48

The earlier years are nested inside me like matryoshkas: the early confusion, the youthful romanticism, the 20-something premature jadedness. They’re all still there.

48 has such beautiful symmetry:

48
24
12
6
3

Halfway to 96. It’s still not too crazy to say to myself, Only half over. (Yes, that’s getting to be a progressively more difficult argument to make.)

When I look in the mirror, I still expect to see 18-year-old me looking back. I still ask the same question I asked back then: Who are you?

D.

That time of year, I suppose

It’s September, but here in Bake-o it feels like the middle of summer. And I keep thinking about how, before Karen broke her hip a few years ago, we used to take a summer drive up the Oregon coast. It must be the time of year, but I keep remembering those drives. How on the last drive we made it as far as Newport Oregon, and stayed at an ocean front hotel that had a jellyfish tank in the lobby, and how very pleasant our stay was, and how I thought, “It’s really not that much trouble to get away. This is nice enough, we ought to do this two or three times a year.”

I think that was in 2006, maybe even 2005.

These memories assault me unbidden:

There’s an old guy, in Bandon I think, with a model train collection. He lets people visit but he takes a dim view of children — he watched Jake with a steady intent that was nearly insulting. (Yes, he doesn’t know our son, doesn’t know that Jake is not and has never been a destructive force of nature. Not like some boys.)

There’s a place in Newport where you can paint pottery and get it glazed and fired. We had them mail us a bunch of pieces . . . most were broken when they arrived, but we still have the salad bowl.

South of Newport, there’s a sushi place we’ve been to twice. Last time, they made us wait two hours for our food. They were able to keep Jake (who was quite young at the time . . . six or seven?) well supplied with tofu, but it was still a grueling wait. The kid was great, never kvetched, just played with his toys and ate his tofu.

I keep thinking about the Newport Aquarium, which I think is better than the Monterey Bay Aquarium — every bit as nice but half as crowded. Recently, unpacking, I found a stuffed animal from our last trip. An octopus.

We’ve been to the Oregon Seal Caves twice, I think. Always impressive — both as a geological formation (I think it’s one of the largest sea caves anywhere) and as a noise/stench. Lots of seals or sea lions or whatever. Noisy buggers.

I miss these trips up the coast. I miss the silly dinosaur park north of Gold Beach, the place with the giant cabbages. (The cabbages are real. The dinosaurs are fake.) I miss the petting zoo in Bandon, where my young son had a penchant for taking pictures of animal poops. It’s one of the biggest petting zoos in the world, by the way, and if you have young children, it’s a reason unto itself to make the trip to the Oregon coast.

I miss the coast itself. It’s indescribably beautiful, especially the stretch from Gold Beach to Port Orford. I miss hiking with my son along the coastal trail. They seemed like such boring hikes back then, but now my heart aches for them.

More than anything else, though, I miss traveling as a family. We do a lot less of it nowadays, since Karen doesn’t travel well.

And I keep thinking about the ocean, and the wind in Bandon, and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in Newport, and Yachats (which is just a fun name to say), and all the bridges large and small we cross on our journey north, and the little hotels and tiny towns and restaurants, some gems, some crap, always a surprise.

I’m an odd bird. I was restless after ten years in one place, and yet I dislike change, too. I guess some losses take a while to register.

D.

Coughing up a lung, unpacking

This is one of those viruses where the improvement is incremental. I know yesterday was better than last Friday because I had no fever, no chills. I know last night was better than the night before because I got to sleep without a cough drop in my mouth. For the past four or five days, I’ve been able to lie down without feeling my lungs collapse into a layered pastry of velcro. And this morning, I had the energy to unpack.

I brought in six or seven boxes from the garage, most of which were labeled ‘kitchen, store,’ meaning these were low priority items that could be left in storage as long as necessary. There’s a futile feeling associated with such unpacking; after all, I have a fully functional kitchen now, so anything I might unpack is, at the very least, unnecessary. And so I’ve had to decide what to do with another two huge pyrex casserole dishes, another three frying pans I never use.

Some things are useful. I found our electric can opener, our Belgian waffle maker, our bread machine. I also found the base of a Cuisinart (nothing else left, just the base), an old mark-up board written on with indelible marker, a wire rack for barbecuing fish (which I’ve never used), a joke drinking mug, a caulking gun.

And so forth. I threw a bunch of stuff out, and I put more stuff out into the garage for eventual donation. I kept the mini-Bundt pan, the fajita iron, the bamboo forms for making sushi. We keep all our wedding china, naturally, but we’ve had perhaps two or three occasions to use it over the years. I broke one of our wine glasses from the wedding china sets — I doubt it will be missed.

I don’t know what impulse led us to grow over the first two decades of marriage, but at last we’re finally shrinking.

Still. I haven’t found our flatware — I know it’s out there somewhere — and I haven’t found the one thing I tend to think symbolizes our decades of uncontrolled growth: an aebelskiver mold I bought in Eugene, Oregon. I even used it once. So, yeah, there’s at least one more box of kitchen stuff out there, along with countless boxes of books.

Oy, the books: we had a built-in bookcase in our master bedroom in Oregon, and nothing like that here. I have no clue what I’m going to do with all of our books.

Time to drink more water.

D.

They have a union, you know

D.

Sick

Funny how the common cold can make you wish you were dead.

I know who did it: daughter of a patient I saw on Friday. She kept coughing without covering her mouth, launching snot rocket after snot rocket. One of them hit home.

The annoying thing is, I’ve already passed it to my son. Isn’t that the opposite of what’s supposed to happen?

So excuse me while I cough up a lung.

D.

By popular request

Coming soon, to a womb near you.

Gimme some time to compose my thoughts. I’m frazzled from the move, from work, from lack of sleep.

Oh. Still need to pack the kid his lunch.

D.

Away for a bit . . .

We’re moving out of temporary housing today, and our internet service won’t kick in until Tuesday. Regarding the move from this rental: it is amazing how much stuff we’ve accumulated in two months. Most of it is food, but still. I’ll be able to transport this stuff in two trips with the Camry stuffed to the gills, if I’m lucky.

D.

Too cute

My son outgrew his bowler hat, and he’s been pestering me to find a store where we could buy a new one. The kid hardly ever asks for anything, so it’s not like we’re spoiling him with bowler hats. Anyway, whenever Jake talks about the bowler hat we like to claim he’s emulating Alex (from A Clockwork Orange). Kind of difficult since he’s never seen the movie. (He’s way too young. He should be at least fourteen.)

We thought it would be fun to dress him up like Alex for Halloween. Karen remarked that he ought to skip the athletic supporter, which of course forced us to do a google image search, which led to

Time for a little ultracuteness!

Which doesn’t at all explain how we came by this,

pimp my code!

. . . from this zany place.

Gaaaah I’m exhausted.

D.

I am so ready

8. No more mega commute.

This commute is really wearing me down. It’s bad enough that to some small degree, I find myself liking call because it means I don’t have to make the drive home.

Today, on a stretch of two-lane highway with no chance of passing (no dashed white line) for about 8 miles, I found myself sandwiched with a tailgater behind me, a slow person in front of me. I should have pulled over and gotten myself out of the sandwich, I know, but I wanted to get home.

After a while, there’s a long, straight bit of road with the dashed white line. There was no one ahead in the oncoming traffic lane — no one — so I passed. Safe, legal pass. I didn’t cut off the person in front of me, I just passed, but you would think I had run over her cocker spaniel. She honked and flashed her brights at me for the next minute. She didn’t speed up and tailgate me, but I found myself wondering if that was next.

I don’t know why stuff gets to me, but it does. My son says I stress out too much.

D.

Bakersfield!

I was going to write a “God help them, they know not what they do” post, but I think perhaps I should sign the contract first 🙂

D.