Home Again, Home Again?

Where is home again?

I write tonight from my rental house on the little island by the bridge.  The one where I grew up.  The name of the island even has Little in it, and yet despite its small size, it has distinct neighborhoods.  And my rental is not in the neighborhood I grew up in.  It is at least three miles and 15 years away -  it feels as distant, as alien as the moon. 

After rehearsal I hit the road for a walk for two very good reasons: it was beautiful out, and I was terrified.  I went to a familiar place, a public, quarried, graffitied, lookout, makeout place.  A safe place.  A palimpsest place.  I walked in the mossy lane, longer than I remember; I climbed up the rocky slope, shorter than I remember.  But at the top, the encircling view was- for all intents and purposes- the same.  The play of light familiar on the green of the bridge, the blue of the water, the reflective gray of the mudflats- the mudflats that had earlier caressed my nose as I crossed the causeway whispering "you would know us anywhere til your dying day and beyond and we are your childhood, and we will always be right here fragrant and exposed of a low tide, longer than you will live"- the spruce, the roofs, the sunset- all where I had left them.  Long ago and far away.

On younger trips up the hill, there was something I never noticed, never named, never saw from this vantage point til tonight.  To the south, beyond the big island, stretching its shoulders on the horizon- was a tall island.  Flattened by distance, it was still a profile I would know anywhere.  Home.  Across miles of crisp autumn air, and in the fast fading light, it was there for me to look at.   On that island, there's a red and white Ford pickup parked at the town landing by the tomalley shop.  There is a gray cat in a saltbox house at the base of another rock outcropping, a cat who is trying to figure out how to break into the new automatic feeder.  There's a black and white cat who will sleep and eat in the cab of a model T truck.  There's a journal and a box of chocolates on a table, that I forgot to take.  Tomatoes on vines in the garden- tomatoes I should have picked.

Two thousand miles- to the North, to the West, Dave is in a place I cannot even picture.  There's moss, I know.  And moose, he hopes.  I have neighbors here.  But I don't know them.  In that journal, on the table, Dave wrote "think of me, and I will be there."  (I paraphrase, since I can't refer to it, damn me and my rush to get out the door because of my reluctance to get out of bed)  So I called him to mind, and I walked with him a while.  Someday he will walk with me here, and I won't feel lonely.  He'll probably cook, and I will go to bed on something more nourishing than a Slim Fast shake and a frozen enchilada.  He'll talk to me, as comforting as the smell of mudflats, and the terror of a new job and life will diminish.  I will look into his face, and feel at home, because in his eyes I am not only known but welcome.

So yes, I came back- as many people don't.  To the same island, the same school- but for all that I might know some names, some faces, it is not comfortable, not home.  Not yet.  Sometimes home is provided (generally in a smile), sometimes home is something you just have to work at.  Again and again.

I'll crawl into bed tonight with a book, my faith (work+time=it'll be okay), and the image of this Friday when I will go home to the patient red truck,  my cats, the tomatoes, the journal and the chocolates.  Glad to see the neighbors I know.  And I will dream of next Friday, when Dave will walk toward the baggage claim in Portland- coming home to me.


      

Sleeping In

When I woke today, it was already light- all quiet but for the rain.  No alarm, no cats.  No Dave making coffee in the kitchen, singing nonsense songs about having become an indentured servant to a woman and two felines, or about how his sternman (me) needs to get out of bed.  Instead, he is still asleep, somewhere on the outskirts of Calgary, dreaming of his imminent moose hunt.

When I woke today, I didn't even need to get out of bed.  It's one of those weekends.  I could sleep through it, read through it, see no one, run away, watch the entire series of South Park, surf the internet until my eyes fell onto my keyboard- in the words of Terry Pratchett, the world is my mollusk...or, judging from the introverted options I listed, I am a mollusk.  No deeds to do, no promises to keep.  Not the sort of weekend you get very often once you qualify as an adult.  

So then there's the question: What to do with it?

I did roll out of bed, originally intending to crawl back into it.  I fed the cats, bade farewell to the contents of my bladder, and then turned to head back to bed.  And I probably would have made it back, except I compulsively looked at a clock.  6:25 am. 

The borderline. 

I could get up, have a nice pokey morning with coffee, and puttering.  Or I could sleep in.  In my nice bed, on a rainy morning.  But if I sleep in, will I ever get up?  My actual stated goals for these Daveless weekends were along the lines of "Oh, I am going to thoroughly clean the house" and "well maybe I will treat them like writing workshops..."  All very proper and productive. 

But there is a certain allure to sleeping in, even with the knowledge that going back to bed and sleeping until, say, 8am- would probably set a pattern whereby I would spend the weekend in some horizontal position, doing nothing more strenuous than producing oil with my scalp.  I know- I make that sound terrifically enticing, don't I? 

Clearly, since you are reading this, and since my foreshadowing kept no secrets, I did get up.  I have made it all the way down to the couch, with a rest stop at the Keurig.  Unfortunately, I have found my way under another comforter, and the cats are ostentatiously advertising the joys of napping. One has moved to my side, to transmit the sleeping sickness through touch and the lulling vibration of his purrs.  Why have I taken these demons into my home? 

Will I ever keep my eyes open long enough to burn the trash, take out the compost, vacuum and wash the floors, and totally reorganize the office?  So.  Much.  At.  Stake. 

So.  Sleepy.

Post-It from My Lighting Booth

Well, I have been in my job for about 6 weeks now, and have yet to have either technical training or the financial training necessary to pull off the full scope of my job- but I am undaunted in the dim!  Or perhaps mildly daunted and in the dark, but I persevere. Tonight is a bit of a trial by fire- a reminder that not everyone in the community is rosy kind and helpful, not everyone on the island has the kind of joie de vivre, live and let live, things will work out- imperfections and all- attitude.

In this job I am not to ever burn any bridges that might lead to support and programming, so I am afraid I will have to bite my tongue until the red behind my lids abates.

Yes, You Can Go Home

You can't assume it will be the same as when you left, but most of the pieces will be there.

I left school last night to go up to Ellsworth to hang out with my grandmother, mom, uncle, and aunt in the hospital. Another fall and another crack to the head has sent Grammie to the ICU- not because her condition is immediately dire, but because she needed to be where she would have the most attentive attention. When I got there, she was all bandaged up and looked like Yoda in a bathing cap. One of the nurses had finished off the dressing with a pink gauze printed with purple hearts. The result was actually quite fetching and cheerful, and Grammie generally rocked the adorable old lady look. She was also mellow and pretty chipper, all told. Because her short term memory is so poor, she didn't realize she'd fallen, and wasn't really fretting much. The Zen of Dementia. She had her family kicking around, some hands to hold, and a good dinner. On a sixty second loop, or really any loop, that's not so bad.

Hopefully that superannuated Buddhism will serve her well as the family moves her to a new nursing facility, where, we hope, she will have a higher level of care. Her former home is, as are most old-age homes in this country, a for-profit establishment, which wrests earnings from Medicare by underpaying staff, and under staffing the facility. Not the best recipe for quality care. So we will try another home, run by another company. Mom would prefer to keep her at our real home- the one run by our family, but the family can't afford to have a household member not working. As far as aphorisms go, "money makes the world go around" does, all too often, hold up to scrutiny.

But I am home- have been for a while. And the evenings, generally few and far between, spent under the florescent lights at the Ellsworth hospital, are a big part of the reason why. I remember the fall of my first year on IAH, when Charlie had had another heart-related complication. I took the evening boat off, and as the light faded during the crossing, I was glad that while it did require a boat ride, it was a relatively easy matter to get where I needed to be. And last night, packing up Grammie's room at the old old home, it had just been a matter of a familiar drive through the familiar fog. The world has gone green, and springy, and soft the way that it does, and the conversation in the car spun around the axis of education, the way that it does. Mom also pointed out to Uncle Vern what I had also been thinking: "at least we're not packing up her room because she's dead." Then we all thought, but no one said: "this is a dress rehearsal." For her passing, and then for our own.

But many hands make for lighter work. And every season comes back around.

Reckoning I am Very Lucky

Seems I didn't have much to say for myself in April. Turned 31, which was kind of pleasant, since I like prime numbers, and by the mathematical definition of "happy" 31 is a happy number.

In the wins/losses categories: the island successfully got a new fellow placement to help with ICDC and town business; we did not get the Community Block Development Grant for affordable housing; I did get that theater job, the one so serendipitously dropped in front of me. I even have secured rental housing on Little Deer Isle (my very home island) of all places, for the overnights that the new job will require. And I am very humbly gratified that the new job will pay a comfortable middle class salary, with benefits. As someone who entered the workforce with a B.A. in Theater, making a dependable living wage with benefits was my pie in the sky. Nothing fancy, just the economic clout to be stable, in a job that meant doing some good in the world. Through some wild quirk of the universe, this job- one requiring a Theater background- came into being in my own backyard and ended up being structured and supported in such a way that- even in this time of financial crisis- it wasn't cut.

So let's actually chalk that one up to stupendous good luck.

Now I will just have to make sure I do good work, and am worth those pennies, many of which come from private donations.

The job will start on July 1st, shortly after this school year ends (June 20th). I have to admit, while terrified of the learning curve of the new job, I am looking forward to a measure of clarity it might bring- allowing me to be more one thing (an arts educator) than so many things (tutor, volunteer theater director, non-profit part time executive director, selectman, chairperson, blah, blah, blah....). Granted: I will still be a selectman. I will probably still serve on the ICDC board. But there is a certain amount of divesting that could be done, and that I welcome. I harbor secret dreams of getting my weekends back. And not in a naughty "I am seriously shirking my real work by deciding to work with Dave on the boat" sort of way, but in a "this is my leisure time and I can do whatever the hell I want with it, guilt-free" sort of way.

The stuff I love doing? Problem solving and working like a mad theater geek? That will be my day job. Organizing a rehearsal schedule, planning the blocking, developing lessons, etc... they will no longer be tasks that need doing on the weekend, or on week nights after work and before a meeting. That's the stuff that will actually make up my work day. I will get to do what I love because I am supposed to, because I have been given the keys to a theater and I am contractually obliged to make it come alive.

Mwaa haa haaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! Being brainwashed by the Protestant Work Ethic (or- just as likely- having no economic alternative to hard work) is not so bad, if you love your work. I can't believe I will get to do what I love in order to make a living. And because it is administrative, I actually get a large degree of independence. If I want to do Godspell as the next community theater production, and it seems like it will work, I get to make that call. Holy Smokesies. I get to say "hey guys, let's put on a show!" And then I have ability to make it happen.

So yeah. Consider this blog post as the official "Morgan goes into shock about the prospects of her new job" post.

At any rate, the whole package is a really nice thing to have on the horizon- a very solid idea of how the bills are going to be paid, the knowledge that if I get sick I can get whatever it is taken care of, and that there's a good 48hrs or so a week that I might reasonably use to decompress and just hang out with Dave. At this point I would have been happy with those three. Throwing in work I could see wanting to do for a long time...

31. Very happy. Very Primed.

The Ragged End of Winter

According to all the local markers, spring has now officially begun. Cabin Fever Theater on Deer Isle has finished the run of its yearly show, Isle au Haut's town meeting was today. The equinox came and went; we begrudgingly set our clocks ahead.

This spring has revealed little in the way of delight thus far- though lord knows I am open to the possibility, and keep telling myself it is around the corner- after this deadline, or that deadline. Choosing to be highly involved on this island, even though I spend most of my waking hours working on another island, has left me generally strung out and testy. Weekends evaporated some time last year, and I answer to a host of masters. Mine was the surliest face at town meeting today, no doubt, as I picked up another dubious town honorific (by dint of being a responsible young person). Well- perhaps Dave's was surlier, but it was hard to tell, because he is sick, and had his head bowed for the duration.

And as I do the work, and get more tired, more stressed out, and my outlook bleaker and bleaker- I end up wondering "is this how it is going to be?" That life on this island will entail commuting so that I can actually make a living (but not a full time living, as that doesn't jive with the mailboat schedule), and then coming home to the many hats being an "islander" requires one to wear. Though the funny thing is, many islanders opt out of wearing any official civic hats at all. It's not suited to their temperament, or they did their bit a decade ago.

Well, maybe despite my shiny education, my youth, and rapidly diminishing naivety, civic engagement on this island is not my style. How long do you have to be involved before you can retire to the more pastoral island life? Is it just a quota of years, or is it counted in years per committee? I work with other people who give a great deal of time to the town. 60-something men, the lot of them. They are pleased to have another in their number, and they are pleased to have someone to pass the bag to as they (understandably) also want to move on from the intense duties that come with trying to keep this place going. It's just tiresome that all the bags are being passed to me. Because we suffer from a dire lack of shiny young educated naifs. Basically we have one left, and she's crumbling. I have it on good authority. There's only so much multi-tasking I can do, only so many times I can cheerfully field questions and requests and play nice until I am thoroughly drained. I am not, by nature, an extrovert.

A comrade, a comrade, my kingdom for a comrade! Right now we are blessed with the quietly incomparable Margaret, but alas, most Island Institute Fellows are loaners, and two years is the limit. She will be moving on after summer.

Remember me? I'm you, too.

When I was sixteen I left my home town on an island. Packed up, headed to a new school in the Northern middle of Maine's nowhere. To study Science and Math so that I could also study music, dance, and theater. Surrounded by potato fields, I damn near pined for the water.

Then I went to the landlocked heart of the country, in Iowa, again for theater. My Freshman advisor looked at the name of my high school and told me I needed to major in Biology, not Theater, so that I could actually get a job when I graduated. She was a philosophy professor, and that was her philosophic take on my future. Theater could be my spare time gig, my gal on the side. When I went to my advisor from birth, mom rolled her eyes and said to declare for theater, since it was what I wanted all along.

I am not blessed with a surfeit of sense. So I did. For four years I lived in a box believing that most things are possible (though perhaps not staging Artaud's Jet de Sang), rubbing shoulders with all sorts, and living for and through the work. I only mustered a semi-respectable GPA, but then the classroom never held a candle to the theater, unless the theater was the classroom. I very seldom got the roles I longed for, but I developed a rich friendship and appreciation for the girl who did (I always enjoyed her performances, but friendship came out of late nights hand washing and ironing silks when we ran costume crew together- thank you For Colored Girls). And yes, when on the last leg of that four year journey I finally got the role- success was counted sweetest for never having been Juliet. Especially because I shared the stage with her, and the other Top Girls in the program. I never did play opposite my other, dearest friend- except for scenework: Arkadina and Trigorin. It was not the right scene for us. I just cherish the one audition together for Desire Under the Elms (the only authentic Yankee auditioning, I didn't make the cut).

Later, when we all dispersed to our ends of the earth, I came back to Maine. To get back to being an authentic Yankee. Which meant I decided to turn my back on Theater, more or less. I wanted to be dependable-ish. To be fully human in the real world, not just in the black box. I wanted to finally be home. I would fit in community theater as I could: but working in theater, using the degree I was now sorely out of pocket for...? I gave up that ghost. Cause there are a lot of things in life I love. Being there to pick blueberries when they are ripe. Soldiering through the seasons; loving the light on the water, on the rocks; spending part of most every day on a boat; being within a few hours' range of my family's kitchen table. And now, Dave.

I think the skill that served me well and got me through school, was that I could make myself enjoy or take interest in most anything (except retail sales). It's a survival skill useful for only children. So I could let a big love go (it could be ravenous- four years taught me that), knowing that I would be able to pick up and put together other smaller loves. Was it islander pragmatism? Too much Chekhov in the Grinnell curriculum? What was slaving in a city for the love of theater and spending almost every minute wishing to be elsewhere compared to living and working in Maine and occasionally longing for theater?

For a decade I pretty happily repressed the whole theater thing. I figured it was completely over when I moved to the unbridged island. But then I had to get a job, and the one that showed up was in my hometown. And since I had to spend more time on the mainland, it wouldn't hurt to audition for Maria in the Sound of Music- since now the town did have theater. So I got to stand on the stage and sing those songs- catchy and wholesome, and learned by heart long ago: before I had any training; before I had built any pretense at a resume; when I was just a kid singing on a septic field because it felt so damned good to be bursting with song that it required the highest elevation on our property.

And that landed me here. Now. Two weeks out from- forgive the phrase!- my directorial debut. I will not be singing this time around- not on stage. I will have brought people to a place where they get to sing their hearts out. It's a new place for me, and it may even lead to the unimaginable- that I make a living with that theater degree. Here. In Maine.

Tonight I have survived another rehearsal- directing takes more preparation and improvisation than acting ever did.

The performance of this role lasts nine weeks, and then ends on opening night. My family and friends won't have seen even a snippet of it, just the echoes. The tunes are in my head, the acting beats in my heart, and the rhythm is in my body- but. My job is to speak, not sing; to stage, not swing. I have always loved the process- bringing the words and notes from the page and breathing life into them. So I enjoy directing. I get to be constantly helpful to a lot of people- problem solving for actors, cutting extraneous numbers, set pieces, and props to make life easier on the cast and crew, etc. I hope I solved exponentially more problems than I created, at least!

But I confess, and only to this page, that I feel slightly as I did when I didn't get the part. Turns out that while I love the process, I also love being a part of the product. One of the bodies on stage physically striving to make the thing come off. The heart bursting with song, the head wrestling with life, the soul seeking satisfaction. Part of the humanity burning under the heat of the lights.

Next year (if there is one) I will have the brains to at least cast myself in the chorus.

Over the past couple of days, I have been talking with my students about what it means to be a geek. That, original definition of a carny who would eat bizarre things aside, it simply means one who is passionate about a certain discipline- unabashedly. To the bone. On a daily basis in the course of my job I flirt with various forms of geekdom. I thrill to the Pythagorean Theorum, I deliver the goods on photosynthesis, and obviously- discuss definition drift. It's fun, more or less. But the thing that makes me scared, the thing that gives me insomnia, the thing that is so perfect so natural so mine is still that sublime black box.

So imagine all the demons that could come pouring out with this job opening. And at the bottom, the scariest.

Hope.