A Thousand Misses

For the first time since I’d moved to West Virginia, two dramatically different things began to happen. My apprehension towards the intentions of strangers began to dissolve and I made eye contact at the grocery store. Although accidental, furtive glances made way for smiles and a little less of my East-coast indifference. I also started applying for jobs in Huntington, reaching out to every contact at the University that might produce some kind of employment. While these contacts proved fruitless, I caught myself wanting friends, wanting employment, resolving (if not quite wanting) to create a life for myself here.

Although accepting and supportive of my boyfriend's Catholic views, the strict stance on cohabitation before vows erected itself like a wall between us and any future plans we had dreamed of. I pleaded and asserted on the phone from my air mattress in the basement. He denied, steadfastly resolute.

Following my declarations that "this was the one" and that I wanted a life and a family, Dad offered to pack me up and ship me off to a flat in New York. The offer seemed less and less appealing as reality dawned. I would struggle to pay rent on an overpriced shithole in the city hours from a boyfriend that would make absurd excuses to visit but never stay--lest his parents disapprove. I would not have the family or life that I wanted in New York.

The Catholics I'd dated had a nasty habit of not wanting to admit to their parents just how close we were and where they lay their heads at night. After our first night together with one of the more memorable mistakes I made, I watched as the boy I cared for sat on the edge of my bed pulling on his socks. He dressed himself hastily as I drew the covers around myself. Not wanting to show my rising panic, I posed a simple and obvious question as calmly as I could.

"Where are you going?", I asked.
"Confession."

While among the more ridiculous and cliched, his was not the only lesson.

There was the "You're a great girl, but I feel nothing for you" guy, whose arms bore railroad track burn marks from desperate acts and his Teretts that I had tried to understand.

There was the off-off again first love who called every few months just to hear the sound of my voice--the only girl he ever felt about in that way you hope someone will one day feel about you. He endeavored to deserve me until I was twenty when he loved me and moved to Maine in the morning. Our relationship was punctuated by silence while others I went on to have were filler between their breakups, my breakups, and hiccups generally faced by youth with seemingly endless choices.

There was the one who said I gave too much--much more of myself than anyone ever should give another person; the one who chose an end over continuation just because he could, and another who would have loved me given the chance or not. He brought me snow from upstate in a coffee cup for Christmas and hardly slept beside me on the couch for our closeness.

It was one near-hit for a thousand misses. The Catholic had been the most memorable. So really it had been my fault that when the second rosary was hung with care around my bedpost on the silver chain I'd procured for it and his parents instructed that while we spent every waking moment together, the sanctity of marital acts was respected--I should have known. There was no future for Tommy with a girl marred by divorce, a borderline parent, and an intellect free from religion.

When I moved in with him at the age of twenty-three, my father and I started what would certainly have been a typical father-daughter relationship had we lived together while I was enrolled in high school. He gave me a key to the house that I attached to my koala key chain, cautioned me against speaking to strangers, and spoke to me nightly about the dangers of falling into the “wrong crowd”. While for me, the “wrong crowd” was comprised of right-wing bigots, homophobes, and any other human being not devoted to the betterment of mankind; for my father, it meant a group of seemingly kindred spirits who would undoubtedly win my naïve affection and then case the house for valuables they could sell for drugs.

Twice burned by such individuals who robbed him more of his sense of security and faith in humanity, I could hardly blame him when, as he packed his car for a weekend trip, he left me with strict instructions not to let any man, woman, or child into the house while he was gone. Lost dogs, three-alarm fires, and car-wrecks be damned; I would send them on their way or calm any wayward traveler through my side of the keyhole until the paramedics arrived. Even the mailman, with whom I was now on a first-name basis, was not to be trusted.

As Dad’s Subaru disappeared around the corner, I closed the front door and slid down the other side to the floor despairing in the knowledge that when his car crossed the border, there wouldn’t be a single human being I knew in West Virginia.


I'd always thought that there came a time in everyone's life, where you would be forced to learn to appreciate your own company--to respect and admire the voice of the narrator and the clarity they brought to what you hoped would become a movie script ending to your life.

Commanding correction from the rim of a megaphone, my narrator interrupts the resounding stillness and peace of laundry and dishes with recaps of missed opportunities and half-finished conversations that have long since ended. Never have I been forced to address the obsessive, condescending prattle that continually picks apart my dreams, my most basic human interactions, and the cowlick that splits bangs across my forehead with such vigor as during those four days in the empty house.

I plugged my ears with "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and ran vigorously on the treadmill in the basement. Excessive and obsessive as are most of my pursuits when indulged in with conviction, I resolved to run in the upcoming marathon in town on November 7th. Lack of credentials aside, I would achieve my athletic potential at the expense of my love-handles and hips.

A bit of a recap

In the very beginning of the summer, before I'd hardly had a chance to unwind, I boarded a plane bound for West Virginia where I went to visit my Dad. I had not, for a multitude of reasons, seen my father since the day I graduated high school in 2005. There had always been all these reasons and excuses why I hadn't visited him. I've realized that despite everything and anything...there are some relationships in your life and people you meet or know that are worth holding on to. While it was stressful in its own way, I'm grateful the trip gave me the opportunity to get to know him better.

Working for CTY this summer as an administrator was above all things a tremendous learning experience through which I made a small handful of incredible friends. While it was not what I had expected and my naive enthusiasm for the position did not serve me well, I adapted and made the best of it. I missed working more closely with students and found myself creating opportunities--visiting floors to join in on improvised four square games, co-facilitating afternoon swing dancing lessons, acting as a pirate judge for campus color wars, and performing in a staff lip sync for the talent show just to be a greater part of the action.

While I have not made any decisions regarding future endeavors (as I really ought to as soon as I can) I'm hopeful I will return to CLI in Baltimore next summer, where I really felt I had a tremendous positive impact on the staff and students.

Moving back to New Paltz was like coming home. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude and keep reminding myself to soak up every minute and to take advantage of every opportunity I can.

I also started working on a new body of work. At the end of last semester I spent an exuberant amount of time in the studio cutting out magazine clippings. I kept finding all these characters and scenes that suggested strong narratives filled with tension. I've begun scanning these collages and am making large format digital prints of them that I'm going to continue to print over. I'll have to post some images soon.

Song of the day: The Weakerthans-My Favorite Chords

learn something new every day

If there's one thing I always say when talking about my family it's this: we're complicated. I can never keep up with the various multi-decade long family feuds, who's speaking to whom, who swore they'd kill the other on sight, etc. We're Irish, German, French, Austrian, etc. and quite dramatic apparently. We're a family in which different groups gather for the various obligatory holidays and that's about it.

This afternoon, a few members of my family got together to eat dinner with a semi-long-lost uncle from Claifornia I haven't visited with since I was twelve. This afternoon has been really nice, an actual family occasion (granted there are only 5 of us here) where uncles and aunts came over to exchange hugs, stories, and copious amounts of food and where I unexpectedly learned a bit more about myself.

Today, I learned I'm related to Leslie LaGroves, a graduate of MIT, West Point, and the project manager "master mind" of the Manhattan project "responsible for killing all those Japanese people" as my aunt phrased it. LaGroves was also responsible for the CIA's operational policy of sharing information on a need to know basis, a topic of much discussion at the dinner table--more so than our family's hand in the dropping of the atomic bomb. Casual tidbit of dinner conversation I'm sure. Why hasn't anyone mentioned this before?

I also learned...as my other uncle pointed out, that I have double jointed thumbs. Sweet.