From the Archives: On the State of the Union

President Obama delivers the State of the Union Address this evening. I’ll be there, with popcorn, for a lot of good reasons, both civic and personal.

Below is a transcript of a post from January 2008 which explains why I’m a State of the Union geek. Please note that the tally of years is up to sixteen now. 

Love you, babe.

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Politics, Personal

According to the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 3

“[The President] shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

I celebrate the State of the Union Address today, not so much because of any political motivation, but because the (generally) annual speech to the joint houses of Congress and to the nation and the world, coincides with a more personal event for me. Thirteen years ago, my partner and I set off on our first adventure together.

It started on a Friday. We worked in the same lab together, he a molecular biology grad student, me a biochemistry undergrad. Chatting over epi-tubes one Friday morning, we planned a lab-group outing. A performance art group was presenting a new piece that night on campus. I was on my way to class, and so he said he’d pass along the event to the other members of the lab group when they came in. We agreed to meet at the theater 15 minutes prior to showtime.

I showed up a few minutes late to find him waiting outside the door to the theater. Alone. He shrugged, and said that he guessed everyone had other plans. I learned later in the weekend that he had completely neglected to mention the plan to any of our friends or colleagues. We watched the show. We went out for coffee. The time we spent together stretched longer and longer. The sub-zero nighttime air of the desert in January did not deter us from ending up on the roof of the Chemistry building in the middle of the night to look at the stars. We ended up at a different coffee shop at five a.m. And not a thing had passed our lips but conversation and food.

Our waitress happened to be another chemistry student. She was due to get off work at six. We cooked up a hair-brained scheme to go to Tucson all together when she got off work. (Tucson was a four or five hour drive from where we were, across the desert and one state line, and none of us had ever been there). We waited, but she backed out, begging fatigue. Undeterred, we climbed into his truck and hit the road.

There is no rational explanation for why we did this. It was really rather stupid. For both of us. For a lot of reasons.

We spent the day in Tucson, driving around, eating again, and then drove back home late in the afternoon. Sleep-deprivation makes the next couple of days a hazy blur for me, but by the time of Bill Clinton’s second State of the Union Address in January of 1995, after a dizzy weekend, we were firmly Together.

And though we were married in July a couple of years later, each year we tend to note the passing of the state of the Union with a little bit more nostalgia and enthusiasm.

So here’s to us babe, and our Union. May we bear witness to many more presidential speeches together.

Home Again

We packed up the van (not OUR van, a rental, because our van had a double-whammy, pre-trip hissy fit) and drove to Albuquerque and back for the Christmas holidays. The traveling was lovely, the Sonars had a great time, the visit with family was rich, and I am very happy.

We left Coastal Texas in the afternoon on December 20th, with stories about the eclipse looping on the radio. That night, we were too tired to stay awake or to wake up for the eclipse, but as we stopped for the night in Sonora, Texas, I wrote, “Sonora under a solstice eclipse.” The moon was so big, a dusky color, like it was preparing for its big scene later that night.  

The next morning I was moved again by the windmills near Fort Stockton. Longtime readers here might remember that I wrote about the windmills last time we drove through. They line up like wanderers along the front edges of the mesas, soaring and spinning, roaring with the updrafts charging up the ridges.

At lunch that day we ate at Farley’s in Roswell, New Mexico and soaked up the delicious alien kitsch. The smart woman tending the bar there enhanced our lunch with a little Gaga, and the menu reminded us that “It’s better to live and learn than die stupid.”

Just around sunset on our second day of driving, we pulled through the mountain pass and into east Albuquerque to see that city dressed up in her winter jewels, the city lights twinkling on all around us. 

We visited with family that I hadn’t seen for decades. I managed to finish some last-minute knitting and felting (in the bathtub!) for Christmas gifts. We ate posole and chicken stuffed sopaipillas with green chile, and homemade marshmallows (Everyone should make marshmallows at least once in their life. We make them each year around the holidays.). I learned how to properly make our family’s fruit salad (yep, I’d been doing it wrong and I’m so glad to be enlightened).  We drove up into the mountains east of the city and found mud puddles and sledding-snow in the same spot. We slid and slid and slid and managed to get only our shoes muddy. 

I hope your holidays had some marshmallows and mud and a lot of love in them.

Memorable notes from the not-a-journal:

Did you say Deli Bean?

Deep Sand Beyond Shoulder

Pump jacks and the miasma of H2S every two skips (“Do Not Stop in Low Places”)

Me and Billy the Kid never got along, and outgoing D-Gov Bill Richardson should not pardon him. Dad reminds me that without clever writers, no one would even know about Billy the Kid. Or Jesus, I add in my head, winking and taking the hug.

Red or Green? Hot or Mild? Corn or Flour?

From am radio: Rupert Parish Disposal, Our Business Stinks but it’s Picking Up

Best railroad car graffitti: “snow” dripping from the “eaves” of a cargo box

Sympathetic Ignition

At Frog Pond Creek, somewhere in Texas, in the early morning fog, the Sonars inform me that this is good D&D fog, to cloak early morning travelers across the plains.

There IS a Garden of Eden in Eden, Texas.

Upon our return to the coastal plains: the land is so flat I feel like I can see the curve of the Earth.

BELL NECKLACE

When Sonar X10 was in kindergarten, I was a first time Room Parent. As we organized the class party, I searched around for some little gift the Sonar could share with his classmates. Something that wasn’t cheap plastic. Something very inexpensive and/or easy to make. I found a jar of jingle bells at the craft store and decided to make each kid a necklace. I just threaded a bell on a length of yarn (something I have in abundance around here) and tied a knot. Took me ten or fifteen minutes to make them. 

The Sonar thought they were great. He happily wore his bell to school and jingled around all day.  All of the kids have had a similar reaction as they pulled the bells out of their goody bags. Smiles as they put them on and jingled around the classroom. (Side note: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, all elementary school teachers who survive children’s Christmas parties deserve a fifth of bourbon.)

This is my sixth year making bell necklaces for school party favors. I’ve made them for each kid, each year. I’ve switched to a smaller, quieter bell for the sake of the teachers. But these little gifts still hold up to the cheap and easy requirements, and the kids really love them. Sonar X10 has several squirreled away in his treasure boxes.

The very best reaction, though, came from a kid in that first class, who was so excited, so thrilled with his BELL NECKLACE. “A BELL NECKLACE! I have ALWAYS wanted one of these!” he said to me and his mom and anyone else who would listen. 

His mom and I have laughed about that story more than once since then. I saw that awesomely enthusiastic guy this morning while I was volunteering at the library, and I’m happy to say that he is just as earnest and enthusiastic at eleven as he was at six. 

Jingle Jingle.

Home for Christmas

I am thirty-seven years old. I live in Texas now, but I grew up in New Mexico. For the first time since I was eighteen, I will be home for Christmas this year. 

I have been home many times, but usually in the summer, around the Fourth of July, never at the winter holidays.  ‘Home’ for my folks now is not the same home in which we had Christmas together the last time. The house is different, and the people have changed and grown (and we’ve added some Sonars), but we will all be there together. 

A lot of ugly things have happened in my family since then. Gradually, though, (stubbornly slowly, you might say), I recognized my stupidity and selfishness and did that thing where I untangled my priorities and realized what was most important in my life and who were the most important people.  I hear that song “Boots” by The Killers and that’s exactly how I feel about Christmas this year. I have been remembering the magic of my childhood Christmases and hoping for a tiny little bit of that, and for many years I’ve been working to knock the mud off my boots. This year I’ll finally have the chance to step back into home.

I am unbelievably geeked about going home for Christmas. I thought I would be nervous, worried about an upswelling of stupid emotional baggage, and while those thoughts jangle around in the back of my head a bit, they don’t upset me. They aren’t taking away my joy. 

My joy, though, is nothing compared to the excitement I see in my parents, who will hosting their grand-Sonars for Christmas for the first time, and I have absolutely no doubt, will be spoiling them silly. My dad is sending me messages every couple of days, questions, observations, little announcements that they’re ready and really excited and will we be there soon? And can we come sooner?  I love it. 

Spoiled by Choice, A Love Letter

I am sitting at the table in the back yard. The morning sunshine is warm on my neck. I came out here for the sunshine. I came out here for the clarity. I am sick. I have been a little sick for nearly two weeks. I have been a little more sick for five days. The children have atypical or walking pneumonia, as conferred by the sticky-sounding mycoplasma pneumoniae. It knocked them each out of school for two days. Sonar X10 probably should have slept a third day. They need the weekend. 

I hear birds and the trilling buzz of what I assume are bugs in the grass. I haven’t seen any frogs recently, but there could be frogs out there, I suppose. I hear cars, a few streets away. I think my neighbor is in her back yard too.

I should go to the doctor. I have a low fever. Again. I am fatigued. Partner is worried. He will be disappointed (but probably not surprised) if I don’t go. The only thing the doctor can provide that I am not already doing is antibiotics. I’m not sure I can even be seen today. I may have worried away the opportunity to be seen before Monday. 

I know that I have the stupid pneumonia too.

It is so perfect out here today. A barely stirring breeze counters the almost, but not quite too hot warmth of the sun on my arm. The grapefruits are hanging from the tree in front of me, yellow and dusky with a kiss of pink on some of their shoulders. 

I sit here and believe that this sunshine, this air, that juice inside the thick-to-bursting peel will heal me. Will put the kabash (a new favorite word of the Sonars since I taught it to them the other day) on the mycoplasma pneumoniae that has set up shop in my lungs, its formlessness both exposing it and protecting it from the attack of my body. 

My scientific brain tells me that I need the antibiotics. That I will heal faster, protect my body and my family, and return to strength sooner with them. That they are worth the wait in the dour, germy office (and the copayment and the pharmacy fee).

A stubborn irrationality has taken hold of me. A fierce rejection of what I should do, in spite of myself. 

It feels good to put words on paper. I know that they are flowing out, crowding the page with their insistence. I must live in Paradise. Where I have this luxury, to sit in the warming sun and the balmy breeze, and to choose willfully to reject the antibiotics that others seek with desperation in order to save lives. My life is certainly not at stake today in my stupid, irrational rejection of the trip to the doctor’s office. Will I ever stop being that spoiled brat?

There is a bee searching the grapefruit tree for blossoms that won’t be there for a few months yet. Not until after we pick those hundreds of juicy fruits. There is a ladybug crawling up a leaf. A fly is flitting over the table in front of me, wondering, perhaps, if I have any crumbs to drop.

The timer. Fifteen minutes of sunshine to make sure I am getting my vitamin D. But I think I will sit here a bit longer. The breeze and the bees have shaken the bushes beside me so that I can smell basil. 

The avocado tree has not grown taller for at least two years. But the pomegranate tree that nearly blew down in a summer storm, its roots tipped out of the swampy mud, is reaching up taller, stretching itself up into the seamless blue sky, straining against the ropes we used to tether it back into the ground. 

Mosquitos. In December. Can you believe it? How did I come to this garden with the buzzing chorus and the basil breeze, and the whiff of truck exhaust? What did I do to deserve this time in the sun, where I can reach down and rub my fingers along a chive so the oniony tang sticks to my fingers while I listen to the delivery guys curse the neighbor’s cargo and a mower cut the green December grass?

If I sit very still, I do not notice the tremulousness in my muscles. The fatigue in my body. I do notice the tightening of my lungs as the gas-powered trimmer chugs by on the other side of the back fence, leaving puffs of exhaust and fragments of grass and weeds to float by on my herby breeze. 

Please don’t wrinkle your brow and shake your head at me because I am happier here, on this bench that you built, next to these herbs that you planted, soaking up the medicine of our lives.