Do Be Ridiculous ~ Part Deux

My first trip to California this summer was so fabulous that not taking another would have been.......ridiculous.  This time it was really a vacation.  A whole week.  No kids or grandkids.  No reason to be late.  But I was.  My son's girlfriend drove me from Peoria to Chicago to catch my 9:20 am flight.  We left in what, according to Map Quest, should have been plenty of time to arrive an hour before departure.  Wrong.  Construction and traffic and pit stops, oh my.  We pulled up to the airport at 8:55 am.  I got to the ticket counter on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the woman informed me that I didn't have time to get checked in and would miss my flight.  I wasn't shocked but I was devastated.  She gave me a stand-by boarding pass for a flight that evening at 5 pm.  Not only was it full, but I had a train to catch once I got to LA that would be leaving there at the same time that I was leaving here.  I walked away to look for somewhere to cry.  Just as I spotted an open seat by a woman who didn't look like she'd be too disturbed by my sobbing, one of the other women from behind the Virgin America counter came over to tell me that the flight had been delayed and if I hurried I might make it. My destiny depended on luck and speed.  It didn't look good.   I got to the security check and waited for what seemed like hours.  When my turn came I walked through the security gates and waited for my belongings to be scanned.  As soon as they came through the curtain I grabbed my bag, my laptop, my purse and my shoes and RAN,  barefoot, to Gate 35B.  Out of breath I thrust the boarding pass at the man behind the counter and explained my situation.  He entered some information into his computer, looked at me and told me that they had already given away my seat.  My heart stopped.  Then he added that they did have a seat, but I would have to sit between two other people.  I promptly informed him that I would sit on his dick if it getting on that plane.  California, here I come!

 

 

I want to say that I have flown Virgin America several times and I love their staff, their amenities and their Turkey Protein Platter which includes sliced turkey breast, Greek yogurt hummus, whole wheat pita, carrots and cucumber sticks for dipping, muenster, cheddar and brie cheeses, tomatoes, olives, seedless grapes and a cage-free hardboiled egg.  I was so stressed out and exhausted by the time we were in the air.  If that egg had been in a cage, I never would have gotten to it.  Thank you Virgin Air, you think of everything.

 

 

 

One of the first things that I did while on my vaycay was to go to a wine tasting with my daughter and her husband (the ones who claim that I snore? you ask......yes, them) and Sammie their manny.  We walked through the beautiful grounds of Sculptura a winery and art gallery all in one, into the main building and up to the counter to begin our tasting.  Now I do stand up comedy and when, after a show, I am standing at a bar, with men, we are doing shots.  Well blame it on muscle memory cause when my first sampling of wine was placed in front of me I slugged it down like it was a Misdemeanor or a Vegas Bomb.  It was delicious and I turned to share my observation with my fellow drinkers and to my horror they had not even tasted the wine yet.  They were swirlin and sniffin,and finally sippin.  I thought someone was gonna start singin One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others and then a trap door under me would open and drop me into a pit with all the other no class mouth breathers or I'd be given a scarlet G (for gulper) to wear on my chest which would signify that I was, henceforth, relegated to drinking only the wines that came in boxes or with screw tops because that's all I deserved.  Although they noticed my wine tasting faux pas no one said anything and I sipped my way through the rest of the tasting making mmmmm and ahhhhh sounds and wishing I had something intelligent to say about body or oakiness. 

 

 



"Let's go to the beach," said my daughter, Samantha.

Are there any more lovely words in the universe?  I love the ocean.  It has a way of calming, centering and renewing me like nothing else (even a quick shot of wine).  So I put on a somewhat skimpy maxi dress, gathered my book, water and towel and we were on our way.  Now keep a few things in mind.  I anticipated a relaxing lounge-around after a leisurely walk from the car to the beach, I am almost fifty years old, I am so far out of shape we don't even share a time zone and I am afraid of heights.  This is where they took me:

Let me be more specific.  The TOP of this is where they took me and then we climbed down to the beach.  Did I mention that I am afraid of heights?  Did I mention that I had on a long dress?  Did I mention that I am a hundred years old and crippled?

There was one point where I had to traverse a narrow ledge that, had I slipped, I would have fallen to my death (which, I suppose would have kept them from having to listen to me snore).  It took forever for them to talk me into going across and when I finally did I ran and got my foot caught in my dress.  My daughter couldn't understand why I would run, but I just wanted to get it over with, one way or the other.  When we got to the bottom we did have a lovely walk.  There were tide pools with all kinds of aquatic creatures including anemones, starfish and snails. I made friends with two snails in particular.  If fact I flipped them over, announced that their bodies looked like tiny vaginas and licked one of them.  Don't try to make sense of it.

After a nice walk and sexually assaulting a snail I had a decision to make.  I could either climb back up from whence I came or I could find some big rocks and Virginia Wolfe it into the Pacific. I had some events coming up that I was looking forward to and had just bought some new underwear so I decided I'd try to climb.  Sam and Lucia went ahead of me and stopped to give me what I'm sure they thought were helpful tips for scaling my way back up that rock face every now and then.  At one point I had to get from a lower rock to a higher rock.  Sam wanted me to step onto the higher rock just like I was walking up stairs but between the distance, my bad knees and my fat ass that was not happening.  After much thought and hiking up my dress I traveled from rock to rock in the best way that I could at which point Sam lost her shit.  The sound of your child's laughter is a joy, right?  Wrong.  She's laughing hysterically and asking why I would just throw myself from one rock to the next.  Uh, cause it was my only option?  What she should have done much, much sooner than she did was to inform me that my entire left tit had escaped from my dress.

We made it back to the car and drove a quarter mile down the road at which point Sam pointed to a pretty little area off the road and announced, "That's where you park if you want to take the stairs down to the beach."


The impetus for the second trip (read: excuse for us to spend time together) was a Tough Mudder in  Tahoe.  If you aren't familiar with Tough Mudder's they are obstacle courses that run over 10-12 miles and treat it's participants (read: victims) to 20-25 obstacles, a few of which are called Artic Enema, Funky Monkey and Everest.  In other words it's HARD.  Almost as hard as my rock climb probably.  Lucia and three of his friends were participating and Sam and I were signed up to volunteer for the event which raises money for The Wounded Warrior Project.  We parked and took a bus to the resort area and then a ski-lift further up the mountain to the obstacle course.

The view was breathtaking and the energy was electric.  I am a big boo hooer when it comes to things that I find inspirational and my tears started flowing at the volunteer meeting when they talked about how the event couldn't be a success without me......ok, us  Sam and I were sent off to sign the participants in when they arrived and, among other things, give them their bracelet for their free "end of the run" beer.  Yea, very important shit. And I was determined to be the best Mudder volunteer Tahoe had ever seen.

We started our shift at 11 am and the people came at a pretty steady pace.  Now Sam is pregnant and it was hot so she drank lots of water to ensure that she stayed hydrated.  Every time she got a bottle of water for herself she would also get one for me.  At 12:45 she had a healthy baby and I had a full bladder but did not want to leave my post (else how would I put all the others to shame).  Sign in closed at 2 but things had to be packed up.  I tried to stay and help, but I had to PEE!  I told Sam where I was going and headed to the porta potties that were set up behind the volunteer's tent at the bottom of a hill.  I got about halfway down the hill, slipped on the gravel and my legs both went out from under me.  I fell.  Down.  Hard.  In front of people.  Three of them started toward me to make sure I was okay.  I waved them away with assurances that I was fine.  I was, however, not fine.  My knee was scraped and bruised and I could have used some help getting up, but I didn't want them to come near me because.........I wasn't sure when I was going to stop urinating!!!!  Oh yea.  Not a little "Whoops I peed a little when I sneezed" kind of situation.  Every bottle of water that Samantha had brought to me was currently running down that hill.  When it finally stopped, I managed to get up and hobble to the porta potty even though I didn't need it anymore.  I texted Sam, "Fell down a hill.  Pissed my pants".  I'd like to say that she was shocked at my clumsiness or incontinence, but based on the casual look on her face when I opened that potty door I would have to say that she wasn't.  "Let's go have lunch, Peepee Pants" was all she said.

You would think that after almost missing my flight on the way out that we would get to the train station on the morning that I left to come home in plenty of time.  You would be wrong.  We got up early enough and then dawdled around until what turned out to be the last possible minute to leave the house.  My train was leaving at 6:55 am and we pulled up to the train station at 6:54.  Sam and I leaped out of the car grabbed my bags, ran to the train and flung them through the doors.  I got a quick hug before the doors started to shut.  Just as they did I thought I heard someone say that the train was headed north.  I jammed my arms between the doors before they could close and managed to force them back open.  Sam thought I had just changed my mind about returning to Illinois (could you blame me) until I yelled that I thought that I was on the wrong train.  In hind sight the fact that it was the only train should have dawned on me.  A group of three people on the platform assured me that I was on my way to LA.  I'm sure they were thinking that Sam and I should definitely be on next season's Amazing Race. I got my bags dragged up to the second floor, showed the conductor my ticket and got myself some breakfast.  I had a five hour ride ahead of me and had had the foresight to bring some Netflix movies to fill the time.  I chose a French film called Rust and Bone about a street fighter and his relationship with a killer whale trainer who, after a killer whale incident, lost both legs from the knees down.  Don't believe me?  Google it.  I put the disc in my laptop on the tray in front of me and got comfortable.  Too comfortable.  When I fell asleep the two main characters were just friends.  Not so much when I woke up.  My first conscious thought was "What is that noise?'.  Well, it was these two former friends goin at it.  Hard.  And loud.  He was on top going to town.  She was on the bottom, stumps flailing every which way.  I shut my computer as fast as possible, but I have no way of knowing how many people had watched the brown chicken brown cow that had been going on in my lap. 

As I traveled (South) along the coast I couldn't help but wonder if other people have such ridiculous things happen to them on such a regular basis.  It doesn't seem like it, or maybe they do and just don't tell everyone.  That would be a shame.  Wave your freak flag, tell your story, laugh any time you have the chance and enjoy the view.

Thanking Anne Lamott

In February 2007 I got arrested after a misunderstanding with the law.  Apparently they frown, heavily, on calling in your own prescriptions.  I saw it as eliminating the middle man; they saw it as a felony.  They won.  It was a horrible experience, but it was the beginning of the end of a twenty year battle with opiates.  Getting arrested probably saved my life and definitely saved my sanity.  Two years of visits with my probation officer and random drug testing left me little choice about using.  I guess if I had been willing to go back to jail I might have continued to use, but the three days I spent locked up was enough for me.  Horizontal stripes and community shoes?  No thank you.  I began to believe that living above the influence instead of under it might actually make things easier, but I hadn't a clue how to go about that or why my attempts to stop using in the past had never been successful.  I went to NA meetings because the court mandated it.  I listened to people who were having varying degrees of success at living a drug-free life because I had enough sense to do so.  And I read.  A lot.  Anything and everything I could find about overcoming addiction.  That's how I found her.

Browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble one day I found a book of essays and interviews of well known people's stories of their experiences with addiction.  The list of contributors included Richard Pryor, Chuck Negron, Alice Cooper, Richard Lewis, Steve Earle, Malcolm McDowell, Grace Slick and several others with whom I wasn not familiar.  It was a great list (seriously they had me at Richard Pryor and Alice Cooper) and I had no doubt that it would be an interesting read.  I picked through and read the chapters of the people with whom I was familiar and then went back and read the rest.  All of them were heartbreaking and inspiring and hopeful and it felt like each of these people, in their words and their willingness to bare their souls, had given me a gift.  I finished reading Dock Ellis' story.  It was late and I was tired.  I turned the page to put in a bookmark and there was Anne Lamott.  Soft eyes with lines of knowledge and wisdom and experience around them and the most fabulous blond dreds.  I put down the bookmark.  One more chapter.  One more story.  The story that would touch my soul and change everything.

As she described herself as a child she also described me.  Never feeling like she fit in or belonged.  Always feeling like she was "too much" or "not enough".   And how that first mind altering substance changed all that.  Made everything right until it made everything wrong.  She wrote about not using drugs but what she also wrote about, in this essay and in her own books of essays, was how she was this wonderful, crazy, neurotic, silly, irrational, perfectly imperfect person even without any mind altering chemicals in her system!  That's when I had my epiphany.  I had been willing and even able to give up the high, but what I'd never been able to let go of was the built in excuse for being a fuck up.  It was so easy to tell everyone, myself included, that my words, actions and decisions weren't really my fault because I was wasted.  If I quit using drugs on a regular basis I would have to take responsibility; but what I realized thanks to Anne was that I didn't have to be perfect just because I wasn't wasted.  And that was the key to my freedom. 

I've read just about everything she's written and while I love her fiction, I devour her essays.  She has a strong faith in God and talks about this part of her life often.  I am an atheist but respect and admire how she can use her belief system to inspire others without ever making you feel like she's trying to convert you.  In the essays where she talks about her church she refers to it by name.  It is located north of San Francisco and just happens to be mid way between Lake Tahoe where my daughter Sam and I volunteered at a Tough Mudder last month and my daughter's home.  When I realized that, on the weekend we were spending in Tahoe, we would be driving back to Sam's home on Sunday it occurred to me that I knew where Anne Lamott would probably be that morning at 11 o'clock.  Now it crossed my mind that as an atheist, my going to church to try to meet Anne Lamott was a bit like a vegetarian going to a butcher shop to try to run into Lady Gaga while she was trying on dresses and I struggled with the idea that maybe it would be wrong, but I talked to a few friends about whether my plan bordered on stalking and after much thought I decided.  I was going to church.

It took a while to convince my son-in-law that my pagan daughter and I were not punking him when we told him he needed to get up at seven in the morning and drive three hours so that we could go to church but we finally did and he got up and drove us there.  Bless his heart.  We found the church and parked.  I had a card that I had written a little something about how she had changed my life, her book Bird By Bird that I planned to ask her to autograph and my phone so that I could get a picture of myself with this woman whom I idolized.  I was having a bit of a panic attack while trying to decide if I was really going to go through with this craziness when a car pulled up next to us and she got out.  Her dreds make her so distinctive that there was no "Is that really her?" moment.  There was no doubt.  She walked into the church and I just sat there.  My daughter gave me a "shit or get off the pot' look and we got out and went inside.  It was a small church with a small congregation and it felt very welcoming.  Anne was sitting across the sanctuary.  Even though I could see her it didn't seem real.  The sermon was given by a visiting pastor and was a story about a gift that she had sent to her brother and how much it meant to him to know that someone was thinking of him.  She knew that he appreciated what she had done because he called her and thanked her, telling her how much it had meant to him.  Do you know what he didn't do?  He didn't ask her for anything more.  That would never have occurred to him or to anyone with half a brain and one eyeball who was expressing what he was trying to express.  Gratitude.  Appreciation.  Humility.  And so, after the service, when I had the honor of meeting Anne Lamott, I told her how her willingness to share her experience and her talent for putting words together had made it possible for me to change, to be a better mother and friend and to truly enjoy the life I was living.  I gave her the card and then I left.  I didn't take out my book or my phone, because I was there to honor her and an autograph and picture weren't about or for her.  They were about me.  Asking for more when I had had more than enough was not okay.  Making this about me instead of her was not okay.  Being selfish instead of grateful was not okay.  How do I know these things?  Anne Lamott taught me.