Athena Polias

 I grewup in Small Town, USA.  The people wholived there were complex, and simple, and wonderful, and awful in the way onlysmall towns can be.  Growing up, I alwaysfelt like an outsider looking in.  I sawfriendships form that I should have included me.  I saw causes and stands made that should havebeen my causes and my stands.  And when Ilooked at my wonderful, crazy, and very beautiful family, I wondered why I wasa part of it.  I never felt at home in myhome.  I never felt at ease in myskin.  And I never felt like I was givingthe world all that I could offer it. This may have been because I was gay, and being gay—especially in SmallTown, USA—meant being an outsider.  Itmight have been because of some kind of ambition that fought with my internallaziness.  Or it might have
                I firstmoved out at nineteen.  And then, when Iwas twenty, I moved to Europe to be with a boy. That went as well as you might think it went, and so I moved back inwith my parents when that European experience went sour.  But I moved out as soon as I could.  Being at home, for me, isn’t the same as itis for my brothers (who are so at ease being at home, they have no compunctionto move out, let alone to raise their children anywhere other than my parents’house).  I have an ingrained need to bemy own person, to be other than my family. Don’t get me wrong.  I love myfamily very much, but I need them to be my background, my foundation.  They are the place I come from so that I cangrow from them.   And I did have a driveto grow from them. 
                When I wastwenty-one, I moved from an amazing rental house I was living in with threeother roommates, two of which are very good friends of mine.  I had had enough of the small town, and Iwanted more from life than Sandpoint, Idaho could offer to a young gay guy inthe year 2000.  I wanted the big bang ofa city, but not too much bang.  So whenmy friend, Carr, offered me a place to sublet in her apartment in Seattle, Ijumped at the chance, and made the move of my lifetime. 
                I movedto the city. 
                On thethird day of the ancient Greek month Skirophorion,the people of Athens celebrated a festival in honor of their patron Goddess,Athena Polias—Athena of the city.  InSeattle, I became Frank Polias—Frank of the city.   I worked in a shop on the corner of 5thand Pine.  I made my home in the U-district.  I drank vanilla breve lattes like they weregoing out of style.  And I fell into theGap and started rocking tight, black, ribbed sweaters.  I saw Seattle for all its worth, its possibilities,its seediness, and its triumphs.  I fellin love in Seattle, and I did the most Seattle thing one could do:  I moved with my love to a small farm outsideof Seattle. 
                I mademany wonderful memories on that little, two-bit farm.  But now I am back in a city.  This time, the city is Tacoma.  But I want to do this city living justice bywriting about it in my blog.  I am goingto be Frank Polias, again, and I am going to harness all my identity as anoutsider looking in to give my blog a taste of Tacoma the way I see it.  Each week, give or take a week, I plan onwriting up my experiences with T-town and publishing a blog about it.  Athena Polias willing, I will give to you myinsights and observations in a yummy little funny story for all of you to eatup and enjoy.  I thank you in advance andlook forward to our future correspondences.

Clan of the Cappuccino

As you might have guessed, I am a fan of Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series, a group of books that includes The Clan of the Cave Bear.  When I first encountered these books in high school, they burned me alive with inspiration.  I wanted nothing more than to run out, hunt for my meals, and make medicines from teas.  I read up on survival and other Paleolithic ideals and conventions, and I was itching to put this into practice.  The only problem was, I had a soft heart and could never be a hunter.  Although, as a hoarder, I’m pretty sure I’ve got gathering skills. 

            I just discovered the final book of the series was published last year.  Some super fan I am.  I will say that the fifth book in the series, which was published in 2002, left me a little flat.  It didn’t have the drive or passion of the first two books, and it lacked the interesting dynamics of the third.  The fourth book was a long read, and a little too contrived, but it was a story about traveling from the Ukraine to France before the euro rail was invented, so I cut it some slack.  Rereading the books, however, has begun to light that same fire in my belly for all things Cro-Magnon!

            I am a white American, which means I love borrowing ideas from cultures that aren’t all about the Gap and Starbucks.  So while reading the books, which have a heavy theme of animals as totems and spirit guides, I began wondering what my totem would be.  Surely the Gap isn’t my totem … but maybe Starbucks is!  I do love coffee, and I’m already marked with a mermaid tattoo! 

            Joseph is already sorted on this issue.  When I met him, he already had pictures and wall art in his apartment depicting the gray wolf he identifies with.  Joseph has wolfish qualities, too.  He’s loyal, fiercely protective of his pack, and he’s a bit aloof.  (Don’t worry, he gave me none of that “lone wolf” crap when we were dating.  I would have socked him in the stomach for it … maybe my totem is the Boxing Kangaroo!) 

            So all the while I was rereading my way through the series of books, I kept thinking which animal would embody my spirit?  Which animal do I have such a kindred connection to that other people would recognize the qualities that connect us right away?  I have a few favorite animals, but favorite animals aren’t necessarily totem material.  For instance, lately, I have liked owls.  But I like owls as decorative motifs, and I don’t think I embody the wise owl spirit.  I have a list of animals it MIGHT be.  And I have a list of animals I would WANT it to be.  But even these “small” lists just make me feel like saying Noah’s Ark is my totem.  Why not?

            My desire for a totem has been getting to me.  I even tried a couple of YouTube meditations to find my Animal Spirit.  But the voices on these videos are too annoying and too fast for me to really get into, and (didn’t think of this) I don’t know how to meditate.  It was very frustrating.  I had to form an image of a “happy place” and when something came to mind like my bed, the narrator would say something like, “perhaps it is a meadow near a babbling brook, or perhaps it’s a mountain side with trees all around.”   Crap!  I was supposed to be in an outdoorsy place?  Okay.  Hang on.  Okay, there, I’m in a forest. 

            “Now, you see a path,” the narrator tells me. 

            Uh, no I don’t.  Hang on.  Thinking … thinking …

            “You start down the path,” the voice continues.

            I said hang on!  Geez!  Okay, I guess I’ll just make a path, stomping through some forest I made up in my head.  Why do I see a refrigerator in the tree branches?  Never mind, ignore it. 

            “You encounter an animal.”

            Oh, this is it.  Whatever animal I think of will be my totem forever … why can’t I think?  Think think THINK!!!!!

            “Now ask your animal …” oops!  Gotta hurry, I guess I see a Muppet!  Wait, a Muppet?

            “… if it is your Spirit Animal.  If the animal is not, continue along your path until you meet the next animal and ask it the same question …”

            Nope!  Lame!  Way too hippy for me!  I have a religious view.  I have ideas about the universe and how it works.  Why do I need to do this 1970’s I-wish-I-were-an-Indian-so-I-can-pretend-I-have-more-culture-than-Starbucks-drinkers crap?   Why do I NEED a Spirit Animal?  It just seems like something people make up to make themselves more important, anyway.  It’s not like I’m going to be attacked by crackheads some day and will be forced to call out, “By the power of EAGLE!!!” and have an eagle swoop down from the sky to carry me into safety, and scare the crap out of the crackheads at the same time. 

            And what would I do with a totem?  Meditate on it?  Paint pictures of it?  Get a tribal tattoo of it?  That just seems so … AWESOME! 

            But here’s the kicker.  One of the websites said if we can’t find our spirit animal, we have to RELAX, because being stressed out may scare animal spirits away from us.  Well, that’s just great.  How can I relax when I don’t know what my totem is? 

            Well, I give up!  I will never be an awesome caveman.  So much for The Clan of the Cave Bear showing me how to live my life.  I’ll just have to drown my totemless sorrows by shopping at the Gap.  I may need a cappuccino to get me through this difficult time in my life.  Spirit of Starbucks, take me away! 

The Call of the Mammoth

When I was in high school and going through all of the career counseling classes they make you take to see what jobs were right for your personality, there were only two jobs I was interested in.  The first career choice I picked was to be a puppeteer.  (The fact that I made my own hand puppets from my own designs made me super popular with the ladies.)  And the second career choice was made after I read Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear at the age of fifteen: I wanted to be a caveman. 

            I figured I would take a year after high school and move myself up into the mountains to survive on foraged and hunted food.  I would make clothing from the animals I killed.  I would make medicine from the herbs I found.  And I would surely find a cave somewhere in the wilderness of Idaho which would make a good home for me while I lived on a sabbatical away from humanity and technology. 

            I wasn’t stupid.  I knew this was going to be a lot of work, so I began preparing for it right there, as a fifteen year old boy, by reading every book I could get on survival, herbal medicine, flint knapping, and cavemen!  It became one of my many obsessions in my life.  I learned about the Venus figurines of the Aurignacian sites.  I learned about the painted caves in France and Spain such as Lascaux.  The Chauvet cave was discovered my junior year and I had a folder filled with information about it.  English class was dedicated to writing short stories about cavewomen and art class had me busy.  I painted rocks my Art Teacher, Mr. Shook, brought down from the mountains for me.  I sculpted my own Venus figurines from clay and Mr. Shook taught me to use the small kiln to fire special glazes on them.  I also began sculpting small, votive mammoths which I glazed in browns, oranges, and terracotta reds.  I wore a mammoth pendant I made for myself around my neck, had a raccoon tail on my backpack, and sported a faux fur vest which I wore in my senior portraits. 

            I’m not sure why, but the idea of Cro-Magnon humans living in a world of ice and winter with all of nature against them filled my mind for a long while.  My art was their art.  My dreams were to go back in time and breathe that primeval air.  I was a scrawny little guy who went hunting every fall with his dad and his brothers and never killed anything due to a combination of clumsiness and a soft heart.  But in my mind, I could survive an ice age. 

            The idea still flavors my existence.  My mom buys me mammoth figures when she comes across them.  Joseph bought me a mammoth ivory pendant as a gift one spring when we decided to rent a cabin and get away for a while.  And I still love looking at those cave paintings in books and on the internet.  But the idea of being a caveman hasn’t struck me for a long while until now. 

            In T-town, with an icy Mt Rainier looming above my new front porch, I have begun to hear the call of the woolly mammoth again.  I take my dogs for walks, and almost every time, someone (crackhead or otherwise) has to stop me to ask if my dog Dinky is a wolf.  Dinky is Siberian Husky mixed with Border Collie, and he is usually in a state of shedding his fur.  But he’s half the size of a regular wolf, and his eyes are brown as can be, not yellow.   

            Sally, my other dog, receives no such attention. 

            So I’m not sure how this inspiration will manifest itself this time around, but it was much of my culture in high school the last time it hit.  Perhaps I’ll take up painting rocks again, or maybe I’ll get a mammoth tattoo.  Until I know for sure, though, I will walk with my wolf and carry a spear in my mind.  (Maybe I should carry the spear in my hand, it might cut down on the crackheads who talk to me on said walks.)

Don't Flush Diapers Down the Toilet, and other things I've learned while moving to T-town

The island I lived on with my love and my dogs and even my little cat was a dream in more ways than one.  In some sense, it was the ideal place for us.  It was a crumbling little house that needed lots of love in the middle of an orchard long overgrown with blackberries and nettles.  It was full of birds and flowers in the springtime, apples and deer in the fall.  The friends we made opened themselves to us as though we were family members and old school friends they have had for a very long time. 

But in another sense, it was a dream we had to wake up from eventually.  We didn’t own the place, nor did we have the money, time, and know how to bring that poor house back from the brink of death it stands upon.  The very sensible thing to do was to pinch ourselves and move back to a city and why not the city I’ve been commuting to since I started nursing school in 2010 where I now work?  It seemed like the likely choice.  So we moved to Tacoma, which the locals colloquially call T-town.  Joseph and I have lived in Seattle, it was where we met and where we lived before we moved to the island.  But living in a city was a second nature for both of us and much of the city habits we developed were quickly shed when we crossed the ferry to our new home eight years ago.  Coming to T-town has been a rude awakening in some senses, and also a bit of a dream in its own right. 

So living amongst packing dust with our life scattered about us in poorly labeled boxes, Joseph and I found ourselves trying to conquer our fears and concerns one small job at a time.  And I’ve come to learn a few things:

1. Don’t flush diapers down the toilet.  The plumbing in the new house was speaking to us.  Literally.  When you flushed the toilet the bath tub gurgled.  When we ran the dishwasher--good gods, a dish washer!  I was beginning to think such things were myths!--the sink wheezed.  Finally, after two showers and a toilet flush, the plumbing had had it and everything backed up and pooled in the bath tub in a rather disconcerting display of color and texture.  I texted my landlord (a woman I work with who is a godsend) and within a 24 hours we had the men out here to router our septic line. 

The day was windy, the dogs were going nuts having to live in a new house and a new when the smart, upstanding guy and his slack jawed helper came to clear up the house’s old pipes.  There was a mess in the living room I was working on to make room for our couch and the dogs had to be shoved in the laundry room with the baby gate we bought for them in place.  The guys had me turn on all the water and flush the toilet multiple times to see if anything would back up again, and as it turns out, they did a top-notch job. 

The slack jawed guy showed me what he thought was a handy wipe and said, “You can’t flush these handy-wipes.” 

The upstanding guy called from across the yard, “That’s a diaper, turn it around.”

The slack jawed guy obliged and we both saw that it was indeed a diaper.

“You can’t flush these diapers,” the slack jawed guy told me.

“Good to know,” I said.

“Hey,” said the upstanding guy, “they just moved in, it’s not their diaper.”

But the advice was taken, I will never flush a diaper as long as I live.

2. Have ghosts, will travel.  It was well documented both by my landlord and other people who have lived in this house that this house is not haunted.  So my only explanation for why we’ve still been having spooky little events like the feeling someone else is in the bathroom while we’re in the shower, or my dog Sally being completely freaked out in an empty room by herself is that the ghost from the old house came with us to the new house.  But that’s okay.  I’m used to the ghost and having a friend in a new place is always welcome.  My landlord made me promise her that if the ghost turns out to be a poltergeist, that I wear a helmet if I allow it to slide me from one point to another on the floor.  She’s a nurse, so she’s all about safety. 

3.  “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold.”  The new place is full of potential friends.  A lady at Safeway greeted me like an old friend, even though I had not seen her before in my life.  I then realized, when she greeted me again as I walked the dogs one day,  that she lives a couple of blocks away from my house. 

On another dog walk, a woman yelled to me from across the street, “Alan!  Hey, Alan!” 

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not Alan.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I’m Frank,” I told her. 

“Oh, well, you walk just like Alan.  I’ve been thinking you were Alan for two days now.” 

Oh, great, so she has not only been watching me walk by for two days, my walk isn’t as unique as I thought it was.  Guess I’ve got a new walk to work on! 

There was also a roommate of sorts living in her car along side of our yard for the first couple of days we were here with her dog on a chain resting on our grass, but before I could learn her name or even pet her dog, she left.  Probably for the best, I don’t think she would have liked chipping in on the rent. 

4. Neighbors are always looking for a fight.  Our new neighbors have been very, very nice and have made it clear that we can come to them if we need anything, but just when I was starting to be very glad for better neighbors, the unthinkable happened.  I was minding my own business on my porch when one of the neighbors climbed up into the fort they have by the fence and took aim at me with a huge gun he had constructed with PVC pipe at some sort of camp last summer (he had the courtesy of telling me about the weapon he was using to shoot me).  So, now, I have to shop for Super Soakers to stash under the porch rocker just in case poop goes down in the hood. 

Armed with these new insights I will continue to make my home here in T-town.  I might have to be mindful of what I flush, or realize a creepy feeling that comes over me when I am alone is just an old friend saying hello; I may have new friends to make and new neighbors to dodge bullets from, but I am here and I am staying. 

TRAIL MIX part 2: Wagon Train

            In her book, Little House on the Prairie, my homegirl Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions that the Big Woods were growing so crowded that they more often than not would hear the echo of an ax that was not Pa’s ax, or a shot of a gun that was not Pa’s gun.  I completely sympathize with this sentiment.  In our world, Joseph and I can’t completely cut ourselves off from neighbors.  But there is a very real idea of being crowded, even on the five acres we currently rent. 

            Take for instance, the other day when I took my dogs into the deep back yard where I allow them to take care of their business, I saw a woman walking through the property.  I know this woman.  She drove her bus-turned-home (complete with wood and trash burning stove) onto the property of my neighbors a year or two ago. I saw her on our property before, and she thought I didn’t see her, so she slinked behind the building she was standing by to hide.  I decided this was as good of a time as any to introduce myself.  Joseph and I keep to ourselves, but even if we were the most open books on the planet (a goal my blog is going above and beyond in trying to reach) we would still appreciate anyone who wanted to come on our property to slink around to at least introduce themselves and maybe even ASK if it was okay.  As it turns out, she was making audio recordings of our windmill.  She collects sounds, apparently.  You can always tell a city slicker from their blatant disregard of boundaries.  If, in Idaho, I was caught trespassing, I would expect to at least be the target for some trigger-happy land owner.  You don’t cross boundaries uninvited. 

            So I call this woman on being on my property.  Again.  At first she tries to tell me the path through our property is easier for her to take to get to the back road.  So?  Then she tells me that the property line is actually marked by an old metal fence post, which Joseph and I had moved to its current location and has nothing to do with property lines whatsoever.  Then as I’m looking at her Bus-turned-Home, I realize that she has parked it in the very corner of the property line and has carved out a little yard from our side of the line for herself.  I was really beginning to get worked up when I realized something: I’m moving.  This is not my fight, nor my affair.  And this is a very good check mark in the column for pro-renting over owning your house. 

            Joseph and I are moving.  Thanks to a very kind lady, we found a house that is not too far from my work.  We’ve been moving boxes and furniture, but by bit, from our old country house to a home in the city.  Yep, we’re becoming city slickers, again.  The difference, however, is that there are actual fences to mark the boundaries between property lines.  And we won’t need a boat to go home.  The island was great while it lasted, but we out-grew it. 

            So pulling our lives with us in the back of the truck has set me to thinking a lot about Ma and Laura Ingalls.  We have the luxury of taking our things bit by bit and making multiple trips.  But if my worldly possessions had to compete with food stores for a space on a rickety old wagon, I’m not sure how I would decide between what to keep and what to leave behind.  But the call west held more promise to most than those worldly possessions they kept.  It was a promise for a new life and a new opportunity.  I think the pioneering spirit is alive in every culture, but has really been fostered in America where the Europeans found a wide open space where they could just pick up and leave there troubles behind.  I can’t count how many times I day dream about just picking up, moving house, and “starting fresh.”  It is a myth, and a dream that isn’t usually questioned.  Americans grow up with the idea that the grass is greener if they just venture out and see for themselves. 

So, if I over look all the inconveniences, the hard work, the doing without boxes of supplies and home furnishings, I guess I’m living the dream.  I will live in a new house and this new chapter of my life should be more than worth the effort. 

Ghost Stories

The house we currently live in is old.  Rumor has it that the original builders, the Nelsons, had to bring the lumber in by mule cart because our street didn’t exist in 1914.  When we moved in we thought it had a sort of crumbling charm.  Some of the exterior walls were bowed in the centers.  The old wooden stairs twisted around to a rather roomy space that was a little larger than a hallway, a space that connects the upstairs bedrooms and half-bathroom.  The lumber they are made from is well worn and shows wood grains close together which mean it is old wood.  New, commercially grown wood has wide spaces in the wood grains. 

            I woke up at 5:00 PM because I’m on the night shift.  The first thing I did tonight was step on a yellow jacket and it stung me right under one of my toes.  The long story short is that I had to stay home tonight and that enabled me to notice something with Joseph that unsettled both of us.  Because I’m on the night shift, I have to stay up all night anyway to keep my sleep cycle intact, so I was upstairs standing on the stairs in my accustomed place talking to Joseph as he readied for bed.  I always stand on the stairs while he flits from bathroom to bedroom getting ready.  As he was talking to me from the bedroom door we both looked up and saw something at the same time.  There are six white lines carved into the ceiling.  Six marks show that something was dragged from one point from in between the bedroom and bathroom doors to the stair landing.  It was Joseph who suggested that it looked like the mark of something with six fingers dragging its fingertips along the ceiling. 

            Now, I know what you’re going to say.  We probably moved something that scraped the ceiling and made the marks and didn’t realize it.  But Joseph and I are careful minded when we rent a place, and if either of us had made the marks, we would have remembered doing so.  What is more, when we tried to reproduce the marks with our own fingers, we found that we could not do it; the marks are cleaned off places on the normal aged discoloration of the white paint.  And in all this time living here, with me standing in that very spot talking to Joseph about his day as he came home from work, or plans while he was getting ready to sleep, neither one of us ever noticed these marks before.  They are both new to us.

            Normal people might think, so what?  Why are you so worried about these marks?  Well, I’m worried about them because they are just another unexplained phenomenon in a house full of unexplained events. 

            Right when we first moved into this house, we established that the dogs would sleep in the laundry room.  So one night in that first month or so after we made ourselves at home, I was tucking in the dogs, Dinky and Sally when I heard Joseph say, “Dinky, get down” from upstairs.  I hollered up to him to tell him that both Dinky and Sally were downstairs with me, and he said, “Oh, we have a black dog ghost.” 

            I rolled my eyes.  I’m usually much more prone to believe in ghosts than Joseph, so I knew he was teasing me.  He mentioned it again a few weeks or months later, seeing a dog that shouldn’t be upstairs, but as Sally is prone to sneak up there to make sure you’re not doing anything fun, I wrote the complaints off. 

            Then, one night, as I was upstairs in the office typing up some homework in the dark, I turned off the computer.  The only light besides the monitor upstairs was the light from the half-bathroom shining across the hallway and into our bedroom.  My eyes were a little wonky, because I had just been staring at a bright computer screen and now I was plunged in darkness, but I could clearly see that Sally was sitting in the doorway of our bedroom waiting to accompany me downstairs.  I stopped, and bent to pet Sally behind her ears and my eyes adjusted as my fingers came to the dog ears, there was nothing there.  No Sally.  No dog of any kind.  Sally was downstairs sleeping under Joseph’s recliner chair while Joseph watched TV.  The only thing I could do to explain the even to myself was to quote Joseph, “Oh, we have a black dog ghost.” 

            The dog ghost was fine.  Every once in a while it would dash across our peripheral vision, or seem to be in an otherwise empty room, but it has never appeared so real as to inspire me to touch it since that one time. 

            Joseph sleeps with a fan, and sometimes the fan causes problems in our marital bliss.  It can be too cold for me in the winter time.  It might cause earaches or my hair to tickle my face.  It might make gyrating noises if it’s an old fan and is on its last leg.  But rain or shine, summer or winter, Joseph has to have the fan to sleep.  Chalk it up to his being a Southern boy more used to fan-requiring climes.  So imagine my annoyance when the fan started making Joseph wake me up to tell me he heard voices. 

            “It’s just the fan,” I told him.  “I don’t hear anything.” 

            “No,” he insisted, “I hear voices.  Did you leave the TV on?” 

            Even with me telling him he was just dreaming or the fan was making his ears play tricks on him, Joseph went all the way downstairs to make sure the TV was off and then started looking for radios that might have turned themselves on in old junk drawers.  And this didn’t happen just one night, it happened at least once a month, and it became so common place that Joseph no longer looked for a cause and even stopped waking me up for it.  He would just mention it the next day. 

            “It’s the fan,” I told him each and every time. 

            So one night, about a year or so ago, I was lying on my side with Joseph asleep next to me when I heard two people talking.  I felt like I was hearing them from far away or that I was hearing a radio turned down very low.  But with the fan going, how could I hear it at all?  I actually got up and walked downstairs.  I couldn’t hear anything.  So I went to bed, but returning to the bedroom made the voices get louder.  The only radio we have in the bedroom is the alarm clock, and I listened with my ear to its speaker to try to rule out its going berserk.   Finally I had to lie down again and try to ignore it, but just as I started to drift off the voices would pick up again, or change tone, and wake me up until I woke Joseph up and asked him if he heard voices.  He didn’t hear them, but the next morning I had to apologize to him.  I guess the voices he heard were as real as they could be without coming from any identifiable source. 

            So we’re moving, and as if to prove that changes in the environment startle ghosts into action, our “friend” has been very present lately.  One morning while I was going to sleep for work, I felt someone walk into my bedroom even though I was home alone, the dogs were in the laundry room, and my BEDROOM DOOR WAS CLOSED.  The muffled sort of air that tells your ears that someone who is probably wearing a coat came through the closed door and walked across the fan (yes, Joseph turned me into a fan user).  As it walked across the fan, the wind from the fan was cut off, and as it passed, the wind hit my cheek again.  I kept my eyes squeezed shut as I felt it walk all the way around our bed and stop by me.  I refused to look at it and I forced myself to go to sleep.  It was real enough that it stopped the wind from my fan and I didn’t want to look at whatever it might be. 

            And maybe it’s just because I’m on the night shift that my comings and goings seem to overlap with its comings and goings more, but the other night I was trying to stay up so I could get ready for another stretch of work days, when I slowly began to nod off.  As my senses began to drift away I became aware that something was standing behind my couch just to my left and that as I was falling asleep.  I was falling asleep, so the part of my mind that became aware of the thing standing behind the couch could not rouse the rest of me, which seemed to be paralyzed with the prospect of going to sleep.  This thing (which I perceived as eyeless and hairy with black hair and large teeth) bent down to put its mouth next to my face and the smack of its lips against its gums woke me up faster than anything.  Nothing there.  Maybe it was just a dream, but I was fine not going to sleep for the rest of the night. 

            And maybe the face of black mold coming out of my wall is the face of Jesus coming to watch over us … and then again, maybe it’s just a face of a black mold man unaffiliated with any saviors coming to watch over us.  Maybe the mold man has six fingers it uses to drag across ceilings as he walks back to the place his wall over the stairs.  Who knows? 

            All I know is this: we are moving out of this house right when it is beginning to feel a little too crowded for comfort.    

Wedding Fiasco Part TWO: China Patterns

The wedding planning hasn’t stopped at my house, or rather, in my head.  Joseph and I are not rich.  I do not have parents who ever planned on paying for a daughter’s wedding, because they have no daughters.  And Joseph’s family is in the same boat, so the wedding that has really started to surface in our plans is a very small, simple, DIY affair.  I wanted to incorporate things that Joseph and I love and want to share with our guests.  This brought me to thinking that our wedding will be a camping adventure for the whole family and would have a woodsy theme. 

I suggested to Joseph that we should plan on serving our wedding dinner on camping dishes.  As a teenager I always imagined that I would have speckled blue dishes for my future house, and that my plates and mugs would be equally at home inside my log cabin as they would out on a prairie picnic.  Joseph, on the other hand, likes tin just fine, but has an aversion to those speckled blue dishes for reasons I have not divined.  And while I was planning to use this move to completely change out my haphazard collection of dishes for something nicer and more matched (albeit cheap camping dishes), Joseph suggested that we allow our guests to keep their camp dishes as a wedding gift.  This I knew was Joseph trying to tell me that he did not think highly of my speckled blue dishes. 

But I wouldn’t let this go.  I could forego my speckled dishes.  In truth, I don’t like them as well as I did when I was a teenager in North Idaho dreaming of the day I would live in my own Ted Kacynski cabin alone in the woods.  (Strangely, I never had a wife in my fantasy of the future.)  I liked the idea that we would use part of our wedding budget to upgrade our dinnerware into something that we would use forever.  And then it hit me, we needed to pick out our china pattern! 

My Grandmother has a rather extensive collection of Currier and Ives dishes that I love.  Whenever I see pieces of it in thrift stores and antique shops, I buy it.  It has a sentimental charm for me that I cannot resist and this was naturally the first china pattern I suggested to Joseph when I said I was willing to give up speckled camping dishes.  Joseph liked the idea of using some of the wedding budget to upgrade our dinnerware.  He thought that a meal with our friends and family in honor of our marriage was probably the best part of the evening, and it should be celebrated with new dishes that we would use for the first time on that day.  But he raised his eyebrows at the Currier and Ives.  That pattern, he said, was wonderful for Gram and Grandpa.  But the pattern was always for Gram and Grandpa, it wouldn’t be our dishes.  So that’s when I launched my second idea at him:  Fiestaware!  Color is one of my most favorite things in life, so what better china for a guy whose favorite color changes weekly than china made to be mixed and matched? 

Joseph’s serpentine eyebrow arched once again at this suggestion so I let my suggestion cool.  But I was bound and determined to think of an amazing patter that both Joseph and I would love. 

Shortly thereafter, I was consulting the Sacred Oracle of the Twenty-First Century.  I am speaking, of course, of Google.  I sometimes use its toolbar to type in my most intimate questions (knowing the whole time that these questions will forever be linked with me and affect my advertising experience on my websites).  I began to type “Which china pattern should I choose?”  But Google, being a sacred oracle, suggested “Which china pattern is made in the USA?”  Yes!  Sacred Google, you have done it again!  Joseph is a stickler for buying things that are made in America!  So I clicked on the suggestion and the very first thing that popped up was a made in America website that touted Fiestaware! 

Armed with this new information, Joseph’s eyebrow stayed put, and I was given the go-ahead to start planning my life in color: Fiestaware color! 

But how to choose a color, or two, or convince Joseph (who hates rainbow weddings) to have our wedding dinner on a rainbow of dishes? 

I began pouring over the Fiestaware websites and imagining color combinations that would look good together and would keep the idea of Frank and Joseph’s wedding alive.  For instance, while I love every color, some colors are more me than others.  And the first color that I took to on the websites was “Peacock.”  In every picture, peacock looked like the very blue of the Mediterranean, which I have seen many times … on Google.  It was an intense blue with a vague idea of green under its surface.  But how would I use this color?  I wanted to mix right off the bat, so that Joseph wouldn’t have to be persuaded later, but Peacock would be my main starting point.  Should it be Peacock, Turquoise, and Chocolate, or Peacock and Plum with punches of Lemongrass?  We almost ordered our first pieces in Peacock, but Joseph suggested we go somewhere to see the colors in person before we made our final decisions.  Okay, but I could already tell I loved Peacock very much.  I liked the Plum and the Turquoise, too.  And I absolutely hated the newest color, Paprika. 

So like a four-year-old on December twentieth waiting for Christmas, I waited, too. 

And finally, yesterday, it happened!  We went to Macy’s in the Tacoma Mall, and saw the Fiestaware for the first time with the intention to buy.  And it was beautiful, all those colors paired next to each other in stripes of cups, saucers, and medium sized canisters.  Like a moth to a flame, I walked straight to the Peacock and picked up a mug. 

But something was wrong. 

This was not the blue of legend I had seen so much of on my beloved Oracle Google.  This was a primary blue.  A flat, though intense sky blue.  A Crayola dream of Easter Egg Blue.  But it had none of the mysterious notes of green beneath its glaze.  When I held it up with Turquoise, I felt a little disappointed.  When I put it next to Chocolate, I felt a little sick.  And when I tried it with Scarlett red, I felt like Superman.  And while I do love my Super Friends, I don’t want people to think of them on my wedding day. 

Joseph did not like it, either, and his stupid eyebrow made no bones about telling me.  I’m sure Peacock is just fine for many people, but it was not fine for us. 

“So,” Joseph said, “which colors do we like?” 

And that’s when we began to really pour over the glazes as though we were visitors in the ruins of some lost civilization, looking for those colors that would speak to us.  One color, that for me, was Fiestaware’s best supporting actor was Lemongrass.  It’s a funky, retro yellowish green that shines brightly with every color it is paired with.  It makes the perfect companion with everything.  And even though I didn’t like it as the main color, I knew Lemongrass was my favorite, and would be a part of my collection.  But we wanted to have that main color, and we found it. 

Just as much as Peacock looked good on a computer screen, Paprika looked bad.  But in person, it was warm, understated, and vibrant.  And the best part was, it sang when it was paired with Lemongrass.  And, best of all, Joseph loved Paprika.  It has a terracotta toned brown hue.  It feels like a cabin’s warm logs in firelight.  We were on the hunt for a covered butter dish to start our collection, which Macy’s didn’t have in our new-found Paprika.  So, we took our show on the road and went to the Fiesta Store on Proctor in Tacoma.  Here we not only found a Paprika butter dish, but Joseph found pasta bowls in Evergreen, a discontinued color that makes a nice teal-green contrast to the Paprika.  We bought all three pieces, which drained our wallet a little faster than we expected, which lead to our next thought: we might need to register for Fiestaware. 

But registering should be easy, right?  At least we know which colors we like.