emlocke

Category: Thoughtful

  • Dear Dixie

    1468800_843481833585_1243191480_nOne year since you, Dix. Dixie Chick of Shadowland White. Dixalicious. Chunk with the Junk in Her Trunk. My Snuggleupagus.

    I still miss you every every every day, especially when I’m walking home after work. I used to get home and launch into a frustrated rant about work or slow walkers or silent filibusters. You’d sit at my feet, shifting back and forth, if necessary, as I paced, twitching the very tip of your tail hopefully, like you always did. When you got impatient, you’d put your paw up on my knee, like, “excuse me, down here, hi, hi, hello!” I’d finally get the message, and I’d kneel down to greet you and instantly forget all my troubles.

    When I scratched your ears, rubbed your belly, or snuggled your scruff, your comfort and happiness comforted me and made me happy. I believe you knew that, and that you felt the same way.

    I loved knowing—usually—what you needed from me, and that I could provide it. And you could always give back what I needed most from you. Could you read my mind and know what I was feeling? I’m not entirely sure about that. I think it just worked out that what was best for you was best for me; that’s enough for me to know that our bond was special—honest, generous, affectionate, and loyal.IMG_4797

    I’ve faced some tough times in the last year. When I’m sad, sick, or tired, I miss you terribly. When I can’t sleep or concentrate, I remember your thunderous snoring and the insistent, reassuring press of your forehead, chin, or rump against me. When I feel weak or hopeless, I remember your steady gait and your patient gaze. But I also miss you when I’m happiest, because feeling safe, peaceful, or loved always reminds me of you.

    A few fantastic things have come my way this year, too—four of them are other Shadowland labs, including your granddaughter, Birdie Balderdash!

    Ida Run-A-Muck & Birdie “The Bird” Balderdash of Shadowland, November 2015

    Your wonderful pawrents Karen and Craig have sent Birdie, along with young ladies named Ida, Sally, and Shirley, to visit me, and Mom and Dad, for sleepover weekends when we’ve needed some labrador love in the house.

    12742131_10100210970829665_4083055946047667566_nSisters (yes, littermates!) Sally and Shirley of Shadowland, February 2016

    Shadowland is in very good paws with those girls! We feel so lucky to be part of the extended Shadowland family, thanks to you. Karen and Craig adored you; I’m so grateful that they shared you with me.

    Right after you died, I worried a lot about where you might be and if you were okay there. It tore up my heart to think about you being somewhere unfamiliar, not sure what to do, lonely, waiting for me, and wondering why I didn’t come. On bad days, I felt so guilty, angry, helpless, and sad that I looked forward to the “good” days when just the sadness, on its own, felt tolerable. A year later, I think I’ve finally come to believe that wherever you are, you’re safe and content, and comfortable enough to roll belly-up when you’re dreaming. Now, I’m just hoping I get to be with you again someday, there, wherever there is. I know you’ll wait for me.

    IMG_5083

    It’s been a very warm March week, the kind of days you would have liked to spending lying on the deck, baking in the sun. Even before it registered that this anniversary was approaching so quickly, I’d found myself thinking about how much you loved to do that and wishing you were here to enjoy this weather. Making you happy was not only a delight, but a point of pride! I hadn’t grasped that facet of love so thoroughly until I loved you; you probably understood it all along.

    IMG_4728

    So, wherever you are, know that I’m thinking about you, which is kind of like petting you with my mind. Thank you for being my best friend. I promise that I’m okay and I’m ready to love another dog full-time, just as soon as I’m allowed to bring one home! I’m so proud of you for overcoming your fear of cutlery and for becoming the Dog of the House after Maggie was gone. You did a great job looking after Mom and Dad. Please say ‘hi’ to Maggie for me. You’re a good, good girl. I love you, Dix.

    Always,

    Your Girl, Emily

  • (I can’t get no)

    My theory is, the same way my body craves proteins and vitamins when they’re lacking, I get cravings when there is an emotional or intellectual deficiency of some kind. I go through phases of fixation on one particular element of my life.

    Material cravings have me browsing online and mail order catalogs like it’s my job.  Next, I’ll spend every free moment working out or planning a workout, my refrigerator is stocked with fresh, lean organics, and I get my hair cut and revamp my skincare regime.  Then I’ll read three books in two weeks and entertain the notion of going back to school for an advanced degree.  And when that passes, I sprout social butterfly wings and make a point to catch up with everyone I know before retreating into a domestic phase.  That usually involves a comprehensive scrub-down of the entire apartment and the rearrangement of furniture and decorative accessories.

    Sometimes it leads to attempts at creating decorative accessories myself.  That’s a warning sign for a creative spell.  The creativity cravings are the most difficult to satisfy.  It’s like craving something, but not knowing what it is.  Because what I want, what I crave, is somewhere within me, unseen, and if it gets stuck, simply wanting it to emerge isn’t enough to make it happen.  Sometimes I feel just desperate to conceive something of words or colors and when I can’t draw it out, it’s like I’m imploding and exploding at the same time.

    What’s unsettling is, lately, I haven’t craved much of anything.  It’s like I’m caught in the trough of a wave, just riding it out.  It’s odd, though, this absence of want.  It’s like a deficiency of deficiencies, but that doesn’t mean I’m thoroughly satisfied.

    {P.S. What are you non-gastronomical cravings? Material? Physical? Intellectual?  Social? Domestic? Creative? Or otherwise?}

  • I resolve to turn the volume down

    By the time I came across 2 1/2-months-to-New-Year’s-Resolutions Resolutions through Design Crush, it was almost half a month down, two to go, nearing the end of October.  It remindes me so much of the “It’s okay . . . ” pages in Glamour, my favorite magazine pages of all time, the pages that single handedly lead me to choose that magazine over all the others when I’m in line at the airport or under the helmet dryer at a salon.

    Unlike all the placid allowances made by Condé Nast, some of the resolutions pinch me.  13. Remember, love doesn’t find you on its own. Oh.  31. Don’t waste another second. Please? Fine, fine.  Since you asked nicely.  I’ll try to try.

    Just over the cusp and into November, the day after a call was made for our resolutions, new updates ceased.  Did the project run out of steam?  Funds?  Resolve?

    This is the resolution I submitted:

    Maybe not the metaphor one would expect.  Then again, less or lessened volume isn’t always a bad thing, metaphorically speaking.  And literally, it’s almost certainly a good idea.  Turn the volume down, please.  Protect your hearing.  Be kind to your ears.

  • I recommend Nutella to replenish the chocolatey hazelnut reserves in the bloodstream

    I’ve always wondered about comfort food—is it a specific type of food?  The way Chinese Food is, at least as far as my apathetic Western pallet can tell, a specific type of food?

    For a long time, I associated the term so closely with macaroni and cheese that I wouldn’t have put it past myself to point at a pot of elbow pasta and cheddar syrup and say, “please pass the comfort food?”  Then it was linked to mashed potatoes and I thought “comfort” cuisine must have a Thanksgiving significance.  Then I learned that BBQ chicken and collard greens comfort Southern diners.  And one Sunday morning in college, someone glanced at my plate-sized waffle and clucked, “comfort food?” and I figured it must equate ‘hangover food.’

    There is an element of nature versus nurture in defining comfort food.  As a general rule, “comfort foods”are carbohydrate-based.  I could pick a different comfort food any day of the week; I think my physical cravings manifest as emotional cravings based on what my body needs.  Sometimes I want desperately for red meat—a temporary iron deficiency?  Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about apples with peanut butter—low blood sugar?  And sometimes I crave spaghetti, a carbohydrate through and through, even in whole wheat noodles, but it doesn’t always sound appetizing without Boca burger ‘meat’ sauce—not enough protein?

    I think I like Latin American food so much because I like the taste of multiple saturated flavors blended together.  Hot or cold; homemade, ordered, or microwaved, it tastes simple and complete at once.  It sustains—nature.  And yet, I recognize instantly the memory, the nurture associated with cheese melted on a tortilla.  No meat, no beans, no salsa.  In the toaster oven for two and a half minutes, fold in half, nibble.  The crisped edges and soft, warm center remind me of sitcoms on the couch after school with my mom.  I relish every bite—hold the relish.

  • I’m crying small, sticky tears as I write

    Introduction to Creative Writing met at one o’clock on Wednesdays.  I took a violet spiral-bound notebook to class.  On a lavender post-it that I stuck to the inside of the back cover, I wrote:

    “. . . Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”—D. Foster Wallace

    The only work that I have ever read by David Foster Wallace is the commencement speech in which he said those words.  The line was preceded by the following:

    “As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head . . .”

    That’s what depression is like.  A constant, hypnotic monologue damning each pleasure, every hope, any purpose and all courage.  It corrodes human resolve.  It bleeds out energy.  It’s paralyzing.  It will confine you to the inside of your own head and the only way out is to take back control over how and what you think. 

    It scared me that the Creative Writing course was one of the things that triggered such despair.  The possibility that deliberate writing, and the introspection and vulnerability that accompanies it, might always be so damaging was depressing enough.  I didn’t want it to be that way.  I really wanted to believe that, armed with philosophies like Wallace’s, I could cope my way past all the classic hazards of sensitivity, perception, and creativity, and get better.

    To this day, I’ve never read a word by David Foster Wallace that wasn’t in his commencement speech.  At first, I abstained out of fear.  My depression was an imaginative and particularly superstitious monster.  I believed that reading Infinite Jest or Consider the Lobster would bring me closer to the author, but I also believed that if I got too close, I would break the spell.  I might threaten his control over his own thoughts.  And I might shatter any hopes I had for myself.

    I’ve still not become a reader of David Foster Wallace’s work, and now I only wish there were some validity to my irrational fear.

    The speech is archived at Marginalia.org.

    I still have the post-it.

  • Shooting up a love flare

    My mom has this thing that she says: “Love your guts.”

    It’s the verbal expression of those moments when emphatic love flares up so brightly that you want to force someone between your ribs and squeeze them into your chest cavity to get them just that much closer to your beating heart.

    It sounds a little gory, maybe even a little morbid.  But isn’t that just like love?

  • I won’t put on tomorrow’s bra before I get in bed tonight.

    Highly Notable Events in August 2008

    • Browsed wedding dress possibilities with my dearest friend Jill (her dress, not mine)
    • Tuned in to coverage of the Democratic National Convention
    • Tried a new Thai restaurant in Park Slope before my roommate did
    • Acknowledged my compulsive need to be “the favorite”
    • Visited Camp Jewell for the first time in almost five years

    I started this blog five years ago today by summarizing the highly notable events of Summer 2003.  For two weeks, I coded every entry in Notepad and loaded them page by page to my web space on the school server.  Then my HP laptop crashed (surprise.) and I started posting to Blogger.  Google had just acquired Blogger, and as an early-ish adopter, I was one of the first ‘citizens’ from outside the Googlesphere to receive a Gmail invitation.  I’ll keep boasting about that even though I switched to WordPress in February 2006; and, nobody cares when I was invited to Gmail.

    September.  It was the time of year when new pens still smelled new and I had all kinds of plans for a school year more productive, accomplished, and fulfilling than the last.  Before my notebooks got dogeared and my penmanship got sloppy.  Before a leaky highlighter in the bottom of my bag bled through half of Tuesday, and Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday on every single page of my planner.

    I used to resent this time of year in this sort of subterranean way, veiled by typical complaints about the end of the summer and by the goody-two-shoes excitement to go Back to School.  In my unseen heart, I considered it a mean trick. I wondered if the summer off was worth the consequence.  It was a false start—a new year in September?  It promised all these new chances and beginnings, but nothing seemed to change.

    I remember staying up later than I’d ever stayed up on a school night before my first day of fourth grade.  I was organizing my closet.  Sorting troll dolls and amateur pottery.  I cleaned my room like it had never been cleaned before.  I thought if it looked like a Pottery Barn catalog (or like the set of Full House) when I woke up on The First Day of School, it would stay that way all year.

    In the days right before the seventh grade, I dropped hints to my mom that I wanted my first real bra because the narrow straps on my First Day of School dress would expose the sports bras I usually wore.  I also refused to kneel on the carpet, which is how I usually watched TV or worked on craft projects, because The Dress revealed my knees and I didn’t want them to look chafed.

    Every night for three weeks before my senior year in college, I sneaked out of the house and drove into town to walk the length of Main Street and loops around the Middle School for an hour or more, sometimes into the next morning.  Ever since, I’m tempted to go for a long walk when I can’t sleep.  I’ve tried to think of a safe place to go in the middle of the night.  At home, my biggest concerns were distrustful cops and groups of stoned teenagers.  In New York, I have to wait until the gym opens at five if I need to outrun insomnia.  I’ve done it before.

    Outrunning—that’s what it’s always been.  And when I tried to dodge bad habits, quick fix damage, or elude depression, they always caught up with me.  They’ve chased me down.  I decided to expunge ten years of slobbery on the night before fourth grade?  Perfect timing.  I had really started to believe that life worked that way; that time was defined either from one day to the next or over the span of three seasons, and never in between.  Time dropped paperweights and bookends in the same spots every year until graduation.

    Since my days of First Days of School, I’ve been more free to take each day as it comes.  To take.  Each day, individually.  For what it is.  As it comes.  Not before.  Nor after.  One at a time.  In chronological order.  I know it sounds indifferent, like how you live when you’re just getting by.  But, honestly?  I would rather get through every day without walking all night just to get to it.

  • Compromise is the divide between adaptation and resistance

    If I travel in the morning and arrive home mid-afternoon, and if I lie down on the couch in the living room with a book and use either the air conditioner or two strategically arranged fleece blankets, depending on the season, to keep my body at just the right temperature, I can pretty much guarantee that I will be sound asleep by the time my mom gets home from the grocery store with the instant oatmeal and the flavored carbonated water that she is stocking just for me. I don’t usually come to until all the groceries are unloaded and she’s already putting them away.

    If I travel for longer than forty minutes in the family mini-van, if I listen only to the white noise of the highway beneath the wheels, and I let the cold-blooded creature inside my mammalian body succumb to the hyper-controlled environment, I can pretty much guarantee that, as determinedly as I resist, I will fall asleep in such a position that I wake up with a drool splotch in a highly unlikely spot, such as mid-calf on the back of my jeans. I will be unresponsive for half an hour at a time, then I will stun other passengers by bursting straight into a conversation through most of which I slept.

    For the three years I attended Mount Holyoke College, I could pretty much guarantee that I would start my period within six hours of moving into my dorm room at the beginning of each semester. As far as I know, my cycle never coincided with the other women with whom I lived in such close proximity.

    If I express distaste for a new pop song the first time I hear it, if I comment on weak metaphors and lazy rhyming, if I sulk in protest when I hear it, I can pretty much guarantee that within two weeks, I will know all the words to that song and have a favorite line and press ‘forward’ on my iPod with the secret hope of shuffling to it. I keep an untitled playlist that I think of as “Songs I Love to Hate,” and in the same moment as I denounce a song, I make a mental note to download it.

  • I lay awake wondering what I looked like when I fell asleep

    For years after my parents stopped tucking me in, my mom or my dad continued to look in on me after my lights were out. I think a lot of parents do that, take that moment to make sure all is safe and sound, that their child isn’t staying up too late to read under the covers, to say a silent goodnight, to see peacefulness on a sleeping face.

    I got caught reading under the covers. I was also known to sit up until all hours, unable to put down a crafty project, trying on all my dress-up clothes, or sifting reverently through shoe boxes of toys and trinkets, taking inventory of treasures the way children do.

    While I played in the dim light from my closet, I listened for a parent’s footsteps. I learned the warning groan of the floorboards a few steps shy of my bedroom door, and I learned to leap into bed and feign sleep with minimal mattress creaking. Oh I got caught, but sometimes I fooled the watchdogs.

    And yet, there were nights when I took comfort in knowing that I’d have company for just a moment in the night. As I got even older, I would remind my mom to “come check on me” every now then. When something upset me and I felt vulnerable, I wanted someone else to stand watch. I guess I’d be the type of cowgirl to sleep with one eye open unless I could count on someone else to look out for trouble on the prairie.

    There were nights when I couldn’t fall asleep anyway. My mom would crack open the door and I would say, “Mom,” because I’d been expecting her but she wouldn’t expect to find me lying awake in the dark.

    “Why are you still up?” she’d ask.

    “I don’t know. I can’t sleep.” She would tuck the covers tighter or press both thumbs in circles against my forehead or kiss my cheek right up next to my ear and tell me goodnight again, hoping it would take. I remember one night when I called out to her before she closed the door again.

    “I’m craving something. But I don’t know what.” Her silhouette braced itself in the doorway and she sighed. “I think it might be coffee.” I was maybe nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember what she said; I don’t even know what I would say to a child who told me she was having indefinable cravings in the middle of the night.

    I’d probably tell her, “Nice try, but you’ve had your last glass of water, your last bedtime story, and your last goodnight kiss. Go. To. Sleep.”

    But I maintain to this day that I wasn’t just stalling that night. I really craved something—something—whatever it was.

    I felt what New Yorker writer Judith Thurman expressed when she wrote, “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for a familiar ground.” Or Frank O’Hara, who wrote, “When do you want to go / I’m not sure I want to go there / where do you want to go / any place / I think I’d fall apart any place else” in ‘Metaphysical Poem.’

    I was maybe nine. Maybe ten.  My first restless night of metaphysical angst.

  • Tilt your head this way ’cause I’m deaf in one ear

    When our friend Amy invites Caitlin and me out one Saturday night, she describes our destination as “Meatpacking.” Just like that. A proper noun all by itself. As though it’s the local supermarket or a small coastal town.

    “She’s on a first-name basis with The District.”

    “We’re going to need something more specific.”

    Caitlin sends her a text message: ok! where? Amy texts her back with an address and approximate time. We’re already getting dressed and then we find ourselves with some time to kill.

    I agree to trim Caitlin’s hair on the condition that we do it before we start drinking, which is not how she proposed the project. We open the bottle of wine that I’ve had in the fridge since before Thanksgiving. Saving it for something, for nothing. For when I felt like it. I definitely feel like it as we sit together on the futon, watching Arrested Development on DVD and making up rules to our own drinking game as we go along.

    Once, in college, a friend of a friend of a friend set me up with one of his friends on the basis that, “He’s kind of shy. You’re kind of shy. It’s perfect.” In the car on the way home, just the girls, we agreed emphatically that the logic was faulty, but this particular guy was a lost cause. “He turned and faced the brick wall every time I tried to include him in the conversation.” “Is that seriously the type of guy people see me with? Seriously?”

    After we turned out the lights, though, I relived the encounter and reconsidered the set-up. Across the blue-black room, I asked my roommate if she thought the fact that I’m deaf in one ear could possibly be an issue for guys. Not that it would be a turn off, but that it could make certain people nervous in certain situations.

    “No.” She paused and I waited. “I mean, I really don’t think so.”

    I was right though; it does make certain people nervous. It makes me nervous. Turns out, the fact that I’m deaf in one ear is mostly just an issue for me.

    (more…)