Sparkwood & 21

So, Yesterday I Got Stuck in an Elevator and Nearly Lost my Mind

I don't think about getting trapped in an elevator every time I get on the elevator, but I think about it most times I get on an elevator. And yesterday, one of my very worst nightmares came true--for two minutes.

Two minutes is long enough! Two minutes is long enough be seized with terror and to size up your lift mate then determine on the spot whether you'd kill him with your bare hands if you had to. Because it might come to that.

I was on my way to work (and early, I might add, feeling all cocksure and responsible) when I swept into the elevators when a girl got off. I pressed 4. It went down to C, the carport, and I kicked myself for not checking to see if the elevator was going up or down. A young man got on the elevator at level C. [I told Beth this story earlier, and she pointed out that old ladies say 'young man.' He was a young man. I stand by this in my walker.]

Then the elevator moved, but then it stopped. Then the display began FLASHING. Then nothing. No movement. No opening of doors. Just the silent flashing of the following:

_ _

After about 30 seconds I began to jab wildly at the Open Doors button, even though I've been told by numerous know-it-alls that that button is impotent and does nothing. Still I stabbed at it like a frenzied murderer. 

Then the elevator began to ascend, maybe descend, it was hard to  tell, because the elevator began to move while still FLASHING the ominous:

_ _

"Are we moving?!" The young man had both palms flat against the side of the elevator walls and his eyes bulged from his face.

"I don't knowwwwhatthefuckisgoingon?!?!?," was my approximate reaction.

The quickness with which I began to lose it was astounding. I immediately had trouble breathing and when I realized I might be stuck inside that elevator I knew I couldn't do it. I knew my whole body would shut right down. 

I began to have the first inklings of a panic attack.

"I'm freaking out. ARE YOU FREAKING OUT?!" I was pleading with the young man with my eyes to tell me everything was fine.

"Yes. I'm freaking out." He said it as much to himself as to me.

Then, in what seemed like a slow stretch of time, pulled thin like taffy, I kinda lost my shit. Then bam, the doors of the elevator slid open and we were on the 8th floor. My terror-mate and I ran out them. 

"This is where I need to be." He said it with such relief.

"Wait! What? No! I have to go back down. I'm going to 4. Don't leave me."

And he laughed. He laughed! We almost died together SECONDS AGO, and already he was laughing.

I mustered up all my strength and got on a very different elevator and went down to 4 and walked into work looking like I'd seen a ghost. It took me a full half hour to recover.

Looking back the saddest part of this entire episode is that I didn't take the stairs down. Didn't occur to me. Besides, I was going to be late.

Even Momentarily

If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

-Ronald Reagan, in a letter to his soon-to-be wed son

Dear Mom: A Mother's Day Present

My mom's mom died when my mother was just four years old. She barely remembers her.

This was a fact I often forgot when my mother was overly protective or when the punishment was too harsh for the crime or when I wanted a hug and instead got advice. It was hard for me to remember that my mom didn't really have a mom and that she was doing this whole mothering thing without even the thinnest semblance of a roadmap. 

My mother's not perfect, and neither is yours. But goddamn, did my mom do a good job. I can quickly tell you about the times she disappointed me, but overall, my mother busted her ass at being a mom, and she did the very best she could. Just thinking about how much effort and sweat and tears and sleepless nights she put into figuring out how to best care for my sister and me puts a lump in my throat the size of boulder.

My mom was 24 when I was born. 24! I was 24 an entire decade ago, which means at my age my mother had a ten year old daughter (and another kid, to boot!). I try to imagine having a ten year old child, and I simply can't do it. I can't fathom being solely responsible for another human being. 

Despite divorce and financial hardships and some really nasty treatment from people who were cruel beyond all imagination, my mother perservered. She shielded my sister and me from things I'll never know the full extent of. She scratched my back to put me to sleep well into my teens. She sacrificed god-knows-what so that her girls could have. She instilled in me a love of writing by filling my head with books from the very beginning. 

She is so much of who I am. I am so much of who she is.

There is nothing I can buy right now for my mother that she can't easily afford herself. Flowers seem silly. Besides, she's going to be out of town this Mother's Day. She's traveling, one of her new, later-in-life loves.

Instead I'm giving her this: a public acknowledgement. I'm giving her a piece of writing that attempts to encapsulate just how much this woman means to me. This writing will fall miserably short.

I'm thankful for so much of what my mom has given me. It would be laughable to attempt to list them here. When I think about how much I love my mom my whole chest fills up and my eyes well up and I can barely stand it.

You wouldn't know it, but my mom is an amazing writer. I still have the hand-written letter she gave me when I graduated from high school, and it is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read in my life. She may have been guarded, she may have been less affectionate than other mothers, but never, ever for a single second have I doubted her commitment to me, her unabashed devotion, her selflessness at so many turns.

My mom has no pretenses. She never puts on airs. She's an honest woman who works her fucking ass off. My mom and I are different in a million ways, but if I ever carry myself with the level of humility and absolute realness that this person who raised me does, then I'll have become a better human being.

She gave me life. She gave me crayons. She gave me baths. She gave me groundings I badly deserved. She gave me Barbies and when I asked her, "What do you do with these?," she replied honestly, "I really don't know." She gave me permission to cry in my room while I cursed her from the other side of the door. She forgave me when I mocked her elaborate Christmas morning scavenger hunt when I was 15 and an asshole. 

I love this woman more than I know how to handle. I don't tell her enough. 

So, happy Mother's Day to one mom, my mom. For someone who didn't have a mom of her own, she knocked that shit out of the park.

On Predicting the Future and Odds

Her: An old man I sat with for a while at the bus stop told me he'd pay me to go to the movies with him. 

Him: You know, the way I live my life, there's 40% chance I will be that old man someday.

Sometimes

:(

My Friend, Mat

Me: I should get some writing done. I've been slacking like a total asshole.

Mat: werd

Mat: i'm trying to get motivated to walk to the store for beer

me: wow, we are a sad bunch

Mat: haha, i know. it's bad when drinking seems hard

Mat is a friend I met at NBC Bay Area. He's pretty awesome, the kind of guy who drives to the Far East Bay to buy a life-sized Spiderman to keep in his apartment.

Mat lives in the Mission, but we don't see each other any more. You go from seeing someone 40 hours a week to never seeing them at all, it happens just like that.

I'm going to stay at his place in a week or so when he's out of town and watch his puppy Dexter. The place with the life-sized Spiderman, a statue I bet is pretty goddamn creepy in the dark. Like I said, he won't be there.

It is something that the people that life shoves at us, those are the people we get. For better or for worse.

Mat is for better.

It's Never Equal

“It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them—and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on—this desperate need—and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.”

~Madeleine L’Engle

"now we tumblr"

I never lived in Williamsburg or even shopped at C-Town, but their Tumblr is the best.

Not Writer's Block, Writer's Fear

The doubts and questions and self-directed insults bubble up almost as soon as I begin to type. I start writing what I hope will be a book (or at least a long-form somethingorother), eke out a few sentences, when raw insecurity leaps from my gut to my brain and seizes my fingers mid-keystroke. 

"This is ridiculous. People already know this. This is nothing new. You are going to fail."

An attempt to elbow the beast of blind fear into submission is this blog entry.

"we always feel now the secret grief of growing old"

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.

For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.

If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars [seen here]