Minkgirl Muses

I’ve been back from Ireland for a week, but I’m still tripping. Somehow, I lost my mental and emotional mooring during transit. Maybe it’s that we had always envisioned the trip as the boundary between normal London life and the end time. We knew that when we returned from our holiday, we would start packing in earnest and shutting everything down. And so we have. We leave our flat 2 weeks from today, and fly back to America for good 3 weeks from Sunday. Everywhere I go, I think “Is this the last time I’ll be here?” Every time I see someone I know, I wonder if I should say a proper goodbye or leave it to chance that we’ll be together again. I was in the playpark yesterday with a lovely French woman, whose family we’ve been friendly with. It was a rare sunny day, and the kids were climbing and playing and scrapping around. We sat at a picnic table and chatted, until finally, we just ran out of things to talk about. It isn’t that we’re not interested in each other – if we were staying here, I think she would become one of my close friends. But we know we probably won’t see one another again, and I could feel both of us realizing this. We’ve already covered all the superficial topics, so there’s nothing else to talk about unless we go deeper, and there isn’t time to do that. Almost as one mind, and even though there was plenty of daylight left, we got up, collected the children, said our goodbyes and with relief in our hearts, headed back to our homes.

I’ve never gotten over the strangeness of leaving people behind. When I was a kid, I used to get really mooky during the last few days of summer camp, because I knew that the girl I ate grape popsicles with everyday was going to go back to her home two towns over and that we would probably never see each other again. My last hours with every work colleague, student, actor, and friend have always been flavored with piquant nostalgia and the queasy recognition of life’s impermanence. How is it that can we know each other so deeply and specifically in this moment, and yet know that we will be complete strangers in the future? I don’t think I’ll ever get over this. Another reason why I’m glad to be heading back to San Francisco and staying put for awhile. I want accumulate a wealth of friends, colleagues and acquaintances, so that I have a nice fat human cushion to land on the next time I have to say goodbye to someone.

In other news of the day, here’s an ironic tidbit:

I just repaired my journal (using Gman’s glue and sticky tape), which he roughed up earlier this year in a fit of pique. He actually tore out the first page and then tore that page up into smaller pieces. I found them scattered around the house like confetti one day after I had been nursing the baby when he wanted to play with me. He also removed a postcard that I had affixed to the inside cover of the journal – a card created by a young San Francisco theatre maker advertising a show, which had caught my fancy and seemed to sum up my experience of 2006 (the year I started the journal). The card has the single word Zen printed on it, but the surface of the card is very rough – essentially the same texture as sandpaper. I loved this visual/visceral metaphor of the fact that a state of being present isn’t always full of touchy feely flowery goodness. Sometimes being present really rubs you raw. Having Gman literally rip the Zen out of my inner life seems like another cosmic joke – haha on me if I think any amount of thinking and scribbling is going to stand up to the deep, dense, and passionately complicated experience of being a mama. G-d have mercy on me, and please keep my cupboards full of sticky tape.

Be well.