The Power of Pomade

When I was 18 and first out on my own, shopping was an exhilarating experience, flush with possibilities. I felt that I was almost — but not quite — cool, and that all I needed to tip me over the edge to coolness was the perfect pair of shoes. And possibly the right jacket.

I was certain — in the way that only the young can be — that if I could put together the perfect outfits, all of my insecurities would — "poof!" — disappear. I’d feel how I imagined the models in Teen magazine felt: totally at ease with themselves, able to throw on any outfit — with those perfect shoes and that awesome jacket — and look and feel fabulous.

And I did feel pretty suave in the brown distressed-leather bomber jacket I bought with my student loan money. It had an aviation patch over the left chest and a satin lining printed with little fighter planes. I mean, seriously — who wouldn't look cool in that?

Did all my insecurities go away? No. But that’s probably just because I never found the right pair of shoes.

As I’ve gotten older and wiser, I aspire to get joy from life experiences instead of consumer goods. Being cool is less important than it was, and I realize that quality of life comes from a deeper place than my pocketbook.

But occasionally I am hit with the familiar feeling that a certain purchase may hold some great power to transform me.

Take, for instance, hair product.

After a haircut, I always leave feeling a little more awesome than when I came in, especially if I walk out with a new jar of pomade or bottle of spray gel.

Before I’ve actually tried the new hair product, I am filled with hope and optimism: the whole world is open to me. This new hair product may be the secret ingredient for a hipper, funkier, sassier me.

That is, of course, before the post-new-hair-product letdown. Before I realize that by the end of the day, the pomade makes my hair feel like dirty dog fur or that the spray gel creates a helmet-like crust on my hair similar to that chocolate sauce my parents would never buy me when I was a kid that hardened over ice cream like a magic shell.

After my real-life experience with that oh-so-full-of-potential hair product, of course, I’m back to being my usual not-quite-cool-but-mostly-ok-with-it self.

But then, last fall, as I was browsing my usual neighborhood discount store when I should have been working, I glanced at a display and gasped.

Those boots!

They were casual, yet a tiny bit funky. They were just the perfect mix of greyish and brownish. They were priced just low enough. I tried to remain calm as I scanned for my size. Oooh! There it was! I held my breath as I put my extremely picky feet into the boots.

They. Were. Perfect!

I snatched them and ran to the checkout counter, filled with a rush of hope. These were the ones. These would change everything.

I wore them almost every day last fall, winter and spring. I wore them to play in the park. I wore them to business meetings. I wore them out on the town. (I would wear them on a train. I would wear them in the rain. I do like them, Sam I am!)

And you know what? Yes! Those boots did what years of self-exploration could not. I became cool. It was so simple. All I needed, all this time, were those freaking boots.

Tattoos, Triathlons and Tango Lessons

What do these things have in common: hiking the Applachian Trail, moving to an island, getting a tattoo, training for a triathlon or marathon or long-distance bike ride, taking tango or salsa or drum or guitar lessons, hiring a fashion consultant or personal trainer, taking a year - or more! - off work to travel, buying a boat or motorcycle or sportscar or RV, finding religion or meditation or yoga, going back to school, joining a choir, donning a kilt and tossing cabers in Scottish Highland games, and starting a blog?

They are all somebody's answer to the question: What's next?

We spend our lives looking forward to what's ahead. My son just turned four and he already wants to know when he'll be five. As a child I couldn't wait for my next birthday - oh, how I longed to be one year older. When I was excitedly looking forward to turning 13, my father told me that I should never say that I can't wait for something, because I'm just wishing the time away between now and the thing I can't wait for. And that in-between time is passing either way, so I might as well enjoy it as it goes.

Even when we aren't giddily squealing "I can't wait," we still measure our lives by milestones. Whether it's getting our driver's license, graduating from high school, going to college, getting one degree or another, traveling abroad, starting and advancing a career, buying a home, getting married or having children, there is an underlying awareness of what's next.

But what happens when we reach the end of our personal list of milestones? Or what if one of our milestones is on hold or seems unreachable?

What's next?

We find something that makes us feel alive or sexy or strong. We find a goal we can strive toward. We've been students and workers, we've been travelers. We may be spouses and/or a parents. But is that everything?

Personally, as a parent, I need more in my future than my children's milestones. I want to have something to look forward to beyond my son getting his driver's license or my daughter's first date. (Please excuse me for just a moment while I pick myself up from the floor after briefly visualizing those two milestones.)

So, I ask, what's next for me?

Not having an answer to "what's next?" brings my own mortality uncomfortably to mind. Retirement sounds wonderful and all, but I would really prefer to have something on my milestone list between now and snowbirding in Arizona or Mexico.

So I'm looking through the local event calendar for biking and running events to train for this summer. I'm pricing sailboats. I saw a personal trainer yesterday to set up a strength-training routine. And yes, I started a blog.

But if my dad was right - and I think he was - then I also need to appreciate this very moment that I'm living now. Sure, there's more out there, and I'm excited to continue to create new milestones. But it's also valuable to slow down and acknowledge the life we've created and the people we've become. Then maybe we can settle into ourselves a little and enjoy where we are. After all, this - right now - is what's really next.

A Cat in Revelstoke

"Very funny,” I texted back to our friend Steve.  He had just sent me a ridiculous message asking if we could pick up a cat on our way to their house.

We were on the second day of a two-day drive from Seattle to visit Steve’s family in Golden, a small mountain town in southeast British Columbia.  Steve has a dry sense of humor.  The idea of tossing a cat into our packed-to-the-brim car with our crying one-year-old daughter and whining four-year-old son for the last one-and-a-half hours of the 11-hour trip was obviously his idea of a joke.

I had to admit, when I imagined a cat amid the mayhem of two little kids and their tired, stressed-out parents, it was kind of funny, in a comedy-sketch sort of way. Like our own version of National Lampoon's Canadian Vacation.

Then my cellphone rang. It was Steve explaining that no, actually, he wasn't joking. His neighbor's cat had hitched a ride on someone's trailer the previous night and ended up in Revelstoke – a town which was conveniently on our route to Golden. It would be a huge favor to his neighbors and save them a three-hour round-trip drive if we could stop in Revelstoke and pick up their cat.

My husband Mike looked at me with raised eyebrows as I hemmed and hawed into the phone.

“What was that about?” he asked after I set the phone down.

“I thought Steve was joking at first,” I said, “but he wants us to pick up a cat in Revelstoke.”

“Shit.” Mike muttered, so the kids wouldn’t hear.

“I know.” I said.

***

I really wanted to be the kind of person who would pick up a cat in Revelstoke. When we were younger, before we had kids, Mike and I did things.  Adventurous things.  Mike lived in Taiwan for 3 years. I travelled alone for several months each in Europe and Central America. On our honeymoon we stayed in $5-per-night beach huts in Malaysia with unspeakable bathrooms and invisible bugs that left us dotted in red bites. We stayed in a jungle camp in Borneo where the rainforest floor was coated in a crisscrossing, crawling layer of millipedes.  We fed pancakes to wiry-snouted wild boars.  We handled adversity with good humor.  When a menacing monkey charged Mike on his way to the shower, we laughed about it.  OK, I laughed about it, and eventually – a few years later – Mike laughed a little bit too.  At that time in our lives, when things went sideways, we'd think about the funny story it was going to make later.

But after having kids in our late 30s, it became more challenging to just go with the flow. Sometimes the funny future story no longer felt like a good trade for the immediate pain in the butt. Things with kids were just... harder.  We didn’t want to trade our under-planned budget travel for all-inclusive kid-friendly resorts.  Bouncing across Mexico in a cheap rental car, eating tortillas, avocados and beer on empty beaches appeared doomed to turn into sitting at an all-you-can-eat buffet watching a guy in a Fred Flintstone costume dance by the pool.

Our kids weren’t very good travelers. Other parents would tell stories of their babies and toddlers instantly falling asleep when buckled into their car seats.  Not ours.  Our children immediately transformed into little howling Tasmanian Devils. Trips to the grocery store were torture.  Long car rides were hell.  I made myself nauseous and half-dislocated my shoulder as I twisted my body backward to soothe my screaming children. I held their hands, handed them toys and sang to them. Nothing stopped the crying for more than a few minutes.

But we were getting better at it.  As the kids got older, they cried less.  We fed them a constant stream of movies, kid-music and snacks, which mostly calmed the tiny back-seat beasts. They still whined, demanded urgent pee-stop in the middle of nowhere, and forced us to make inconvenient, messy, passenger-seat diaper changes.  But they also slept and sang songs and had toddler conversations.  Traveling was getting easier, but 11 hours was definitely pushing our limit.

If Steve had called ten minutes later, we would have been past Revelstoke and we could have honestly told him – alas - we had missed our opportunity to pick up the cat. But as it turned out, we were just coming into the town and had to decide on the spot: do we tell our laid-back friend Steve that we uptight Seattleites aren't going to help out his neighbor? Or do we stop and pick up the damned cat?

I looked at Mike.  “It’s probably really uncool to make Steve’s friends drive three hours to get their cat when we are driving right through Revelstoke.”  I said.

He looked at me, resigned. “Yep.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, we were continuing down the winding mountain road, past mountain sheep and elk crossing signs, with a smallish, fuzzy, orange, golden-eyed cat named Cheddar hopping around the car.  The cat leaped from seatback to lap to seatback, claws partially exposed, grasping for security. Cheddar was a bit shaken up after his recent adventure: his unexpected hour-and-a-half ride the previous night, his overnight in a 20-degree trailer, his discovery today by an unfamiliar family in Revelstoke, and his brief stay in a hastily assembled cardboard box in the back of our car. Now, having escaped the box, he was trapped in a moving vehicle filled with noisy strangers of various sizes. 

Our one-year-old daughter loved cats, but rarely saw real live felines - mainly because we were not "cat people" and we didn’t have many friends with cats. Her word for cat was "mao-mao," and we were to hear it in various pitches and decibel-levels over the next hour and a half. She emitted joyful shrieks of glee when the cat poised itself on the seatback in view of her car seat. Her hands outstretched towards the cat, she squealed, "Mao-Mao!!" in anticipation of the cat jumping onto her lap. Then, when the cat jumped past her outstretched arms and landed above her head, just out of reach (Cheddar was apparently no dummy), she screamed at the top of her lungs, tears streaming down her face, "MAOOO-MAOOOO!!!!" During Cheddar's brief lapses in reason when he did settle into Lyra's lap, she giggled and squealed excitedly, until her tail pulling caused the cat to seek safety elsewhere, and her distraught screaming began anew.

As it turned out, it was a little like a comedy sketch. I laughed at the range of emotion caused by the cat. My daughter even said her first two-word combination: when the cat curled up in her brother's lap for a snuggle, Lyra was SOOO infuriated that her brain rapidly developed new synapses and in her suddenly advanced state, she screeched, "MYYYYYYYYYYY MAO-MAOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!" I appreciated this developmental leap, while at the same time cringing at the rising volume level in the car.

It continued more or less like this for the hour-and-a-half drive to Golden. I tried to simultaneously soothe my screaming daughter, while protecting my husband from Cheddar. At one point, Cheddar got past my defenses and jumped onto the steering wheel. The cat barely got a chance to exhibit his driving skills before he was evicted from his perch by my husband’s arm and sent scrabbling for a grip along the dashboard, ultimately falling back into my lap.

We eventually arrived at Steve's house, safe and sound and slightly rattled.  The cat jumped out and was greeted with shouts of "Cheddar!!" by Steve’s daughter and another neighborhood girl.  The girls grabbed the frazzled cat and lugged him back to his rightful home. We human travelers were met with warm greetings and cold drinks from our friends.

After we had a chance to wind down from our drive and ease into our vacation, I was able to reflect a bit.  We made this trip happen with two small children.  Maybe this parenting thing was getting a little bit easier.  Maybe our adventurous lives weren’t over, even with kids in tow.  We proved to ourselves that we are the kind of people who would pick up a cat in Revelstoke.  And it actually does make a pretty funny story afterward.

Girl Next Door

How is it that I came from a home where my parents never read me a book, didn't notice when I played on a partially frozen pond or fell down the basement stairs, and didn't take me to the dentist for the first time until I was twelve, yet I ended up as a parent who stays up at night worrying about off-gassing toys and pesticides in food?

I recently was contacted via Facebook by my childhood neighbor, Libby. Libby was the embodiment of a wholesome midwest childhood. Her father worked for the Department of Natural Resources - a masculine, outdoorsy job. Her mother stayed home and took care of Libby. Her older brother Chucky was dorky and obnoxious, which added just the right amount of imperfection to the family to make it believable.

Libby was a sweet girl - quiet and kind and clean. Libby had sandy-blonde hair and freckles. Libby's family went cross-country skiing together. They had a purebred Springer Spaniel hunting dog with a nice, clean, new kennel. Libby's dad built her a tree-house in her backyard.

My younger sister and brother and I were a small tousled mob of children who lived next door. Our dog was a German Shepherd mix that ran loose most of the time, occasionally threatening the neighborhood boys who teased us. My dad walked around drinking cheap beer from a can and yelling profanities.

Libby's mom didn't relish her daughter playing with us. But at one point Libby told us that her mom liked that we were "creative," because she thought that would be good for Libby.

We were creative because our parents didn't buy us things and they didn't entertain us, so we had to use our imaginations. We made up games like "Squiggle," where one of us would draw a random squiggle and then the other one would need to make it into something distinguishable - maybe an elephant or a snake or a tree. We made up card games. We played charades. We even created and built our own board games, with game pieces and rules (the making of the games was fun, the playing of the games - not so much). For Christmas, we made each other gifts - occasionally very strange things. I remember sewing a fried egg for my sister and a stuffed "candy bar" for my brother. We wrote silly stories and bad poetry.

Libby's house was full of wonderful toys. She had several Barbie dolls, Barbie houses full of Barbie furniture, and a whole wardrobe of fashionable Barbie attire. My sister and I felt lucky that we each had one Barbie. Each doll had come with one outfit, of which we had long ago lost the shoes. When our Barbies wanted to go out on the town, we made their outfits. Out of socks, of course. Just a few creative snips for head and arm-holes, a strip of fabric for a belt, and "waa-laa," Barbie was red-carpet-ready. Or maybe red-neck-ready would be more accurate, since our Barbie was barefoot and we generally only had white cotton athletic socks to choose from for her dresses.

Hearing from Libby after all these years brought back many fond memories. Libby looks and acts (from what I can tell from our Facebook interactions) just like a grown-up version of the sweet, kind, girl-next-door that I remember. She is a lawyer now and a mother of two children - a boy and a girl. She lives 45 minutes away from the town where we grew up.

How different am I from my childhood-self? Maybe not very. The way I parent is certainly different than the way I was parented. I spend a large part of my brain-power thinking about my children's happiness, safety, health, and future. My parents didn't have the time or energy or inclination to focus on their kids.

But I do value the opportunities for creativity that I was given as a child, and I don't buy many new toys for my kids. When I watch my son pretending that his toy train is a snowmobile or his hat is a fishing net or just playing "Monster" (a game which, as far as I can tell, involves yelling "monster" and then screaming and running around in circles), I feel like I'm doing something right. I guess I've got my parents to thank for that.