hideous moments of consciousness, when I was trying to suss out what the hell was going on, I assumed they were just (ha--just) playing music really loudly, with no consciousness of or care for the insane hour. But then the song, with its annoying bass line, repeated over and over and over.

I assumed someone in the motley crew would gaze at a clock at some point and think, Hey, it's 3 o'clock on a Monday morning, and the few shreds of decency to which we cling suggest that perhaps we could, say, not have every single window and door in our flat open while we amplify our video game. But no.

Also incorrect was my assumption that, when I went out into our backyard and called up--politely, I might add--to a boy hanging out one of the windows and chatting on his phone, he would respond. No.

So I called the police. They may have shown up, as the din died down for a while somewhere around 4.20. But then, miraculously, I looked at my clock and managed to surmise that it was 4.49, and sound was flowing anew. Redial. Loopy plea to the police dispatcher to do something, anything, to make it stop, as I was losing my mind. She sweetly promised she'd send someone out.

At 5.30, it got quiet, and I tried to calm my racing heart by thinking about Gandhi (what would he do if the Raj blared Rock Band at him mid-sleep, hmmmm?) and Rachmaninoff's Vespers and an eye for an eye leaving the whole world blind. Sooner or later I fell asleep, half contemplating blaring "Morning Edition" out in the yard when I woke up to officially face the day.

Last night I did the responsible thing. But tonight, crapwad neighbors, if I so much hear one thump of bass leaking out your windows, I will not be above scrawling a polite request to keep it down onto an egg and tossing it your way.

I Had Planned to Buy Riunite

On Sunday, in celebration of her birthday, Dana had a BBQ fiesta, the unofficial theme of which was "foodstuffs from 1975" (the year of her birth). The festivities got underway in the early afternoon, but Josh and I had to teach a class until 5, so I planned to head over as soon as we were done.

Driving to Joshy's seemed like a good idea that morning. I'd brought my coffee maker to his house the previous day and didn't feel like schlepping it to Dana's on foot or by Muni on Sunday evening, nor did I feel like going out of the way to bring the thing home before heading into the Mission. I also figured that driving would get me to D's more speedily than taking the bus, and had the grand idea to stop at Safeway en route to pick up a bottle of Riunite (on ice, natch) so that I might be thematically proper.

I parked the car on 8th Street at Natoma around 9, putting my toolkit in the trunk and triple-checking all of the locks before I walked away from it for the next eight hours. It was Sunday. The daylight was broad. There was nothing visible in my luxurious 1993 Toyota Corolla save for a bag of plastic bags (destined for the recycling bin at Safeway), an empty printer cartridge (on its way to Office Depot), a packing tape dispenser, my garage door opener, my mileage log, and the piece of plastic that fits into my cassette deck (yes) and allows me to play my iPod through my stereo.

Evidently, this bounty was temptation enough for the denizens of 8th Street. Around 5, as Josh and I left his house and walked toward my car, we saw one of our students heading toward us. "Did you get our messages?" she asked. We said we hadn't, and she replied that she and another student had called both of us from around the corner as they came upon my car (bearing magnetic signs on the doors with my business name, which is how they knew it was mine) and noted the glittering pile of glass on the sidewalk next to it.

Adios, driver's side window. Hello, giant mess. Loot scored by whatever crackhead or tweaker or just plain asshole broke into and ransacked my car: garage door opener, mileage log, tape dispenser, bag of bags, empty ink cartridge. No doubt you're having a field day with those highly valuable things.

In the end--after driving to the carwash to vacuum up as much glass as possible, after calling Glass Pro to arrange an appointment the following day, after sitting in front of my garage for a while and waiting in vain for one of the other car owners who parks there to come or go--I did make it to Dana's. In fact, she and Brad were good enough to let me park my window-less car in their garage that night. I was late in arriving--even later than anticipated--but things were still swinging when I got there, and there was still plenty of Champagne Jell-o mold to enjoy.

But I'm sorry I showed up empty-handed. D, your next bottle of "wine product with natural flavors" is on me.