Erin Seabolt Bond

Originally Posted October 14.

***

As I was lying around my parents’ house this weekend, trying to recover the ability to eat solid foods, we watched several ’90s movies on VHS that my mom had bought at a yard sale. In between bouts of some Beethoven sequel and The Little Rascals, my parents brought out a video letter I made for my grandparents when I was thirteen.

(I’ll let you guess which was most painful and awkward.)

In the video letter, I talked to my grandparents, filmed my dad tickling my mom and my mom pretending to hit my dad, showed off the tricks I had taught my parakeet, played a piano recital piece, and demonstrated how I could play a duet on the flute with myself, with the help of my handy tape recorder.

I played duets with myself by recording one part and playing it back while I played the second. That is how lonely I was at thirteen.

I also played tennis alone by hitting a ball against the house.

I generally don’t like to think about my early teen years. I squirmed the whole time I watched the video letter. There I was, in all my thirteen-year-old glory, my hair messy and my clothes baggy and ill-fitting and my glasses enormous, recorded for forever and played back in front of my family and my husband (who lived in Texas during the worst of the teen years).

But the funny thing is, as embarrassed as I was watching the video, I know I didn’t see myself like that then. At that point in my life, I was rather blissfully unaware of myself and of the teenager’s desperate need to fit in. I hadn’t gotten the memo yet. But I would, soon. In the year that followed the filming of that video letter, I lost my best friend after a slow drift apart (namely hers–toward more popular friends). I was on the verge of becoming intensely self-conscious, but I wasn’t quite there yet.

The video ended, and I laughed it off, and everyone seemed fine. No one seemed to notice how painfully awkward I had been–or, they didn’t care. Jesse thought it was cute. I realized that I was the only one who cared about my hair or my dorky shirts.

Later that weekend, we “interviewed” my grandmother on video, recording some of her memories. At the end of our interview, we asked if she had any closing advice. She thought for just a moment and said, “Just be what you already are.”

Just be what you already are.

How I wish I could rewind, visit my thirteen-year-old self and deliver this advice. Just be what you already are.

How I wish I could save her the years of trying to change herself, of trying to fit in. Getting contacts and straightening her hair and fussing with makeup and buying new clothes and smiling with her mouth closed because she doesn’t like her teeth. How I wish I could tell her, the people you’re trying to impress don’t care, and in fifteen years you won’t care about them.

Because the people who really matter think the frizzy hair is kind of cute.

This is a lesson that continually surprises me, one I don’t quite trust to be true yet. But I hope with time I will keep learning it. Until then, I’ll repeat it to myself, a mantra: Just be what you already are.

Originally posted September 22.

***

It’s taken two solid months, but I think I’m finally coming back to earth after San Francisco.

I remember the first day we were in the city, on the shared-ride van that drove us from the airport to the apartment—I remember looking out the van’s windows at the highways and the hills and the trees that were so California, and I held my breath and felt immediately and completely at home. I remember driving through sunny neighborhoods of stucco houses, the Spanish tile roofs, the pastel colors of the Sunset district. The day was bright and unseasonably warm and we were giddy on little sleep and little food and too many hours spent cooped up in airplane seats. Everything was beginning.

I took the same shuttle back to the airport the night I left. The sun had set, but it wasn’t fully dark. The drive was longer this time, more stops to pick people up on our way, and as we wound through the city neighborhoods, the streets I knew by now, I felt quiet and torn. I’d been alone for weeks at this point, and I couldn’t wait to see Jesse. But in the month I was there, I did not for one minute feel homesick for anything other than the people in my life back here.

The van stopped on a residential street to wait for a passenger. The light was failing, and the fog was rolling in. Inside the houses, people were switching on lamps and watching TV and running the dishwasher and doing homework. Our driver called the passenger again as we waited, shifting in our seats, tapping our feet, clutching our carry-ons.

A door opened across the street, and we watched a man walk down the stairs of his house, carrying a suitcase. He was taking his time, and at the door he paused to kiss the woman holding it open. In my mind now, they are frozen in that moment, bathed in the warm light of their home, just before he is about to walk into the weak gray dark.

When I got home, I felt half here and half somewhere else. Even the mention of San Francisco could make me cry. I’d look through the pictures I took and close my eyes and breathe deep and try to smell the eucalyptus. I’d remember the wind on my face, the gentle fog, the Western sun setting. But I was home with Jesse and my cats, in the same time zone as our families, and close to our friends.

Now, as time continues to pass, I feel myself settling back into life here. Perhaps it’s my classes, my students throwing me an anchor, giving me something to focus on. Maybe it is my friend’s new baby.

Maybe it was the wedding we attended last weekend—the reception, at an old Southern mansion. We sat drinking sweet tea with friends at a long table under sprawling oak trees, our faces gently lit by candles and soft white lights. The day had been cloudy, and now the night sky was oddly orange and felt far away. Maybe it was dancing with Jessica and Amie and Kirsten under a bright white tent, the dark Southern night surrounding us but not touching us. The air was sweet and humid and everything was lovely.

Maybe it is a hundred other things, but I am settling into a sense of comfort here, a sense of being where I am, of loving San Francisco and the memories I have there, but also loving this place for what it is, and enjoying the memories I am currently making here.

Originally posted July 29.

***

A little quiz. For those of you who know both Jesse and me, who would you say would be more likely to be the bleeding heart at the sight of sad-looking people holding out cups asking for spare change?

(You answered me, right?)

I mean, when I was a kid I once saw a man in a parking lot pushing a shopping cart full of ratty belongings, and I nearly burst into tears. The first time I came to San Francisco, I’m sure I didn’t go home with any change on me.

Well. Out here now, I’m a little, shall we say, different about it. For instance, while Jesse was out here, you could regularly overhear me hissing at him, “No eye contact!” I mean, I am serious about it. Put a cup in my face and ask for money, and I will not acknowledge you. I will not shake my head and apologize. I will not seem sympathetic. I will keep walking as if I had heard nothing, seen nothing.

Part of this stems from the knowledge that San Francisco, of all cities, has a host of social services, and a very small percentage of homeless people are panhandlers, and not all panhandlers are actually homeless.

But, it was a little shocking to me to see how quickly I could lose that little girl who once cried at the sight of anyone in pain.

Then, the other day I was on the train and we were stopped outside a pharmacy waiting during a shift change for the driver. I saw an older man in faded blue jeans and a blue plaid shirt struggling to stand up. He was gripping a cane in one hand, the wall with the other. I could not see his face, but from the back he reminded me of my grandfather.

He couldn’t get up. He struggled and struggled, and he couldn’t muster the strength to stand.

On the Science Channel the other night, a man with an Australian accent and floppy straight hair talked about the elements, how there are only ninety-two elements in the universe, and how we’re all made of the same things. I thought of this: that we are all, essentially, exactly the same, that we were all at one point rocks or dust or a thought somewhere, and now we’re here, and some of us ride trains and some of us struggle to stand, and there isn’t a single scientific difference between us, not a single quantifiable difference.

Why am I not the man at the wall?

And whose grandfather is he?

The train started up and we sped off and I was glad to be wearing sunglasses. And I thought about how many stories there are in the world, how many stories have come from a little over ninety elements, how many heartbreaks and deaths and illnesses and births and stillbirths and love stories.

I wanted to weep for the man, and I wanted to weep for myself, because I stayed on the train and kept going, and I said nothing and I did nothing and today I will do nothing and tomorrow I will do nothing. I will take my good luck or whatever it is and will keep buying chai lattes because I’m not sure what else to do. I want to help every old man stand up, but I can’t, and my apathy is only apparent to me in glimpses. Most of the time, I am able to keep myself sufficiently numb.

There isn’t going to be an answer here, just thoughts and questions. It seems sometime that we are all the same person in different forms, all the people on the train, and the man, and everyone sitting in the coffee shop while I type this. I still don’t acknowledge people who ask for money. I staunchly avoided looking at the drunk man on the F-line today who was shouting, emphatically, that his name was not Sharon. I once sat next to a woman on the train for several stops before even noticing that she was actually a man. I am caught up in my own world and find myself lodged there.

A mystery, how different we are and how very much the same.

I hope time and growth erodes my apathy, but we will have to see.

Originally posted August 30.

***

Tonight, I’m sitting at my computer, drinking a cup of hot Trader Joe’s “Well Rested” tea (chamomile with accents of mint and lemongrass), listening as Jesse and some friends play music in the living room. They are practicing for a mutual friend’s wedding this month, and the songs are lovely. I can hear the piano, African drums, guitar, mandolin, beautiful singing. I can hear them harmonizing with one another. I can hear the slow, steady music, and I can imagine the bridal party walking in, I can see misty-eyed grandmothers.

And I’m looking through pictures from San Francisco. I can feel that place on my skin still, I can feel the energy–like an electric current at the very edge of me–I can feel the exact rush of awe as I walked along a dirt path and turned a corner and suddenly saw the Golden Gate Bridge in front of me. The shock of red against the blue water and the brown hills.

The tea I’m drinking I bought there. Every night, I’d have a cup of it with organic honey I’d bought at the corner store. I’d sit in the apartment and listen to quiet music and I’d read or I’d write and then I would go to sleep.

I have come to realize that I want impossible things.

I want to live in San Francisco. And I want to live near all my friends. And I want to live near all my family.

And I cannot have what I want, no matter how fervently I want it.

Last night, Jesse and I watched an episode of This American Life. The episode was called “John Smith,” and it told the story of seven people all named John Smith. From birth to death.

The episode was brilliant. (You can read about it here.) There was life, in an hour, in seven people, in a baby named John Smith, in a dying man named John Smith. John Smith wins the science fair. John Smith watches his mother die.

I cried, and after it was over I just went to bed. Jesse and I tried to talk about it a bit, but the emotions it had dredged up were still a little too raw. When you’re a kid, you’re afraid that bad things might happen to you; when you’re an adult, you become aware that bad things will happen to you. It’s just timing. Life is elation and sorrow, and you don’t get to have one without the other. No one gets exempt from pain. My parents will, one day, die, and they will probably die before I do. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life dreading that moment, worrying about it, crying over it before it happens, but that appears to be what I’m going to do.

I don’t know how to deal with my parents’ aging.

So here is the predicament I find myself in, this wanting of the impossible. I want to always have my friends in the living room practicing for a wedding, and I want to have my parents over for dinner without their having to pack a suitcase, and I want to feel what I felt in San Francisco–that aliveness–and I don’t want that to mean I’m a seven-hour flight away from everything else I love. I want to write, and I want to drink tea, and I want to see Seattle, and I want to teach and teach and teach, and I want to preserve everything just like it is right now, and I want everything to change.

In San Francisco, I’d sometimes find myself with an urge to call my parents or Jesse, only to remember the time difference, the fact that they were already in bed. And even if I had nothing important to tell them, I would feel it like a punch. I couldn’t call. They were unreachable, they were very far away, they were asleep and I was not. So I’d drink my tea and listen to my music and sleep fitfully and call the next day and that was fine, and I was fine, but last night I watched a man named John Smith talk about how he used to call his mother every day on his way home from work, and now he finds himself still wanting to call, but then he realizes she’s dead and all he can do is put the phone down and keep driving.

Okay, then, this is life. Sometimes I wonder how any of us can stand it, this living.

But, we do. The John Smiths keep driving.

And maybe one day I’ll know how all this turns out, and I’ll find myself wanting other things, new things, or the same things, or maybe I’ll let go of the wanting and sit where I am, wherever I am, knowing that what I have is what I have, and where I am is where I am, and that is enough, because it has to be, because it is.