Digging down

The intensity of the interview yesterday has led to a day of pungent self-doubt. I swing from moments of acute nostalgia for the loss of the sparkly, creative woman I remember being at Infocom, to finding myself unable to love the memory of that same self-absorbed and cock-sure girl. What banalities about the others and mortifications about myself have I now preserved in digital video? How could I have forgotten my place so much as to think, for a few hours, that I was as relevant as Steve Meretzky, or Brian Moriarty, or Dave Lebling, or Stu Galley? And how did my neck get so goose-skinned, like those too-thin older movie stars?

I did work on the pathway, for a little while. The ground under the sod is dense clay tangled with the warp and weft of decades of unaerated grass roots. Two days ago, I set the sprinkler on until the area was a grassy marsh, but the water appears to have slid off ineffectively rather than sinking in and softening the dirt. I did uncover a little "cliff" between the hard clay and a small patch where we dug up concrete months ago, where the ground is wonderfully light and aerated. Using that as a starting point, I was able to carve progressive inch-wide shovelfuls off the cliff, plowing up the packed earth for several feet.

But shoveling, or cutting the ground with a shovel, gets old fast. So I turned to removing the mortar from the bricks, which you do by scraping bricks against each other, mortared side to mortared side. The clumpy gray mortar crumbles off fairly easily, leaving smooth red brick underneath. Then you turn both bricks to a different mortared side and scour them together, repeatedly, over all six faces of the brick. It doesn't show in the photo -- the nearest line of bricks are cleaned and smooth, and will look red after a good rainstorm; by comparison, the ones behind are still gray and lumpy. But all that bending and balancing and rubbing bricks together is really hard on one's back.

A rational person would expect, as I adopted the stances associated with poor Chinese farm workers, spine aching and hamstrings taut enough to pop, that I would gain a little perspective. I'm building a brick walkway around the spacious house in which I live. I'm working on it a couple of hours every day. I'm not starving, standing half-naked in a rice pond for months on end.

But a rational person would be wrong -- perspective remains beyond my grasp. Hard labor and physical pain, however, do push to the back of one's mind the immediacy of self-pity, so in the end the same goal was reached -- I stopped dwelling.

So, after gouging out some dirt, and scouring off a few bricks, I shoved a hypothetical ramrod up my spine, and Andrew and I went to Ikea (for the third time in a week) and then to Home Depot, and then out for gelato and coffee. Sometimes you just have to enjoy where you are, and vigilantly not-think about where you were, or where you woulda-, shoulda-, could have been, had things been different.

And on the Ninth Day, Vacation

We went to Newport (mid-coast of Oregon) for the night, to see the son of Anne's college roommate perform with the All-American Young Boy's Choir. We stayed the night after at the Little Creek Cove Hotel -- a wonderful setup where people buy condominiums but have them rented out as hotel rooms when they aren't staying there. So it's like a homey kitchenette hotel, right on the water. Well, since all the beaches in Oregon are public, right next to the beach.

Will, Molly and I walked up to the top of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse (the tallest lighthouse in Oregon, built in 1873). This involved a 45 minute wait in line (they only let about 10 people into the lighthouse at once) and then a climb up 90+ stairs to the lamp -- still using the original Fresnel lens. Five minutes there, each person perched one at a time at the top of an additional 6 step stairway (which puts you eye to eye with the base of the lamp) to briefly glance at the view, and then back down to the main floor. I found the climb up heart-thuddingly frightening, the terror of the going up narrow open-tread spiral stairs (about which I have a specific phobia) worsened by fear that I'd have to comfort an overwrought child (both of them were sobered, but brave about the climb).

Ate local rockfish fish-and-chips (twice) and pan-fried local oysters, so I had a taste of the coast. Today was one of those picture postcard days of sun, breeze and warm, and it was hard to leave the ocean, but we did. We had to get back to The Porch, of course.