October 2014… Electrical Banana
I like typing Banana and Berkeley too... only one vowel each, appearing three times so they’re rhythmic to type.
I have a 5am waking thought at our daughter's house in Oakland, where I'm staying after completing a workshop, and receiving keys to our new house! Mark has gone back to L.A. Tonight is All Hallow's Eve, and I relish the opportunity to Trick-or-Treat with the Grandie. The thought went something like this: Electricity is a current topic. There was a whole riff... I got a charge out of the process.. after a day of dreaming about where to put our furniture, I cannot remember the electric riff... Oh, well.
The house on Englewood was almost ours. We made an offer. Luckily it fell through. We realized after the fact that smokers lived there for over twenty years, and the stench of stale smoke permeated every particle of the house to the floorboards and studs.
Not lost on me was the fact that this could have been our last house. Born in Inglewood; die on Englewood? Bookends.
Mercifully, Mark found another great house on line, and we are now due to move in December or January!
How do you move a household of 26 years?
Book by book.
How do you stay in touch with friends and family who remain 380 miles away?
Visit by visit, card by letter... then there’s email... which you can’t touch, smell, hear, or hug... only eye candy when friends fall into your inbox. Rats! It’s hard to say goodbye.
Writers! What about that Friday morning community of pen to paper people? I will miss them soooooooooo much! And Miss Andrea, our fearless leader!
Perhaps there’ll be groups up in the bay area to join. Different. Give it time. Don’t judge because they’re not yet familiar. Remember how shy and awkward and embarrassed you felt about reading out-loud, in the beginning, and how quickly these folks became your safe space for sharing from your heart.
Colleagues! What about the networks I’m part of professionally?
So many of them are up here as well.
What about my dear clients?
Grateful for my therapist's support on this one! Guilt hangs me up. I want to free them, and myself, to move forward. I shan’t be returning to L.A. every month or so, as I previously envisioned. Bless Sharon's brilliant strategies to help me through this one!
Writing by the Bay sounds pretty sweet!
Being with the grandie is the best lure to be here. Time spent with her is precious.
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October 2015
A year later, I’m looking out at the bay typing away, while seated in one of the blue chairs that used to be in my upstairs healing space, but both now reside in the new living room - not at the Englewood house, but rather a different one. We love this home. In some ways, more than the Studio City house, which was a lovely home for us for twenty-six years!
The essential rooms of this new place are all on one floor, so paramedics have straight access to us from the street - not even a step up or down from the front walk. Amazing. And comforting, too, as we plan to be here ’til we’re taken out feet first. A year of looking seems to have paid dividends.
This house comes as close to perfection for us as anything we could imagine… and someone built it seemingly knowing our taste! We didn’t have to lift a finger to change it to our liking. Well, there is one major repair of a garage beam to deal with, but apart from that, we’re even delighted with the color schemes: a green kitchen, a red, white and grey half-bath, with trivia wallpaper, and basic off-white paint in most of the rest of the house.
Oh, and a view came with. It surprised us. The day we met with our realtors a year ago, here to receive the keys, we had a toast and looked past the orange glare bouncing off the bay, and there, floating in the golden hour of molten sky, was the city of San Francisco.
“How did that get there?” Mark gestured with his glass of bubbly. “Was that view there when we came to look at the house before?” It truly is spectacular. From the lights of San Leandro, Oakland airport, San Francisco’s skyline, to the Bay Bridge, and way in the distance, a wee glimpse of the Golden Gate. Binoculars are a plus, but we rarely use them - preferring simply to take it in with naked eyes.
All good connections have a beginning point. Neighbor Jean is mine. One day, she said, “Why don’t you come with me to my ‘Church of Last Resort’ one Sunday?” I did. And through that simple introduction, a whole world of possibilities opened up. From that first service, where my tears were touched by words read, hymns sung, and invitations issued to be politically involved and active, and a story-tellers event that landed me next to a gal who invited me into a writing group that led to another writing group, and now a third, and a brand new friendship with that gal so similar to me as to be a long lost soul sister with a birthday in the same month, same year, and a family of origin configuration almost identical to my own. She invited me to meet with a group of writers with whom she’s been meeting for twenty three years. I feel so met and held and appropriately challenged to show up as my writerly self that I’m again moved to tears.
Colleagues are plentiful. I will perhaps take over hosting an occasional gathering of Somatic Experiencing Practitioners so we can support one another in our practices of listening to people with big owies, terrible knowledge, horrific stories of human suffering. It helps to be heard. It helps to be held by our peers. It helps to let fall from our shoulders the weight of all that impact of vicarious trauma. If it can flow through us and not land and take up lodging within us, we will be of better service to many more folks for many more years to come.
I plan to invest in a circular fire pit similar to the one my colleague uses, when she hosts these monthly gatherings. She is moving away to her family’s ranch a few hour’s drive south. A fire circle burns away the chaff; helps gold to coalesce.
Even though I’m so busy that I wonder how I ever had time to work as a trauma specialist, and am heading toward complete retirement and only writing, I like keeping in contact with these colleagues whose work inspires me.
The other night, when we were driving the Grandie back to her house for bed-time routine before her mama got back from her Montessori training, we played a word game volley, from back seat to front seat.
A: My name is Alison and I come from Albuquerque, my partner’s name is Alvin, and we sell Alabaster.
Our granddaughter loves these games. Perhaps I’ll change my name to Bertha and sell Bananas electrical in Berkeley. Or maybe I'll be simply a Berkeley writer for Halloween... and beyond...
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