fun

When I started my MFA program at Goucher College, my mind was in a frantic race for a thesis.  Would I write Kisstory: The History of the Kiss?  Would I write The Law of Average: How Mediocre Became the New Great?  Would I finally write the book of essays—about running and climbing, amusement park riding, and camping: Things That Were Fun When You Were Young (But Hurt Now That You’re Old)?  (Instead, I wrote The Book.)

I meant to delve into the history of those activities and compare how it feels to do them as a child with how it feels as an adult fraught with a physical intolerance for vertiginous puking agents and bug bites, ground sleeping, and immobility.  Give me songs around the campfire, then drive me back to the hotel.

I’m thinking about fun now because I’ve had my fill of it this weekend.  Friday night, I went with a friend to see Boister, a local band with national proportions, at the Wind Up Space, a comfortable venue on North Avenue.  The place was filled friends: former, old, new, Facebook, ex-, ex-Facebook, wanna-be, and wanna-be-ex friends.  My husband was asleep at 9:30 p.m., when I left.  So I told him the next morning that I’d had fun

“Fun?  What’s fun?” Marty wanted to know.  “What’s fun about watching a band and drinking?”  His argument was that I might have had a good time, but enjoyment didn’t make for the wild, childlike abandon of fun.

But I disagree.  Friday night, I smiled endlessly.  I flirted with friends.  I hugged.  I talked and laughed.  And damn it, I even danced (or, rather, moved in a pre-dancelike fashion).  It felt more heady than enjoyment to me.  It felt let’s-do-this-again good.  And what makes it fun instead of enjoyment could be this: for nearly three hours, I didn’t think about my father being dead or the things I needed to do the next day. 

I forgot the woes of life and felt only the joys.  So playing Scrabble with my mom is enjoyable.  Seeing Chuck Prophet is fun.  Having coffee with my friends on Friday mornings is enjoyable.  Riding a rollercoaster is fun.  And sex is both—enjoyable for most of it, fun for seven point three seconds.

At lunchtime yesterday, my cousin in Delaware sent an email that she was thinking of popping over to say hi one day; would that be a problem?  Were we averse to people popping in?  Nuh-uh.  But if she came now, I was cooking chili; I’d just make more, and we’d make it an early dinner.  My sister had a ticket to see Linkin Park, but she canceled those plans to come. 

Marty went shopping for bread and corn; I cooked a gargantuan crock pot full of chili; he made super-size salad; Serena-rella scrubbed the toilets.  We straightened up.  I set up a mini-PA in the living room, and we took breaks for singing and playing.  At 4:00, my cousin and her husband and their three children (6, 4, and 3), and my sister, my brother-in-law, and my nephews (5 and 13) invaded our house.  The kids ran around screaming and touching things, and I took 200 pictures of them doing it.  We talked, sang, ate food, and drank growlers of hoppy local-to-Delaware ale.  Music happened in every room in the house, and nearly everyone contributed. 

We sang for hours.  We sang “Hallelujah” in four-part harmony (sometimes).  Serena sang and I sang and Stacey and Beth sang and the kids sang in the microphone with the harmonizer on.

When they finally left just before 8, the house was already straightened up, and we were exhausted—asleep by 10.  This morning, we talked about how tired we were to have passed out so early.  “That was a lot of work!” Marty said. 

And then he added: “But it was really fun.”

By all accounts and definitions, all that cooking and cleaning, all the kids running around, compounded six-fold by the fact that we’re all related, shouldn’t even have placed this event on the enjoyment scale.  Add the household chores that faced us at every turn, and there wasn’t even any forgetting involved.

So what makes something fun?  It must be your own active participation, with a little bit of joyful noise.  Fun is some kind of boister in your soul.

scar tissue

The other morning, I called my mother to tell her something. Her voice sounded shaky, like she was about to cry. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m having a meltdown today,” she said, quivering. “I have all these year end taxes, and my printer says the cartridge is damaged, and it’s brand new, and—“

“Tell me about it,” I say. I launch into my litany. When I hang up, I throw a painful temper tantrum. I sound like a siren, a long, low bellowing moan like a thing dying. My voice quivers at the end from the muscle spasm I’ve given myself.

I call my mother back to apologize, and she doesn’t know what I’ve done, so I remind her that I didn’t hear the complete list of her things gone wrong, the ingredients of her meltdown pot. She lets it out, and I offer some possible solutions—like the person I used to be would do.



My husband is back to work. He wakes up every morning at 4:30 and tiptoes past the rented electric recliner—where I wind up sleeping the second half of every night—squeezing himself silently in the twelve inches between my laptop table and the fireplace. He makes two cups of coffee and plans his classes. He gives six different lessons a day (fifth through eighth grade social studies, fifth and sixth grade math) and spends two and a half hours every morning doing his preps. Then he makes Serena and himself lunch (it used to be my job), drops off a cup of coffee, just the way I like it, beside my sleeping body, and goes up to shower, sending Serena down to make her own breakfast. When he comes home, exhausted from a combination of kids and the bureaucratic nonsense that adds pointless tasks to his overcrowded schedule (he eats lunch with the kids in the classroom), he walks the dogs, makes dinner or a portion of it for us all, then attends to his various tasks—school meetings, Serena’s basketball, Serena’s rock practice. (He used to be able to nap. One night a week, he could almost get out to basketball. Not now.) Then he goes to bed. Rinse and repeat.

Since school started, the almost-constant delightful and delighted guitar playing has stopped. Everyone is tense. The other day, Marty put his car keys in his pocket and promptly lost them. He patted himself down, checked every pocket, every room. He stood in the dining room and screamed the way I haven’t heard him scream since his father died.

I sat in this stupid, stupid chair crying and loving him and wishing that I could help him or even stand up and hug him—if only he had the time and it didn’t take five minutes to raise the chair and stand. If only it didn’t hurt me so much.

About an hour later, he came home to get something Serena forgot and apologized for his outburst. They keys were in his jacket pocket, under his coat, over his pants. “You ought to talk to someone,” I said. He hissed through his teeth. He doesn’t believe in therapy, he’s lost touch with most of his friends, and his brother up the street—well, let’s just say that he’s only signed as a wide receiver.

Last Thursday, I got a reply email from my sister, yelling at me for what she thought was a tone or an implication in my email to her. She called me a bitch and told me she knows I’m in pain, but I’ve been a bitch since the day I complained that my house had too many people in it (right after surgery). We went rounds, finally owning our faults and making up.

My friends have their migraines and their depression and their miserable days. They fall and hurt themselves. They lose their jobs. And because they are good friends, they have to ask how I am. I feel insensitive telling them. Sometimes I say "ugh" and change the subject or write "ok" in lower-case letters, which I haven't done since I started reading Ann Lamott. I want to lie and say I’m great. I am afraid my pain has crowded them out, and they will stop coming.

My dogs just look at me from the floor. I know that spending quality time stroking their fur is good for my heart and my mind. But I can't reach down to pet them, and it hurts us both when they jump up. I slip them some cheese now and again so they know I still love them.

Serena had a stomachache and headache on Wednesday and wanted to stay home from school. She was disappointed that her birthday (on the epiphany) was not met with the usual fanfare. She wanted to have her movie date and sleepover in the attic. But I can’t have strangers in my house right now. I can barely pull my pants up by myself, and someone has to stand by when I shower and help me dry my legs. I can’t suffer any more indignities.

I think Serena is anxious about me. She peeks around the corner to find me wincing while trying to stand. She sees my frustration with the things I drop and the things that lie along my path and the things that clutter my table, and she wonders how much longer it will be this way.





I finger the lumps around the incision in my back. It’s a thick, tough patch, like my life right now. Like the life of everyone in mine. All of us have this scar tissue. I don't have any salve or balm I can rub on the people I love to make them feel better. I can only sit here and wait.