sleepless in seattle

One thing about working for “the man” is that you get to stay at fancy hotels for the corporate rate. I just checked in to the Fairmont Hotel in Seattle where I will stay for three nights. My girlfriend will arrive tomorrow evening from witchcamp, so tomorrow I will explore Seattle on my own. I hear there are some great bookstores here, and someone told me that the public library near the Pikes Market is an example of some incredible architecture.

It was a long trip. The plane was an hour late, and there was a long line to pick up the rental car. I arrived at the hotel at 1 AM famished, so I asked the valet parker if there was a Denny’s nearby. He gave me a strange look, as I guess not too many people check in to the Fairmont and ask where the Denny’s is. He said, “It’s pretty far away. Try room service.”

The room is a big as the average two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and there were five chocolate covered strawberries on the desk, which I promptly ate. Now I am eating my BLT from room service, which came exactly as I ordered it. The tomatoes are even heirloom. Now that’s something.

I feel like I should stay awake all night just to enjoy the room!

this kitchen is closed

that’s what my mother said as she walked back into her house at 5:30 AM from the hospital after my father died. It also happened to be their 59^th wedding anniversary, and I was tempted to highjack the anniversary cards from the mailbox that afternoon, but for some reason decided against it.

This kitchen is closed! Mine, that is.

For five days I was in charge of feeding and transporting a 15 ½ year old young man. I started to say boy, but he really is a young man. After five days, I can’t even begin to imagine what is was like for my mother (and so many millions of others, especially those who work outside of the home.)

And taking care of my father for 59 years! He would have died years before if she hadn’t counted out his pills very morning, leaving the evening doses in the little red plastic measuring cup on the counter. That little cup was a fixture in our lives for years.

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I just now took a break from writing this to call a friend who I haven’t spoken to since last November. Her partner told me that her mother died this morning in Toledo, Ohio. I was thinking of my friend all day. Now I know why.

(Now I get this sandwich generation concept; raising children, and taking care of and burying aging parents.)

My friend’s mother was afraid to fly, and rarely came to California. I met her mother years ago, when she came on the train, and we went to Townsend Restaurant for Sunday brunch. I didn’t see her again until a few years ago when she flew out here for her daughter’s lesbian wedding. She was so excited that she had flown, and was planning all the trips she could now take. I’ll have to find out if she ever did. I am sending much love and many blessings for her journey.

no kids, no plants, no pets

That’s always been my motto…no kids, no plants, no pets. I said that to a relatively new friend of mine, and she said, “Oh, nothing that needs nurturing.” That gave me SERIOUS pause. Literally, I stopped in my tracks, my eyes got wide, and I thought, “Can that possibly be true”?

I have always thought it was more of a responsibility issue. I always knew that I didn’t have the patience to raise children, and both kids and pets mean that you have to be home a lot, which I am not. I like the idea of being able to walk out the door of my house, turn the key, and not come back for a month if I don’t want to. Yes, that gives me a lot of freedom, but you remember what Janis said about freedom. The plant thing is just because my housekeeping is sketchy enough without all those dead leaves dropping all over the place.

So what have I done with all that freedom? Usually gotten involved with women with kids and pets. Nearly every serious relationship I have been in has been with a mother. Is it because I am hoping that some of that maternal nurturing will be left over for me, or because it allows me the space, while they are spending quality time with their children, to roam around out there in the world? I am both an extrovert and a seven on the eneagram, so I need lots of external stimulation.

After some serious thought, I decided that my motto did not mean that I was unable to nurture. I bring my girlfriend coffee in bed every day, pack her lunch if we have leftovers, and drive her son all over town.

Last week, when I was out of town, her son and his friend wanted a ride to a party at 10:30 on Saturday nite, and when D. said no, they said, “If Judy were here, she’d take us.” I think my friends see me as someone who will drop everything and lend a helping hand, if possible. So all in all, I’d say I am a pretty good nurturer.

So what did I do this weekend when my girlfriend was away at witchcamp? Took care of her 15 year old son for five days straight, cooked and cleaned up, watered the plants on the rooftop garden, and made sure the cats were fed and let out (no litter boxes here, thank god).

Although I am thoroughly exhausted and don’t understand how women have survived child-rearing, I must say I do have a feeling of satisfaction. Per the magnet on the refrigerator, “I say, if the kids are still alive at five, I’ve done my job.”

No kids, no plants, no pets..... that's not exactly how it turned out. And I couldn't be happier.

my first pagan hand fasting

My girlfriend priestessed a lesbian, pagan hand fasting last weekend at a retreat center in Charles Town, West Virginia, on a former plantation. It was on the last full day of spiralheart witchcamp, so we took the red-eye, or the shut-eye, as the airlines like to call it, to Washington, D.C. and then drove to West Virginia.

I actually liked West Virginia, at least the part of it that we were in...the NE corner about 1 hour outside of D.C. where West Virgina, Virginia, and Maryland all meet. You can always judge a place by the reaction when I walk in to an all male, all white barber shop and sit down in the queue. I think shock sprinkled with southern hospitality trumped any potential hostility.

The ritual was beautiful, the bride was stunning, and the butch groom had dress clothes on for the first time in years. It was mighty powerful, as most of the people in the circle had been at the witchcamp for almost a week, and the energy in the octagonal wooden room was palpable.

In addition to D., there were at least five other participants. Four different women called in the directions and welcomed the ancestors, and a gay man welcomed our queer allies and reminded us that certain kinds of love are still illegal, at which point, my damp eyes gave way to sobs.

They jumped the broom on literally the same land where slaves had jumped the broom in unions that were also not recognized by the law, and the rings were passed on a purple ribbon around the circle of at least fifty people, and everyone gave a blessing and a wish to the couple.

After the ritual, D. came over and asked me how I liked the hand fasting. “ I want one”, I said. She laughed.

Our hotel was in Harpers Ferry, WV, where John Brown led a slave uprising in 1859 and seized the Federal Weapons Arsenal. The town is very old, especially by California standards, and had an old haunted hotel with a view of a gorge on the Potomac River. (Click on the other pics on that page to see how beatiful the gorge is.)

There was a great flea market one block away from our hotel (not the haunted one), and we got sick at some of the LOW prices on stuff that was way too big for us to schlepp home. All in all, the vibe in West Virginia felt good to me.

We spent the rest of the weekend in a suburb of DC with the witchcamp teachers and organizers, and I was privy to hours and hours (and hours and hours) of camp debrief and some deep pagan theological discussions. One of D’s friends asked me if I was pagan, and I said “No, but now that we have been together for over a year, I am familiar with all of the holidays.” D. asked me which one I liked best, and I said Brigid, because I like all the books of poetry on the altar and the Brigid poetry slam in blogosphere. Although for Beltane, the antique postcards of maypoles are also very beautiful. Oh yea, and the sex part is good too.

The changing of the seasons means the changing of the altars at the house, and as a visual learner, just noticing the changes in the altars teaches me the meaning of the holidays. This weekend opened up a lot of questions for me, mainly just about the nature of “the divine”.

As Marga Gomez would say, “Who has it ? Where can I get it?”

a desk of one's own

Well, my days as a serial monogamist are over. There has been a steady stream of dating, but I never met Ms. Forever. Until now. I recently asked my girlfriend to marry me, and she said yes. They say Capricorns are late bloomers, which may be true, as I didn’t get this relationship thing figured out till I was 52.

So after you ask a woman to marry you, and she says yes, there are some plans to be made. When we first started seeing each other, her 15 year old son was not too keen on the idea of his mother having a girlfriend. As matter of fact, I couldn’t even walk into the house when he was here. We have come a long way since then, but at the time, we were talking about not living together for four years-after her son went off to college.

As I have begun to spend more and more time at D’s house, we have bought some furniture and rugs together. A series of events this summer resulted in my staying here every night for over a month. We had been casually talking about my moving in around December or January. The other night, she said, “Why don’t you just move in now. Like October 1^st.”

It’s always challenging to move in to someone else’s house, but we have come to recognize our venn diagram of taste in furniture. She has even agreed to let me paint ONE room white…well, off white. I now have a desk and computer over here, so I have one little spot that’s all mine, and I can feel my tastes migrating back to antique oak (from the mid-century blond and clean lines I came to love when I was in LA).

Sometime in the next couple of years, there will be a large party of some kind to celebrate the fact that I am “the freak ball she wants to spend the rest of her life with.” The where and what are still very much up in the air, but one thing I do know, I want faerose to make the cake!