catelin

I seem very ghost-like to myself these days, in this place. So much movement and stillness going on in my life at once that finding the words to communicate my insides puts me off even trying most days. I read about you, but there have been weeks when I haven't even bothered with that. I feel guilty even admitting it, as it is not a matter of waning interest so much as a lack of time and energy. I'm making a long journey these last few months that I cannot share...at least not now. But I am here with this feeble whisper to ask you not to forget me, to please not confuse my silence with a lack of feeling or care, and to believe that I will be back soon.

Here's what going on, the quick & dirty version:

It's way too hot here and I'm ready for fall. Busted my chin open at our last bout, blood on the track (thank you, Bob Dylan!), and then super-glued it together like MacGyver! Work is getting interesting. Sallie Mae still has me in a fucking chokehold and now I hear the CEO may buy a baseball team. All you politicians who keep selling off our rights to the CORPORATION can eat a dick. I hate you with a burning sun of hatred. My boys are growing like crazy and it's freaking me out! I am planning on going to Marfa in November to hang out with all the other wandering desert artists...part of the big master plan to become the 21st century Georgia O'Keefe (only with not much painting talent!). I have a big crush that I'm sure won't last, but he's like catnip to me and I just want to rub my face up against him every time I see him. Meow. I have another dog that I rescued off the streets. A pug named Bug. He's a big pain in the ass and he snores and burps and farts all over me but I love him! I have four dogs now, but they are all so small that they really only count as 1/2 a dog...so the real count should be two. Still, I'm at maximum capacity for the animal orphanage. No más. My hair is finally getting back to its old braidable self. Thank goodness! I feel like myself again. Weekend coming up, a roller derby bout in Austin--our first interleague game ever--and then the countdown to real fall weather. I can't wait! Friday!! Monster movies and popcorn with the kids tonight. And probably more dog farts. Ah, life.

My face is getting old. I have wrinkles and spots that mark every day I ever spent in the sun, every time I furrowed my brow at a problem, every time I laughed out loud and squinted my eyes with a giggle. I heard Nora Ephron hawking her new book about women and aging on some talk show or another and realized that my worry was not unique. It's all too common of a preoccupation of women of a certain age. She's in her sixties. I cannot imagine worrying about my looks as much as I do now in twenty years. I hope that I will come to accept the changes carved into my flesh by time as some sort of graceful patina, something that makes me different but still physically beautiful in some way. A friend of mine suggested botox the other day and I was horrified. I can't imagine doing something like that. I can't imagine cutting, peeling, pasting myself to look like something I am not. It's a nice idea, of course, losing a few years here and there; but where would I stop? Where would I decide that it was enough? I never realized how much I relied on the currency of my looks until they started to fade a bit, until I started comparing myself to my younger self and the younger selves around me. I always feel ashamed to even admit that it is something that bothers me at all...since it is really so completely trivial in relation to what sort of person I am and what I do with my life. I suspect that the next decade will be one of making peace with this new physical landscape and of finding a way to define myself that brings the internal to the surface of my skin so that it can communicate who I am in ways that are still valued by those (including myself) who sometimes have trouble seeing beyond the superficial.

1.
She irritates me. She is like a child, with her petulant demands for attention and insistence at having the world roll under her feet according to her desires. She stands at the door for five minutes, fuming when I finally hear her and open it. I ask her why she did not use her key. She's had a key for months.

"I could not find it," she snaps. I look at the half-dozen keys on the ring and smile to myself, realizing that I have been opening the door far too often.

2.
I paint and paint, sweat trickling down between my breasts, sticking my shirt to me like papier mache. The music is loud and I keep working in the heat. I am alone. The house is a mess. The boys are gone for a few weeks, giving me a chance to feel what it is like to be without them. It's a small taste of what my life might be like if they had never been here and I am unsettled by how much I miss them. It is a physical pain, to be a mother. My canvas and brush are blue, and I imagine the boys laughing together and diving into blue water, two little fish under the watchful eye of their grandparents.

3.
We sit at the table and exchange stories. He is younger than me by almost a dozen years, something that distracts me even as I focus on his softly accented words. I've had a parade of suitors lately, all of them very earnest and interesting. I think to myself that I have become one of those eccentric middle-aged women who is charming in her own peculiar sort of way. Still, the opportunities for companionship have done little to lessen my preference for spending much of my time alone, tending to my gardens or working on any other number of solo projects I have brewing. A friend once told me that I reminded him of an old Joni Mitchell song.

She will love them when she sees them
They will lose her if they follow
And she only means to please them
And her heart is full and hollow
Like a cactus tree...

I watch him stir his coffee and he smiles at me. We dance in the shower at midnight as if it were the Trevi fountain.

For any of you who want to play the roller derby version of Where's Waldo.


Can you spot me?


Summer's the best. Having a great time. Wish you were here.


Love,
Cate

In a criminal case, the victim has a right to make a statement after the defendant is sentenced. This is called the victim's allocution. It is the single time that the victim is able to address the defendant directly, to speak her mind, to spill out everything that she's been choking down for months and months. I was witness to many of these allocutions when I was a prosecutor. Sometimes they were quiet, almost whispers. Other times, they were raging storms--screaming, crying, shaking of fists, pointing of fingers. There were some who wished the defendants peace; others wished them dead. No matter what, they were always heartbreaking. It was hard to watch and not feel like an intruder. Hard to see a person bearing the unbearable.

Today, I was on the other side of the courtroom for my first victim's allocution as a defense attorney. I'd been dreading it for weeks, knowing that this time I was going to be sitting next to the person toward whom whatever was coming would be addressed. I wouldn't be able to get up, I wouldn't be able to leave if I couldn't bear hearing it. I would have to sit there, on the side of the person who had caused so much pain to others, because that is my job. That is part of what I have to do and I knew that I would simply have to get through it somehow. My greatest fear was that I would not be able to do it. What if they hated me too? What if they thought that I was somehow now a part of what caused them so much grief? How would I face them? I couldn't even think about it without crying.

I prepared my client for what was going to happen the best that I could, explaining the process and letting him know what to expect. I told him that part of making things right was letting the family express their sorrow, their anger, their loss, anything that they needed to say. So I sat there today, next to my client, and listened to a mother tell how the last words from her son were that he had just proposed to his girlfriend--how he was going to spend the rest of his life with her. And he did. Three hours later, they were both dead. I looked at her as she spoke, thinking that it would be wrong of me to look away; that it would be disrespectful not to soak every bit of it in. I could feel tears coming and I knew the harder I tried not to cry the more they would come. So I sat and listened to her story, with tears rolling down my face. I felt ashamed, like I had no right to cry for her son, but I couldn't help it. I thought of my own boys and how no mother should ever have to bury a child.

It was in this moment that life showed how it is full of unexpected grace. She addressed me from the witness stand. For a second I froze. I steadied myself for her anger at my tears, for the presumptuousness I would have to cry for her son when I represented the man who had caused his death. She looked at me and said, "I know this is hard for you. I want you to know I don't blame you. It's okay."

Then she moved from the witness stand and came to my table and put her hand on my arm, nodding to me before she went back to her seat in the audience. It was one of the most heartwrenching experiences I've ever had, but I am glad that I went through it because it left me with the certainty of the good in people. I found out later that she had been told about me before the allocution by some of the people in the courtroom--about my past with other cases, about the sort of person I am. I have always been humbled by the way the people I work with care about me, by the way they consider me family and look out for me; but this was so unexpected and such a kindness to me that I am still a little shaken by it.

So my day in court is done. My client thanked me before he was taken back to the holding cell. The families said their goodbyes to each other and returned to the lives they are trying to piece together. The fact that I managed to get through it pales in comparison with the other people who had to get through it as well. Still, I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else today other than where I was.

I want so many things right now, but they are things that will disappear altogether if I dare to give them a voice. They are the sort of things that grow silently and are nurtured with patience. Desire is always a tricky business, and should rarely be mixed with expectation.

It pains me, as much as it is a great relief, to find that I am becoming more and more practical when it comes to affairs of the heart. That great cold winter taught me well. Taught me that I can get through breaking even my own heart to do the right thing when I realize that it needs to be done. The ending of things still has the inevitable sting, but I have such a greater sense of movement these days...of how this time--now--will pass and soon things will be different in ways I have yet to even contemplate. New love will come, just like spring. I am lucky that way, and still so very grateful for all of my life's seasons.