Sofa. Haagen Daaz. Rolling out...wait, what?!

I worked 10 hours straight today. No breaks. When I finished, after a tedious couple hours of charting, I really wanted nothing more than to curl up on my couch with a pint of Haagen Daaz and feel sorry for myself.

But I couldn’t help thinking about a patient I saw today who had been unable to get out of bed for the first time. Could I really be feeling sorry for myself? Before I could talk myself out of it, I rolled out my bike, put on the gear, and clipped in at the top of my road. I like to think I was doing it for her, but actually it quickly became clear I was doing it for me. How did she benefit? The joy was all mine. As soon as I coasted down Frustuck towards Bolinas, I knew it had been a good idea. For one thing, I wasn’t curled up in a big pool of self pity on the couch. For another, I had figured out how to attach the phone mount I bought a few weeks ago to my handlebars, which meant that for the first time ever, since starting to ride last October, I was riding with music. This is BIG.

Music is the soundtrack to my life. I have a playlist called Lookie Here (cannot explain) that has 200+ songs. I play it over and over. That’s really all I have played for the last year or more. Yes, it’s a little obsessive, though I keep adding to it so I rationalize it’s not really all that obsessive. But I figured out ages ago that it’s really okay to listen to the same two hundred songs all the time. Because at least I’m not blowing up bridges or jumping from them. Music gets me over the humps. It turns around the day. I can be starting out morose and blue, a certain song comes on and instantly I’m smiling idiotically and loving my life. 

Every song is a nest of memories. As I started up Pine Mountain, shuffle played Nathaniel Rateliff’s “Tearing At The Seams.” This was a song I listened to, ritualistically, every single time I drove to a certain patient’s house. She lived down a beautiful shady, tree-lined street very close to where I live. I would turn onto the street and line up Tearing At The Seams. It sort of strengthened me for the visit ahead. She was young, and dying of ALS. When that song comes on, I still feel the precise shades of sadness and grief that her death stirred up.

As I summited Pine Mountain at the Deer Valley golf course, I saw the pale nine-tenths moon that would accompany me on my ride. At almost every turn, it was there, and as the light faded, it just got brighter. Funny how the moon does that. 

On the downhills, the wind was loud in my ears and I couldn’t hear my music so well. On the climbs, I could hear it perfectly. So on tonight’s ride, I suddenly got a new appreciation for climbing uphill. Usually I climb so I can spin down. Tonight I appreciated the richness of riding uphill: not just because I could hear my music really well, but because it is no longer a significant strain on my body to ride up hills. I mean, it’s not fun exactly, but it doesn’t hurt. And I had Gregory Alan Isakov and Joe Purdy to make it hurt even less. So I realized tonight that I actually enjoy riding up hills. Who knew that would happen?!

By the time I was riding back down Pine Mountain on the last stretch into Fairfax, the sunset was in full flow. It’s a subtly active process, sunset. The sky changes at every turn, the gold washing across the very tops of the hills get richer, then the pinks start, and deepen, and everything turns diffuse and sort of hazy, and gets richer and darker and more beautiful every moment. I kept turning corners and sucking my breath in because it had got even more stunning and I couldn’t hope to capture it with my phone. Just with my memory and these few words. On the downhills, I would lean down into the bike so I could cut the wind noise and hear my music and also feel closer to the road, to the flow of the ride. Very few cars tonight. Moon all to myself. Mad sunset over the Bay Area. Maybe my patient will have a better day tomorrow and be able to get out of bed. And if not, I’ll roll out again in her honor. And again. And again.

Surf’s Up...in Milwaukee

I think the thing I love most about travelling, though it’s hard to pick from the long list, is being en route. People grumble about airline travel, the lines, the waiting, the bad food. I get happy when I smell jet fuel from the 101. It thrills me to be on layover at strange airports, people watching and wondering how everyone lives in this place and what they do.

But I have to say that visiting an old friend from Ireland is the icing on the travel cake. Opinions differ as to how long it is since we have seen each other. Andrew swears we met for at least one pint on South Anne Street in Dublin either 7, 9, or 13 years ago. I have no memory of the occasion and think it’s about 25 years. Either way, we can all agree that Lauren and I last saw each other on the Haight in September 2000 when I was about six minutes pregnant with Jessie. And a further point of agreement is that it’s brilliant I have come to Milwaukee to spend a few days in their excellent company some 7, 9, 13, 25, or 18 years later.

Andrew, suffice it to say, has not changed one bit since we were 19-year-old undergraduates in Trinity College Dublin back when the Temple Bar was still a collection of grimy warehouses and he worked for 2 days as a waiter in the Bad Ass Cafe. His comment on the experience: “They basically hired people on a daily basis because the pay was so low and the conditions so shitty that at the end of the day you’d be out of there.” I had a better time serving chips and pulling pints in the Buttery Bar, the dank cellar pub under Trinity’s dining hall: at the end of my shift I could just come out from behind the bar and join my friends for a couple of quick Guinness before closing time.

Andrew and Lauren live in a sweet yellow Milwaukee house in the leafy suburb of Shorewood with their two daughters and I’m getting a 4-day peek into their lives. They keep me in their basement, a dark and freezing experience as the A/C has to be on full blast down here since it’s 107 degrees the day I arrive and really hot at the top of the house. My body thinks I’m hibernating in a cave and I sleep better than I have for months. At the ice-cream social a neighbor throws on Sunday afternoon across the road, everyone keeps asking me which house on the block I live in. Oh I don’t live here, I say, I heard there was ice-cream so I stopped by. Nobody wants to be the first to get ice-cream, so I start spooning it out and soon the little gang of kids are lining up. I feel like I live here now.

Andrew is a Professor of English Literature at UWM, a job he was born to do. In his spare time, he gives tours of the socialist and cultural history of Milwaukee, plays darts under the Tricolor he hung in the local Legion bar, and hosts visiting authors and artists that he wangles faculty funds to invite. The last one was the chap who discovered Caravaggio’s lost The Taking of Christ in a Dublin Jesuit dining room. He authenticated it by taking a needle biopsy of the paint and travelling to Italy to verify the materials from which the pigments were made.

We sit in their living room and swap stories of all our college friends.  (“He has some girlfriend in the West of Ireland.” [Long pause.] “I think she’s real?”) Then we try to fill in all the missing years: we have a lot to cover: how he met Lauren, their marriage; my two; all the kids; Lauren’s three novels and the fourth she is feverishly not writing much of; my books and the day job as a hospice nurse that actually pays the bills. I watch how they work as a couple, the comfort of it.
“Wait, Lauren? If you happen to be swinging by, could you come in here?”
“What, tea?”

Andrew takes me on a tour of the city, and treats me to a nonstop history of the place, from its 1848 German founding through the waves of immigration and the Wards with their distinct characters. You can see where the Hispanic taco joints are layered over the old German funiture stores and how the streets of the Irish neighborhood were cut in half to make room for the highway. We stop to pay respects where 7 workers were shot at the Bayview Massacre in May 1886 that led to the 40-hour work week we take for granted now.

Lauren’s under deadline and worried because her book is short. I’ve read the first three: I know she’s a brilliant writer and this book will be even better, but I also know what it feels like to be writing the thing and have outsiders tell me it will all be fine. Shut up! You want to say. You have no idea what you’re talking about. This one sucks and will never sell and I’ll end up feeding my children from dumpsters.

While they’re working, I take a walk around Shorewood. Down on E. Oakland, a surf shop, possibly the last thing I expected to find in Milwaukee. I’ve swum twice now in Lake Michigan from the sedate Atwater Beach and it’s about as flat as the Mediterranean. Wondering how brisk business is, but admiring the optimism.

I’ve barely spent any time in the Midwest, so the impressions come crowding in: humidity like a warm blanket, fireflies, wide leafy streets, lush green gardens. The sense of a good life in a place that isn’t overrun with traffic and skyrocketing property prices. Real basements. And oh yeah, a winter that goes from October to April. With snow. Loving that I came in June. And because I’m a sucker for takeoff and the 33,000-foot view, loving the thought of the journey home and touchdown at SFO.