On the flight to Missouri for my cousin’s wedding, I watched a woman eat a turkey sandwich in a way I recognized. She ate half the sandwich with the bread on it, then removed the bread and ate the second half breadless. I could tell she wasn’t doing this in the style of what we once called Atkins, then keto, now paleo. Instead, she removed the bread because it was so bad and flavorless that it was detracting from the filling. I’d never seen someone eat a sandwich so much like me, a person who hates bad bread, who prefers a bunless hotdog.
While I was in Missouri I met up with a professor from a college where I used to work. I told her about the Spokane wildfires, how I’d naively hoped that an up-close climate disaster might force some kind of response. She told me that there’s an expression in Romania, where she’s from, that’s something like: the knife has reached the bone.
“We will not face climate change until it’s to the bone,” she said.
It was nice seeing her, despite her gloomy pronouncement. She brought us green tea in pretty Japanese mugs and lemon date balls. We drank the tea in a garden on a concrete bench. The nearby walkway featured a tile mosaic of flowers. The professor volunteers in the garden even though, she said, she doesn’t really care about flowers.
When I left she gave me some rose perfume she’d made. She told me the smell of roses is associated with cellular health somehow, that people live longer when they smell roses.
My daughter turned four on our trip. My older daughter is ten. I love them so much it makes me a bad mom, too fussy, uptight. It’s worse when I travel. I spend all vacations hypervigilant: watching, waiting, ready to thwart disaster to such a degree that I screw up all the parts before and after disaster strikes, the good parts.
Halfway through the trip I was so wound up I could barely sleep at night. My husband bought me Unisom, my favorite drug. One pill and my brain turns off and I sleep like the dead, a miracle. But Unisom, like so many other sleeping pills, increases one’s risk of Alzheimer’s, the disease that killed my grandma and my great-grandma before her. So I can’t sleep like the dead every night. Most nights I have to wake up in the middle, think for an hour about everything that has gone wrong and all the things that might, whether I’ve signed up for the school conference and where exactly the carseat travel bag is in the closet of my mother-in-law’s house in Liberty, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City, where almost all of my family lives.
On the flight back to Spokane, I recognized another behavior. In the row ahead of me, a woman was texting someone the details of boarding, the most boring missive: “We got on quickly but were delayed by a few minutes because there wasn’t enough space in the overhead bins for the bags.” It was nice to think of someone on the other end reading, caring. The recipient of that text is my ideal blog reader, someone who welcomes pointless observations.
I am writing this on the airplane home to Spokane, one handed in my Notes app, while my daughter sleeps on my lap. I am thinking about a University of Central Missouri billboard we passed multiple times while in the state, which said, in big letters: “You can afford to be ambitious.” It seemed like a very Midwestern message, the kind of thing you’d need to tell someone who grew up in Missouri but not someone who grew up in a coastal city. I still don’t quite believe it myself. I’ve always felt I could afford to be somewhat middling, but never truly ambitious. Or perhaps that’s not true. I’m surely less limited by affordability than by my own bravery or creativity or passion.
I’m traveling back to Spokane under a pall because I lost a friend this summer. She’s not dead, we’re just not friends anymore. Recently I heard she’d said bad things about me, though I was left to imagine the details. She probably thinks I’m boring, self-centered, that I think all my problems could be solved with a pile of money, that I’ve wasted a lot of time thinking about my appearance when I’ve only ever looked mid at best, that I hold myself very rigidly, that I’ve wasted my potential, that I think I had potential, that I’m not as funny as I think I am, that I’m judgmental, that I can’t tell a story to save my life. It’s all true and then some. And her? Well, she has her faults, too.
I can’t help thinking of her. I haven’t had all that many close friends to begin with. To think I let her into my life and lost her. But did I let her in? Wasn’t there always some invisible wall between us, clearer now that our friendship is over? Was it jealousy? Distrust? I never quite knew where I stood with her, I guess. And shouldn’t I have changed that? Been more open? Would it have changed anything, had I been different?
I always leave Missouri with a hopeful wish that, on my next trip, I will be better. And I think it now, in this context: in my next friendship, I will be better.
The sun is coming up over America and we’re almost to Denver, a city I hate. The sky is pink. The plane banks almost sideways on our descent, and yet I don’t feel it. My daughter is so warm and heavy on my lap. Out the window I can see the disorienting little patterns of farmland. Behind me there is an adult daughter and her mom. The daughter is saying, of a TSA agent, “I bet she hadn’t had dick in years.” Her mom laughs. I hate the sentiment but hope for something akin to that relationship with my daughters when they’re adults: the ability to tell jokes together, though hopefully less sexist ones.
There is a little turbulence and I’m immediately terrified, counting my blessings, atoning for every sin. My cousin’s wedding was beautiful and full of love. The priest gave a pretty homily about the difficulty and joy of marriage, but what does he know? He’s never kept track of all the travel arrangements, bought the wedding outfits, remembered the headband for the younger, the necklace and earrings for the older, never lain awake at night wondering if this is just sleeplessness or something else, the start of perimenopause, not a comforting thought, guaranteed to keep one up for another half hour at least.
Life is patterns, the professor told me in the garden. That’s why, for instance, horoscopes aren’t all bullshit. They’re based on hundreds of years of observing patterns, and there’s something to that, even if it has nothing to do with planetary alignment. In a way, it’s what the text-message essayist in the next row and I are doing. Observing the patterns. Here’s this one, here’s that one.
There is a pattern in my life of coming and going to Missouri. I leave for months, I come back, sometimes for eight years, sometimes for six days. On the trip, we saw a few old friends with whom I wish I kept in better touch, but I can’t. I’m hardly able to deal with what’s in front of me, let alone a few states away and years in the past. Still, I could almost cry thinking about them and their kids, everyone growing up so fast.
A few days ago, Will texted to say he was catching up on some recent kidspringfield posts. It meant a lot. Will is another friend I’m lucky to have, somehow. I told him I’d write about my trip. His wife had a new baby on Thursday, so it may be years before he has time to read this post, but congratulations all the same, Will! A baby Libra. One of the best.
