In case of THE WHITE RABBIT

Australia is a strange land.  It’s nothing like North America.  It’s not even anything like Europe.  It feels familiar, but foreign.  It’s like stepping into another dimension, parallel, but unrelated to this one.  It’s just Australia unto Australia.  Itself unto itself.

And when I was there, I was like a parallel version of me.  Like Alice in Wonderland.

In Australia, I had a new name.  Tricia, the way they say it.  Michael’s Tricia.  I had new friends – a whole group of them – that seemed like they’d just been waiting for me to get there.  Strange, romantic, wonderful people.  So inclined to like me, to love me.  I had  new money in my wallet.  New streets and towns.  New words jangling around in my head.

And there was no adjusting to it!  There was no time of “settling in.”  I went to sleep on the plane and woke up and then suddenly Michael’s arms were around me.  And I was in Australia, deep down the rabbit hole, among mad hatters and march hares.

It just happened.  The week just happened, as though it had been happening all along and I'd never really known it.

I moved Michael into a house and we lived -- lived -- there.

We cleaned the old kitchen and hung clothes on the line.  I met the neighbors.  We ate cold chicken with Dave and Lucinda in the middle of the night.  We ate cereal in the morning sun, sitting on the flagstones in the backyard.  And we wandered Sydney at night with Simon and Victoria, ducking in and out of pubs, dodging early-autumn rainstorms.

And Michael was there.  He was there when I went to sleep and there when I woke up. 

And every time I saw him, it was like a miracle.  That we were there, and I could reach out and touch him.  That we could go buy groceries.  Groceries!  Shopping was a revelation.  Riding the train?  An adventure.

And yes, of course, we did things.  But we didn’t do anything that wasn’t a part of his life now, a part of my parallel life.  A tourist goes somewhere to see something they wouldn’t ordinarily see.  I felt like I was seeing things I’ve already been seeing things for months, for years.  Because they are familiar to Michael’s eyes.

And because Michael is a part of me.

And because when Alice wakes up, she finds herself on a riverbank, and she tells her sister the dream of Wonderland.  But her sister knows that Wonderland is not a dream, not an inaccessible dream anyway, but a lovely dream that lives and breathes and goes on and has a life of its own.

And that’s Australia.

I’m back in California now.  But Michael and I have a life of our own.  And that life goes on.  We carry each other.

And we go on, parallel, Australia, California, Michael and I together like a heartbeat, on and on.

In case of BLOOD TIES

This is my brother.  He is neat.

But tonight, he's asleep in the ICU at the Hospital.

For anyone that doesn’t know, Alex has been going through some pretty scary stuff lately.  He developed some weird symptoms about six weeks ago.  His torso was strangely numb.  It didn’t make sense.  He told my dad.  My dad was worried, but said nothing.

Then, on a Thursday – two weeks ago from today, exactly – Alex woke up and had trouble moving his legs.  My dad took him to the doctor.  The doctor drew blood and ordered a CAT scan and an MRI.

It was the first time I’d heard about any of this.  And suddenly it really looked like my brother had MS or, worse, that he had a tumor on his spine.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.  That was a horrifying weekend.

My brother is 18.  He’s the star of the cross-country team.  He’s long and angular, built to run.  Just like my dad.  He’s the lead in the school musical.  He has a lovely tenor voice and a beautiful girlfriend.  I’m frightfully proud of him.

But with this sudden threat of slowly debilitating diseases and cancer, I’ve started remembering that my brother wasn’t always cool.  And it wasn’t just that he was neutrally neither cool nor uncool.  He was ACTIVELY UNCOOL.  He was a downright GEEK.  My brother used to be a natural klutz, socially awkward, incredibly misunderstood. 

We used to call him the Master of Disaster.  In his childhood, he split his gums open and had to get stitches IN HIS GUMS on two completely different occasions.  There’s also a home video in which toddler Alex picks up a kitchen knife and ALMOST falls on it.  I mean, every single time you watch it – though you know it all turns out okay – you still want to grab the knife away, or catch him, or something!  No, Alex, put the knife DOWN!

Plus, Alex was the kid that EVERYBODY tried to ditch.  Like, Lisa and I are going out to do something.

Mom:  Take Alex with you.

Me:  No way!  He’s too little.

Mom:  Well, you can’t leave him ALONE.

Me:  Watch me!

Lisa:  (feeling vaguely guilty) He can play with…Ben…

Though, of course, we always LOVED Alex.  But he had trouble fitting in.  In fact, for a while it seemed, we were his only friends.  We were very imperfect friends.  But we were stuck with him.  So we made it work.

But then, abruptly, it seemed…Alex grew up.

He did this mostly when I wasn’t looking. 

And the second I realized it was happening, that I was in California, and that Alex was coming into his own…

And that I was missing it…

This is my brother.  My BROTHER.

Some people AREN’T friends with their siblings.  But I never wanted that for us.  I wanted – WANT – to be a part of his life. 

And I want his life to continue.

Anyway.  It turns out that Alex doesn’t have MS.  And he doesn’t have cancer.  But he does have a mass on his spine – or did, until this morning.  The mass is a birth defect.  Alex has probably had it his whole life.  It’s a cluster of blood vessels that, about six weeks ago, started to rupture and bleed into his spinal column.  This is still very bad.  It can cause nerve damage and, obviously, a loss of motor skill, etc.  And it still requires – required, past tense – spinal surgery.  Risky.

But it went smoothly.  And tonight, I know, though slumbering in a deep haze of pain and painkillers, Alex will pull through. 

If you know him at all, you are lucky. 

But my sister and I are the luckiest.  We’ve gotten front row seats to watch him, to watch this KID, beat it all.  He beat accidents, beat injuries, beat bullies, beat abandonment, beat everybody on his cross-country team, and now…

Now we get to watch him beat potential paralysis and death.

Alex, I love you.  Fight, Bud.  Fight.

In case of A PERFECT MOMENT

Although my hopes could not have been higher, I was surprised at just how wonderful Australia was.

A full update to follow.  But for now, this.

In case of TERROR

Tonight I saw, up close, the deep and fearsome solitude of a closed person.

One of my friends, a girl who married young, is unhappy in her marriage.  This does not mean her marriage will die.  It simply means that her marriage is sick.  She and her husband have not yet gone to have this illness professionally diagnosed.  But she suspects that it may be quite serious.  Only time will tell.

But, anyway, this has thoroughly shaken me.  Remember the wedding I went to a while back? The beautiful, romantic, heroic wedding?  That changed my views about marriage and weddings in general?

This is her.

And tonight she described her frustrations and resentment and pain to me with a shocking cynicism.

My heart twists away from me, whining.

I have given up on Truth in relationships.  There is no way to find out why we do the things we do.  Or what it all “means.”  Who can begin to know, who can begin to say, what has happened between people?  Even if we could write down everything we say out loud, who could write down the things we don’t? 

Who can score and tally glances?  Who can quantify a touch, a kiss?

We say things that we WANT to be true.  I say things that I want to be true.  That’s just how it is.

And even if you think you Know in the moment, time will warp your certainty and strip it from you.  You will be uncertain the second It is over.  You will doubt almost immediately.  You will fear, you will wonder, and guess.  Five years later you will look back and say It was because of This.  Ten years later you will marvel that you were ever so ignorant as to believe That.

You will close.

People open and close. 

And even they don’t know when or how or why.

There is no Truth that can be known.  Not between human beings.  Not between anyone who is flawed, imperfect, insecure, afraid. 

Perhaps there is – there will be – Truth.  Perhaps the Truth is that whatever MUST happen will happen.  But we’ll only know what that is when the movie fades to black and the credits roll.  And, in this life, there’s no script to read or way to fast forward.

I cannot tell you how this realization pains me.  As Billy Collins says, I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness is deepened.  How poignant and amplified the world before me seems.

In a week I will get on a plane and go to Australia.  I’m going to see a man there.  I think this is a brave thing to do, but it seizes me with terror – with the oldest, most familiar fear I know – the Terror of Being.

The consuming, breathless Terror of Being.

I have pinned my hope to a star.

But since there is no discoverable Truth here, since I am an astronaut, exploring things I can't even begin to understand, and since I know that...I go with hope.

Because my friend DID get married.  Because she WAS heroic.

Because, even if there is a death in the future, there once was a life.  LIFE in all capitals!  

And the alternative is tin and stone and sawdust.

In case of LITTLE GIFTS

Yesterday, on my way in to work, I noticed a man looking curiously at a bench.

He seemed stumped, perplexed. He looked around several times. Then, when he noticed me staring, he hurried off, dismissing the bench as uninteresting. Uh, I wasn’t looking at that bench. I don’t know what you mean.

When I grew closer, I saw why he was so captivated.

The bench was strewn with books.

Books, perhaps ten, all tattered and well-loved, sitting quietly there. Completely unattended. They might have been patiently waiting for the bus. But it wasn’t a bus stop. It wasn’t anything. It was just a bench. A bench and some books.

And, standing there, I was felt a surge of affection for Monrovia. I love this town. Although I haven’t lived here long, I’m constantly discovering new and beautiful things about it.

The restaurants, cozy, locally owned and incredibly diverse. The cute streets and colorful residents. The street fair every Friday and Family Festivals in the summer. I love getting out of work, inhaling the smell of funnel cakes and barbeque, and lazily beginning my walk home. I love that by the time I get into my room, the ceiling fan is spinning, Beth is home, and the sun is setting out our window.

I run into my neighbors at the bank, at the grocery store, at the little frozen yogurt places. I run into my friends, and my brothers and sisters from church. Sometimes, in the evenings, Justin plays music at Monrovia Coffee Company. And I walk there to see him. Normally, when I get there, the room is already full of people, sipping warm coffees and looking at whatever new artwork is on display. It’s always like they’re waiting for me, somehow.

I mean, I’m sorry to gush like this, but to me Monrovia is the place we all kind of wished we lived. It’s a simple place, full of young people, and interesting people, and history. It’s quiet and lovely, away from the frenzy and paranoia of Los Angeles. It's the kind of town that would have a statue of Mark Twain in front of the public library. It’s the town Upton Sinclair called home, anyway.

So I stood there for another minute, wondering what Monrovia meant by leaving these books here for me to find. I looked around, to see if someone had intentions to come and retrieve these books, but all I saw were a few couples eating breakfast on the curbside café tables in front of The Monrovian. No one paid me any attention at all.

And, well, what would you have done?

I took a book. And no one stopped me. I consider it to be a gift – one of many, many gifts – from Monrovia. My Monrovia.

And it’s called, appropriately enough, “Oh The Glory Of It All.”

In case of A COLD UNIVERSE

The older I get the more I wonder if life might really be all about sex.

I’m not sure who said that to me first.  That life is actually all about sex.  I read it somewhere, I think, or heard it in a movie.  Anyway, it’s a catchy idea, you’ve gotta admit.  Life = sex.  It’s got a nice ring to it.

And people certainly do live like that’s true, sometimes.  Let’s take one of my co-workers, for example.  Which one of these, do you think, is his favorite thing to do?

a)      work at the studio

b)      crack

c)      his girlfriend

Well.  Okay, I admit it.

Between B and C, it’s a toss up.

And Oggy?  Well, after trying a long distance relationship for a while, he decided it would be better to date someone locally.  So that’s who he’s sleeping with now.

Not that he bothered to break up with the long distance girlfriend, mind you.

And meanwhile, all I’m doing day after day is researching photographers as potential clients.  And what do you think this research has led me to?

You guessed it.  Lots and lots of pictures of mostly naked people.

Which brings me full circle back to:  life = sex. 

It does, right?  It must!

Sigh.

I have lots of ideas about sex.  What it is, what it isn’t.  What it means, what it doesn’t mean.  I’ve built these ideas from books I’ve read and people I’ve talked to and the handful of things I’ve actually witnessed and experienced.

But what I keep coming back to is that sex, boil it down, probably just satisfies that human desire to be in contact with other humans.  Even if it’s only physical contact. 

And when humans are most open, most intimate, most together…ladies and gentlemen…we call that love.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that sex and love are equitable.  But from where I’m standing, they’re born from the same two things.  Thing one:  the desire not to be alone.

Thing two:  the fear that we might be.

And if you have something to believe in, some reason to believe you’re not alone…then life, for you, is not all about sex.  At least, it doesn’t have to be.

But if you have nothing to believe in, if you’re a man at the mercy of chaos, a figure alone on a distant star in a cold universe…then you will reach out with every part of you to be touched.

And even those of us that do believe in God need that, too, sometimes. 

In case of THE INVISIBLE MAN

I see things.

And in case you’re about to be all comforting and reassure me that, it’s okay, everyone sees things, let me say right here exactly what I mean. I see things that aren’t there.

This is, I think, what it must mean to be a writer. We’re the kids that played pretend games all the way through elementary school, all the way through fifth or sixth grade, all the way until some Backstreet-Boy-Wanna-Be decided to start pushing us around. And even that wouldn’t have gotten us to stop if it hadn’t awaked our survival instincts. I mean, really. I blame Darwin. Survival was the reason we stopped.

We stopped and we traded our pretend games for, well, secret pretend games.

It sounds funny, but I’m not kidding. It wasn’t that I ever stopped SEEING The Big Dragon. I just stopped POINTING at The Big Dragon.

Thanks a lot, Chuck.

But now I’m starting to wonder if it really is all in my head.

Like, I look around. And there’s all this drama and meaning. There’s all this story everywhere. I can point to anybody and be like “you did this because of that time in your childhood when you ran through the lawn sprinkler. And, what’s more, you’re bound to run through the lawn sprinkler again!” Or whatever. And I can write it that way and it will make perfect sense.

But some days I wonder if I’m just grasping at the air. I wonder if The Big Dragon really exists at all. Or if he ever existed. I used to see him and I ran. But to everybody else…I was just running. I wanted to believe that my running meant something. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it really didn’t.

And sometimes, when people hurt us, we feel like there’s a reason. Because in our minds, there was a relationship there. There was a promise there. There was trust and love there.

Trust. Love. Intangible things. But they’re the realest things we know.

So when we hurt, we want to believe that it means something!

But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it really doesn’t.

I’ve spent my life throwing words at this, throwing flour at the Invisible Man. I feel like if I can just powder him from head to foot, give shape and space to him, then I can prove that he is there!

But sometimes the flour just floats, gently, in a horrible yawning silence, to the floor. There’s nothing for it to cling to.

And sometimes there’s no reason to run, anymore.