social life
What color is your agitator?
When Sam was in elementary school, he often asked people what color their washing machine’s agitator was. You would be shocked — shocked, I tell you — how many people did not know the answer to this question.
Many times people were so loving and accommodating. If we were visiting, they would say, “Let’s go look,” and the whole crowd headed to the laundry room. Sam enjoyed that. If they didn’t know, and didn’t suggest to go look, he didn’t obsess over getting the answer. He had picked up enough social graces that he would simply move on. Often, at that point in the conversation, he would share the color of our washing machine’s agitator. For some reason, I was slightly embarrassed the first few times he shared that — even though I told myself that was not the same as sharing other details about the family laundry.
I was never quite sure of his motivations for gathering that information. I don’t remember when he stopped asking for it. I asked him about it a few nights ago and he remembered that it was something he was curious about. “I don’t remember when I lost interest,” he said. He doesn’t remember why, either.
Sam has been researching home automation systems lately. He thinks about accessibility. A person in a wheelchair can’t reach the controls, he says, and an automated system would let them operate appliances by remote control.
He’s so determined, even if it means teaching himself code, which he finds exacting — even for him.
He had been quiet about it for awhile, but I asked him about it again after this video showed up on the browser history when I came home from work.
(Other parents might have to worry about stumbling upon porn. I just get to see a washer with three speeds of spinning.)
I don’t mind him experimenting on our house. And I wonder about how to show off that quality to an employer. He’s a problem-solver.
The current color of my agitator, you ask?
White.
Random thoughts on hitting the 1,000-mile mark
In the first mile of today’s 4.5-mile run, I rolled over 1,000 miles on my jogging log. I used to run 1.5 miles and called it good. That’s just a warm-up now.You can rack up more miles, faster, if you register for race(s). (Race to train, as RunnerSusan says.) Some of the miles have been logged on trails deep in the Cross Timbers forest. Friends warn me of a mountain lion and her cub roaming on a favorite route down the road. What I still fear most is a distracted parent in an SUV. I don’t run with earbuds and music — on solo runs, there is birdsong, and on buddy runs, conversation. Logging miles on your personal odometer is curiously different than your vehicle’s odometer. Too bad changing the tires doesn’t have the same effect on the truck as lacing up new running shoes.
OMG
I wanted to pass on a particular invitation this weekend. It wasn’t the company. I’m smitten with the great people at nonPareil Institute, where Sam interned in spring 2011. They are having their second fundraiser this weekend, a Sunday night banquet and a golf tournament on Monday. No golf for this working girl, of course, but even the banquet price was a little rich for me.
I reminded Sam we were already heading to another fundraiser earlier in the day — a fajita fiesta for Denton County’s newest therapeutic riding center, Born2Be.
But he wouldn’t hear of it.
“Why didn’t you ask me to buy the tickets, Mom? It’s nonPareil. I should be the host.”
After he finished the order, it hit me.
I’m a trophy mom.
Random thoughts running a Colorado trail
Coloradoans are dead serious about their trails — they aren’t finished until they are paved with concrete and gravel shoulders from one town to the next, lined with split rail fence, dotted with trailheads along the way, and outfitted with all the supplies needed to pick up after your dog. (Though few do.) Texas flora = prickly jungle preferred by spiders, snakes, and biting bugs, i.e., not the Great American Desert depicted in your fourth grade textbook. Colorado flora = the desert depicted in your fourth grade textbook. Lungs breathe shallow and rapid, yet you are not breathless. Rabbits and coyotes run from you, but the prairie dogs stand up and squeak “high five” as you go by. Running with your 21-year-old son gets you some odd looks (trainer? body guard?). When you are all grown up, your dad can drive you to the edge of town and you can run back to the house without having any emotional duress.
Meet Psy
Last summer, I got a fat dose of South Korean pop culture when Paige was home from college. I watched a Canadian couple make kimbap on YouTube. One day she showed me a rap star. His earnestness made me smile. The music was not of his continent, but he made it his own with a sense of humor, but straight — like the local band that was the rage when I was in college, Brave Combo.
When the rapper made a cameo on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, I texted Paige to ask her if it was the same guy. Yes, she texted back, that’s Psy. When I told the newsroom about it Monday morning, I got called a hipster.
Hardly. I was born a dork and I cannot escape it. On trail runs, I’m the durable socks and comfortable shoes to RunnerSusan’s body glide and marathon runner kitten sex.
Yes, I know the first rule of being a hipster is not talking about being a hipster.
I keep my cool and act like a boring, responsible adult, but it’s fun re-living college life vicariously through the kids, especially this latest round of new ideas and new experiences.
My dork-ness was at its zenith, of course, when the kids were in high school. While Sam’s pursuit of an associate’s degree in computer information and technology has inspired a whole new arena of dork-ery for me, the perception of my dork-ness has changed a little with the kids. Michael got me wearing Ray-bans and Sperrys and using an iPhone.
My job has cool factor that many other kids’ parents’ jobs don’t. Someday I’ll break it to them. It’s cool to be a reporter, but it works best when you’re like Forrest Gump and keep falling into history, wearing durable socks and comfortable shoes and carrying a pocketful of pens.
When running is flying
This morning’s run on the Durham Trail, at Lake Grapevine, was exceptionally pretty. Blue skies and cool air. (Yes, I know, the heat and the ozone comes later.) Snow-on-the-prairie, purple gayfeather and thistles in bloom. Ruby red tunas on the prickly pear. Some underbrush had grown so high I felt like a hobbit. Susan thought she saw a deer in a thicket down in a draw — probably, since we had nearly run into a deer in that draw before.
I spend a lot of time on a trail run just making sure I put one foot smoothly in front of the other. If I don’t, my right foot hits the left inside ankle enough that it’s bloodied at the end. Same motivation in watching for roots or rocks — or snakes.
But there are times I stop looking at my feet to take in the big views and admire the quiet beauty. Sometimes I wonder if other people see Texas as they should.
Where I’ve lived before, the beauty can be in-your-face — the mountain vistas in Colorado, the rich fall colors in Wisconsin, and the emerald hills and sunny poppies of northern California.
We don’t have that here. But we have this (pictures taken by RunnerSusan):
Four weddings and a long ago funeral
Tonight was the fourth wedding I’ve attended since Mark died. The first wedding came about eight months after, and I was a wreck.
On your own wedding day, part of your heart opens up and it just gets bigger and bigger until your beloved isn’t there anymore.
Oh, mercy, that expansive, empty space hurts on another couple’s wedding day, no matter how happy you are for them.
When I first saw the date on the invitation, the night before Mark’s birthday, I wondered. But it’s also been nearly five years. Tonight, as we were waiting for the bridal procession, I heard the violinist begin the first few phrases of Ashokan Farewell — one of Mark’s favorites. My eyes couldn’t focus, and I could feel my knees and my heart giving way, but then the string ensemble transitioned to another tune.
Then, I told myself that little bit of music was just Mark’s way of winking and letting us know that they were all there …
Congratulations, Megan and Brandon!
Overheard in the Wolfe House #194
Peggy (lunching at Mean Greens, UNT’s vegan cafe): Is that sweet potato hummus?
Nancy: Could be. It tastes good. It’s different. Steve would hate it.
On writing, on reading and The Mayborn
People often ask artists who has influenced their work — musicians, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, writers. It’s a tough question to escape. I’ve asked it, but not too often, because I’ve found that many good artists don’t seem keen on bringing that kind of consciousness to their work.
I write intuitively, too. I try to edit consciously. And editing often seems to be slightly under the influence of whomever I’m reading at the time.
(Except Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Joan Didion. They are always there.)
This year, Paige has left behind collections from University of Iowa students. Home of Iowa Writers Workshop, there comes from Iowa always something fresh, and often ever-so-slightly unworkable in those pages. I enjoy them. And my friend, RunnerSusan, has loaned me a dozen of her favorite works of fiction that have taken me down unexpected paths.
I took a break from reading the authors scheduled for this weekend’s Mayborn conference to pour over essays for a writer’s workshop. My essay, Carrion (see the pages on the left), has been accepted to the workshop, so I am reading the work of others who will be sequestered with me and our workshop leader. More new voices and ideas.
Like a book club, only on steroids, it’s the eighth Mayborn writer’s conference this weekend. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I threw the manuscript for “See Sam Run” into the workshop to see what would happen. There won’t be anything on that scale for me this weekend, but it will be for someone, and there is all that other talk of writing and reading and writing that is so inspiring to us all. I can’t wait to see what this weekend will bring.
Where running meets writing
It used to be that I ran with RunnerSusan.
It was easy. We were neighbors. Not in the Yankee way, (which we both are, by the way), living next door or across the street from each other, but in the Texas way, where we could be like the two trains in a story problem with 4th grade math. If two runners leave the house at the same time, and one heads west on Frenchtown Road and the other heads east, where and what time will they meet?
And then we’d keep running for an hour.
She moved to a new place, with a peach tree and a patio. It would take more than an hour to meet, so now I race alone.
It’s ok.
One day soon, we’ll figure out how to start the way we started last summer, trail running. Trail running is the best, anyways. If we get going good enough, we might race together this fall, through trails in the woods in East Texas, or up around Lake Ray Roberts.
I’d love to run the Palo Duro Canyon race in October, but a professional conference sneaked onto the calendar that weekend.
Maybe next year.
By the way, fellow Mayborn School of Journalism pals Valerie Gordon Garcia and Sarah Perry joined team-in-training.
We care about blood cancers in the Wolfe house.
A good friend is living with it.
And so is my dad.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad!