Rachael

Clementine just put her sweet white–orange face right onto the heater vent, proving she is Lala’s dog. When Lala was in high school, she’d get up to go to school and then lie down on the bathroom heater vent and go back to sleep.

My whole relationship with sleep has changed since leaving the day job. I still struggle with it, but exponentially less than I did. I’m getting back to the place I think my body likes to be – full of sleep. When I was a kid, I took three-hour naps and slept twelve hours a night. I kept sleeping at night like that right up until I took the 911 job at age 27. Before that, I’d occasionally stayed up late to have sex, to party, to read (only once have I read all night – Housekeeping, Robinson) or to travel, but never for anything else. Not once did I pull an all–nighter studying. My first overnight shift was one of the handful of times I’d ever stayed up all night. I remember looking at 4 am like it had never happened before. I was actually late to an early-morning training shift because I overslept. I’ve never overslept for anything but that, not once. And I was in training with someone who terrified me. The way my heart fell and then thudded back into adrenalized action as I raced to pull on my uniform was actually painful. She never told on me.

I read a post last night by The Pale Rook, a Scottish artist, and she expressed the same feeling I have about loving being something very small in the world. Every time I meditate, I like to think for a second about my relative size in the universe. I live for a flicker of time, not even that. I’m one soul on a planet of three billion that is one planet in one of a hundred billion solar systems in our galaxy that is one galaxy in a hundred billion galaxies. There’s no way to overemphasize how insignificant I am, and I love the feeling.

Today, I have spark. Today, I flare.

I’ve finally realized why I love the monthly Alameda Antiques Faire so much. Every weekend (can this be an exaggeration? I don’t think it is) when I was a kid, we went either garage–saling (it is too a word) or flea–marketing. The way my body moves from table to table, the way my eye drifts from one random treasure to the next piece of crap, makes me feel like a kid with electricity in my veins. I don’t even covet much, that’s the interesting thing. I don’t want extra crap in the house. We can’t afford the nice things at the Faire. So it’s not even like money burns a hole in my pocket.

We sat in an AMAZING set of leather chairs from the fifties. I said, “We could put them where the blue chairs are now!” Years ago, those blue chairs came with our couch on Craigslist for a total of three hundred bucks. They’re comfy but dog–smelling and old–looking. They’re fine for us. They are NOT leather club chairs that embrace your body like a hug of a rich man wanting to huff the money out of your wallet. We asked how much. The guy said six–thousand–five–hundred and we burst into laughter. The best part was that while I was already standing, Lala didn’t even leap up. She just sat there, laughing some more, enjoying the chair.

I did find a black cashmere sweater from Costco in size enormous for twenty bucks. It’s the kind of thing I would never buy from the store—that’s some damn raping and pillaging they’re doing of the world with that cheap cashmere. Buying it new but second–hand? I’m all in. It’ll replace the blue huge cashmere I got on eBay – the one I wear every single day of winter, the one with the hole the size of a watermelon (truly) under the left armpit. I always meant to sew it up and never did. Someday the black one will be in the same ragged, torn shape, and I’ll use my serger to Frankenstein them together.I never, ever wear them out of the house. They don’t have to look good. They just feel wonderful, lighter than any sweater I’ve ever knitted, and I don’t have to respect them at all, the way I do a hand knit. I can rip them off my body furiously every time I go into a hot flash, which is about every fifteen minutes. Immediately after the sweat dries, I’m freezing, so I tug it ruthlessly back over my head.

But the best part wasn’t the finding or the buying. It was the wandering. It was the fact that it didn’t matter which row we went down, or which we missed. It didn’t matter that we got there so late we were only there for a couple of hours before they packed it all up. It’s one of the most bonding date–type of things to do – you explore a little by yourself, you call out to your mate who’s up the row, you laugh about the constipated Santa figure and dream about the place you could put that perfect, vintage, walnut couch that makes you wish—just for a moment—for a bigger house, for a different lifestyle in which you have fantastic dinner parties catered by people in white coats and bow ties. You do this together, and then you let that fleeting dream go and just as readily move to the next table which makes you long to collect vintage French handbags.

We got a poke bowl for lunch and sat with our backs to the sun, the estuary so close we could almost dip our fingers in the water. We watched the cranes on the other side of the water in Oakland offload containers, hoisting them high into the air. At the horizon, in Berkeley, the sky was pale white, but it burst into brilliant blue overhead. I leaned against Lala. She licked my shoulder, taking a tiny taste, and for some reason, I didn’t mind.

Last night, when I took the dogs outside to pee, I smelled that gorgeous fall scent of wood smoke and damp, cool air, and instead of feeling nostalgia or that bittersweet ache, I felt something different. That smell always made me long for something, and I never knew what.

Now I know what I wanted. I wanted all of this. This life. This wife, these dogs, this house, these sisters close to me, these friends, this exact career, bumps at all. I’m not longing anymore. I’m not waiting for the someday I’ve yearned for since I was old enough to hope for my future. It’s an astonishing discovery, actually, and it puts me off balance.

Of course, I still have wants. I want to be the Tim Gunn of memoir someday (knowledgeable, warm, kind, very nattily dressed). More money would be nice. A decent retirement account in the bank sure would be welcome.

But I possess this glorious dream, and wood smoke now just smells beautiful, instead of bittersweet.

This does mean I need to start asking what’s the next big dream, the one that attaches to this one?

In literal dreams, this morning I dreamed I married a sea lion shapeshifter in New Zealand. She was really nice and I loved her, but I found her smell and her barking annoying, and after I married her, I suddenly remembered that I already had a wife I was in love with, but she and her family said they’d come along to our house in the States, and everything would be fine – they wouldn’t mind Lala being there. While neither of us is a jealous person, I wasn’t sure Lala would feel the same way.

So I’d like to state for the record that my next big dream involves no sea lions at all.

ATT linemen are outside on ladders, hopefully fixing our internet connection which has been so spotty I routinely lose connection on Skype calls. Clara is losing her damn mind – finally, something going on in her line of sight above the camellia bushes. Poor old dog, I can tell she’s feeling her age. She’s moving slow, not peeing much, loath to leave the porch when it’s dark and raining. She used to run and leap and bound. She got the party started, always. The doctor says she’s okay, just old. She’s such a sweet girl. I worry I didn’t give her best life which would have included beach walks every day and rolls in sand and endless treats and extra Himalayan yak cheese and fish for dinner every night. I hope she’s happy. I know Clemmy and Dozy are. They love us and want to be with us. Everything else is just bonus. Clara, I think, has deeper existential needs. She’s a border collie – she knows that somewhere there are sheep that she’s not herding. Sometimes when she lies on the office and heaves a great sigh, I imagine she’s wondering what would have happened if she had been adopted by different people, ones with fields full of lambing ewes and rabbits to chase in her off time. Instead, she has this writer person who rarely moves from the desk and a small Morkie barking at her heels. She has angst. I have guilt. We are good pals.