Single Mom Gets New Roommate

In a single week this June, my daughter turned 18 and graduated high school. Now it’s September and the kids are shouldering their backpacks and sharpening their pencils, but in our house it’s still Summer Vacation. There are Back to School signs in the store windows, but instead of settling my girl into a tiny dorm room somewhere halfway across the country, I have a new roommate. In certain key ways, she’s very like my old roommate. Except she’s an adult! This is exciting!

She’s taking a gap year - a phenomenon that only seems to have sprung into existence in the last ten years. When I finished high school, it was called Not Going to College Yet. She launched into her year of adventure with a six-week backpacking trip around Europe and Morocco with her boyfriend. Now she is home and she is my new roommate.

It occurred to me shortly after her return from Europe that I was no longer the parent of a child and it was thus no longer my responsibility to keep the fridge stocked at all times with tasty, nutritious, affordable food. If you have read any of my former posts, you will know that I’ve never been any good at this anyway. But now it turns out I don’t have to be. Because I share my house with my adult daughter and she has a car and she knows where United Markets is!

There are other advantages to sharing my house with my adult child, if that is not a contradiction in terms. These are as follows: I don’t have to do laundry or clean or wash dishes. Because my roommate will be doing all of this. Soon. 

The other day, my new roommate informed me that our sheets smelled bad, and this was because I had left them in the washer too long. I tried explaining that I had not been home when the wash cycle finished, but this did not stand up in court. Apparently, I should not do laundry unless I am going to be home for the entirety of both cycles. Who knew?!

However, the problem of poor smelling sheets will soon be solved, because NR will be doing the laundry. I’m excited.

I threw a dinner party the other night. It was a complex meal, one that I love to make for dinner parties because it is very tasty (Irish cooking has two secrets to its success: butter and cream) but it sure uses a lot of dishes. Late that night when the guests left, the whole kitchen was hidden beneath piles of dirty dishes. Three days later this was still the case. I know, that’s really bad housekeeping and irresponsible and could invite cockroaches into our home. The only reason I am admitting to it is to explain that my new roommate’s powers of observation seem a bit sub-par. Of course, they were my dirty dishes and I should have washed them. But I was busy. And my roommate seemed just fine with living without a kitchen for a few days. The existing dirty dishes were added to by bowls of half-eaten cereal. I am not sure how this will play out.

The fridge also remained unchanged for a while. At first glance, it looked pretty full, but as my new roommate loves to point out, when our fridge is full its fullness consists mostly of a) condiments, b) bread in various stages of decay and c) cheese. This is because I love to cook elaborate meals for dinner parties but when I’m alone I like to dine on cheese sandwiches. It’s not that I’m lazy. Good grief. Just that by the time I notice I am hungry, I am way too hungry to endure the preparation time for a healthy nutritious meal. I must eat, immediately, and thus l make a cheese sandwich.

The other day NR informed me that she wished to go grocery shopping. I showered cash on her immediately. That night the fridge was full of tasty nutritious food. It felt great. Then both of us weren’t home much for a few days because we are busy and important. Some of the food went off. I threw it out, feeling terrible. Then our fridge was full mainly of condiments and the ingredients for cheese sandwiches.

I’m not saying anything. Really, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut. This is me, shutting up about it. As my eldest brother once ruefully commented on the subject of parenting, saying I told you so just isn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be. Plus the local Home Goods just reopened, after a 9-month closure following its roof falling in. We have decided we are going shopping for new bedding in order to solve the laundry problem at least for a few weeks. Turns out my new roommate thinks just like I do. I believe this is going to work!

Single Mom. Teen Daughter. Very Old Shoes. Ice Cubes.

Those things in the title may not seem like they have a whole lot of cohesion, as blog post titles go, apart from the fact that my teen daughter is clearly related to me by birth, I possess some very old shoes, and I sometimes manage to have ice cubes in my freezer for the formation of iced drinks as well as the healing of inflammatory injuries of the body. 

Actually, all four things have a sort of subtle relation to one another in terms of the fact that lately I have been feeling my age. My age is 52, and the sole reason I am feeling it, apart from insomnia, night sweats, mood swings, sudden irrational crying fits, and trouble getting up at 6:30am to go to the gym, is that I injured myself biking and it’s taking longer than anticipated to heal.

If you have read previous blog posts, you may have noticed that I rode 300 miles in early July to raise money for climate action. To keep things short, for those who did not read my ten thousand page post, I did an independent challenge Climate Ride and pedaled my road bike out my door, up to Mendocino, and back over four days to raise awareness of the perilous future facing our planet. The ride was epic, I had a fantastic time, and after I came home I discovered I could not really walk or even just lie down without pain.

For a while after the ride, I thought I had just stressed my body beyond the limits of normal endurance. It would soon go away, the pain, would it not? After all, I had done a 320-mile climate ride a year before without any bodily injury so I naturally assumed I could just keep doing these crazy things with no repercussions. I was, I confess, annoyed that my body had not fully cooperated with the insane task I had set it. Had I not trained for months? Was I not near peak fitness when I rode out my door? So why were there unidentified shooting pains all down both legs to my feet?

When the pain persisted for more than a week, I sprang into the kind of action that all nurses take when they are injured. I did nothing at all, soldiered on with daily life, and continued to hope it would all just go away. 

When this approach failed to work, I spent a few weeks not riding my bike (sensible) or doing much at the gym (also sensible) and failing to seek medical attention (not so sensible). Eventually, after an undisclosed amount of time and several trial bike rides that resulted in renewed pain, I made an appointment with Ron Solari.

Ron is a chiropractor and a healer of indescribable talent. As soon as I explained my issue to him, he knew a) exactly what was wrong, b) how to fix it, and c) when I could be back on my bike. And he was right. And this is why everyone who knows him, and all of you who do not yet know him, love Ron Solari.

Ron told me to do 20 pelvic tilts twice a day and a stretch he calls Number Four. If I were a yoga practitioner, Number Four might present me with no big issue, but as you may already know I’m not a yoga practitioner, nor do I stretch before or even after my epic bike rides, which may have something to do with why I got impacted vertebrae at the base of my spine after riding to Mendocino and back. Three hundred miles in four days: crazy. Not stretching before, after, or during: very crazy.

Now I have spent a week doing pelvic tilts BID (that’s nursing speak for twice a day, just thought I’d throw it in to give myself a shred of validity in the face of my gross failure to take care of the temple of my body) and the painful Number Four stretch. And Ron has adjusted my misaligned and impacted spine twice. And I really think I’m going to be ok. Tomorrow, I’m getting up at 6:15 and I’m going for a bike ride at 6:30. I cannot wait to tell you how pain free I will be afterwards. Do not go away.

The shoe thing: I’m going to skip over it to the ice cube thing because that is more related to Ron Solari and the age-related rubbishy nature of my body. As I left his office this afternoon, I remembered to mention to him that I also have acute tendonitis in my right elbow. I remembered to mention this to him at the very tail end of my treatment for vertebral compression, because it is so painful I can no longer lift my coffee cup without wincing. Ron asked whether I thought it was related to my bike riding? Or my job? Do you lift patients, he asked solicitously? I admitted that I was no longer able to lift a piece of paper without pain. Oh, he said knowingly yet completely without judgement, you’re there.

Long story short, and skipping over the part where you judge me because I’m lousy at self care and allow my body to become seriously debilitated before I consider it worth mentioning to a health professional, Ron’s immediate advice was succinct and focussed. Every night, he said with the intensity he reserves for his treatment instructions, I want you to hold an ice cube against your elbow until it melts. That will be long enough. Then, he continued, not letting up with the intensity, I want you to do these two exercises. He showed me the exercises. I committed them to memory, along with the ice cube instructions. My elbow has been hurting with gradually increasing hurtingness for months. Maybe a year. I knew that in two minutes, I was receiving the verbal cure. I was to do this for three days, Ron said, and then return to him for an ultrasound.

I left his office, after paying his ridiculously paltry fee, only just managing not to bow down to the ground to pay homage to him. He’d hate that. He just likes to fix people. 

Turns out it’s really difficult to hold an ice cube against your elbow until it melts. I imagined, what, a minute? Two? It’s longer than that, but it still shouldn’t really be that difficult. Unless you are someone like me who can’t just sit on the couch holding an ice cube against their elbow without a) emailing someone, b) changing the Spotify playlist, c) doing sit-ups or d) dusting the ceiling free of the spider webs noted while doing sit-ups. 

I held that ice cube against my swollen tendonitis-ridden elbow until it melted. But I dropped it a lot. It slipped out of my grasp while I was groping in the fridge for a La Croix. And it slid away from me while I texted with Jessie about her etsy store. It even went under the kitchen table as I was taking my bike out of the basement to prep for my ride at 6:30 tomorrow morning. Damn slippery little piece of ice, couldn’t you just melt already?

The shoe thing. If you aren’t convinced that I’m feeling my age from the compacted vertebrae or the tendonitis or the slippery ice cube, get this: I was walking downtown the other day to pick up the Jeep keys from Jessie. She was working at the Potting Shed, and a block away from there, I had the thought that the shoes I had chosen to wear were not only really old but had also never actually been comfortable. They looked good though, to me, and you know how that goes.

As I had that thought, the sole came completely off one of them. Just like when you get a flat tire on the freeway, it took me a couple of steps to realize that what felt really weird about my shoe was actually the fact that the sole had completely separated from the upper part and was flapping ridiculously. I took my shoes off so I could walk the block to the Potting Shed. It was Fairfax. A woman walking barefoot doesn’t exactly raise eyebrows.

When I got to her workplace, I told Jessie and her coworker about my shoe and we fell about laughing. I was laughing because of how I felt like a country and western song on legs. Turned out Jessie was laughing because it was so typical of stuff that would happen to her mom. Really? I am not sure why her coworker was laughing. But the belly laugh on a hot afternoon did us all good. And her industrious coworker glue-gunned the sole back on my shoe. 

Now I have perfectly serviceable shoes. I have a spine that is aligned and no longer features compacted vertebrae. And my chronic tendonitis is well on the way to being healed. I am a reasonably functional mother of a teen. And although I am fifty two years old, I only have insomnia, night sweats, mood swings, sudden irrational crying fits, and trouble getting up at 6:30am to go to the gym. So I figure I’m doing pretty good, considering.

Don’t Worry, There’s Always The Sock!

We live in a place where wildfires happen. Earthquakes also happen sometimes. And mudslides. Floods. You might wonder why we would live in such a dangerous place. The answer is that it is Marin County and it is paradise. Plus those things probably won’t happen to us as they only happen to other people. But if they did happen to us it’s ok, because we have The Sock.

A while ago, I finally caved to all the pressure and got an earthquake kit together. This is a really tedious thing you have to do when you live in earthquake country. Ideally, it involves filling several large plastic garbage cans with enough food, fresh water, and provisions for your family to survive out in the open for something like six weeks. When the Big One comes and your house falls down, you live out of your plastic garbage cans. You know, in a tent with foil blankets and canned beans and valium. 

In my old house, I had an earthquake kit that took many months to put together. I was very proud of it because it even had food for the cats and dog and a bottle of wine to ease the pain when the house fell down. Periodically when I ran out of wine I would raid the earthquake kit and drink the really bad bottle I had stashed in it. But I always replaced it. I am really glad there was no catastrophic earthquake while I lived in that house because it was a very damp property and eventually the earthquake kit became really moldy. If the Big One had come and the house had fallen down, we would have been forced to live in a moldy tent with moldy blankets drinking very bad wine. 

When I left that house, I had no earthquake kit for a while, because in my new place I barely had furniture so a kit full of emergency supplies was pretty low on the To Do list. But eventually I got furniture and I made it far enough down the To Do list to purchase one of those ready-made online Earthquake Kits that come in fancy backpacks you are supposed to keep in the trunk of your car. I keep mine in the basement because the trunk of my car is full of adult diapers and wound care supplies. When my house falls down in the Big One, I am hoping the basement will still somehow be accessible. Otherwise we are screwed.

With the fancy online earthquake kit backpack came an extensive guide on things you should do to prepare for an earthquake/wildfire/mudslide/flood. It gave me a headache just reading the first page, but one thing that caught my eye was that in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, the grid could go down and you won’t be able to get cash from the ATM. So you should keep some cash with your kit. 

I have always secretly liked the idea of keeping all my money in a sock. It’s not that I don’t trust my bank. They are a credit union and they treat their customers really nicely. But I know that when my back is turned, they use my money for other things without telling me. So it has always appealed to me to buck the system and keep all my wealth under the proverbial mattress. Since my wealth would not be very voluminous even if it were dispensed to me in quarters, I figured I could hide it pretty easily somewhere around my house.

One day I withdrew two thousand dollars from my bank account in hundred dollar bills. I brought it home and I rolled it up and put a rubber band around it. It made a pleasingly fat roll of cash. I felt a little like a drug dealer. Then I looked in my sock drawer for a suitable sock. Most of my socks are black. But I had this pair in the back of the drawer that I never wear, principally because they have a frill of lace around the top of them and even though they looked really cool in the store, when I got them home and put them on they looked really stupid. This happens to me more than you might think, and not just with socks.

So I put the wad of cash in one of the socks and then, so it wouldn’t look too suspicious, I folded the companion sock’s top over the wad of cash sock. I put them in the backpack where I keep our passports and other important papers, and I slung it on the top of my wardrobe. That night, I mentioned to my daughter that there was two thousand dollars in a sock in the black backpack on the top of my wardrobe. She was suitably impressed. So were all her teen friends who happened to be over at our house that night. So, I instructed the teens, if there’s ever a wildfire and I’m not home, drive far away immediately without observing speed limits, but bring the black backpack from the top of my wardrobe.

You might think I was a bit stupid to be telling a bunch of teens where all my cash was. But you would be wrong. I totally trust my daughter and all of her standup friends. Besides, it was not them I needed to worry about. Over the course of the next few weeks, I kept running out of cash at inopportune times. This was not a new phenomenon. Mostly when I look in my wallet there is a single dollar bill in there. Sometimes there’s, like, six or eight dollars and I feel really good. But now, I had The Sock.

So you can imagine. The two thousand got a bit whittled down. Sometimes Jessie would text me she needed cash for something and I wasn’t home. Take it from the sock became a bit of a habit. Soon there was much less than two thousand dollars in the sock.

Eventually, it felt like there was no real point having such a tiny sum of cash stashed in a sock on top of my wardrobe because if the Big One happened it would scarcely buy us dinner. So I replenished it. This time, I added a sticky note with $2000 and the date written on it. I reckoned it would be psychologically harder for me to keep taking hundred dollar bills from the sock if I had to write down on a blue sticky that I was doing so. Accountability, you know? It was not that much harder.

Plus I had told all those teens about The Sock, and every teen knows about ten thousand other teens on Instagram. So you really couldn’t call it a secret stash any longer. I may as well have put a message up on Facebook. Wildfire? Earthquake? Cash is in the frilly sock on top of my wardrobe.

My life is sort of a financial feast or famine. Sometime there is enough money in the checking account to cover all the bills and even to do something extravagant like buy airline tickets to somewhere very far away. Other times, I look at my balance and I go that can’t be right! Did my employer forget to deposit my wages? And I get confused about how the hell I could be a relatively well-paid professional and yet the sum total of money in all of my bank accounts has fewer digits to the left of the decimal point than I believe it should have. As you may have gathered, I do not spend a lot of time staying on top of my financial affairs. 

But the advantage of that relative looseness is that sometimes I have more money than I thought I had. So one day, I had a weirdly large sum of money in my checking account and I took some of it out and fully replenished The Sock. Now it contains the same sum as the one I mentioned at the start of this blog post. Nearly. Except for that time last week when I needed groceries. 

Plus I have moved the sock. It was just too obvious, the whole top-of-the-wardrobe thing. And it was hurting my arm every time I had to drag the backpack down from there and sling it back up. That thing is full of important papers and things I think I will need in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster, so it is heavy. Now it is in a top secret location under my desk and only Jessie and I and a few select teens know about it. So you know what? Get your own sock!

Shock Waves and Revolutions

I wrote this post a year ago but it was too raw for me to publish at the time.

I want to write about shock, because one day last Summer I sustained two shocks in quick succession and it was interesting afterwards to watch how I reacted, how the body reacts, how the mind responds to assaults that come out of the clear blue on an ordinary day.

As a hospice nurse I am no stranger to death, but all deaths are not equal. The slipping away of a 94-year-old who has been bedbound for months with Alzheimer’s disease is not trivial, but it doesn’t shock me. Sometimes, however, I get a patient I immediately love and become very connected with, someone I am thrilled to get to know, and whom I know from the start it will hurt to lose.

One summer I had two such patients: both with cancer, both wonderful women in very different ways. They came on service within days of each other, even lived near each other, and I had an uncanny feeling their deaths would be near to each other too. 

One Thursday I started my work day as usual, by checking the after hours reports to see if any of my patients had issues overnight. Sure enough, the family member of one of these women had called in. I called her, asked how their night had been. It was terrible, she said. Now if this woman said things were terrible, I knew they must incredibly bad. These were not people to complain. I told her I’d be there after my first visit, which was to the other patient, who was at this point actively dying. As soon as I put the phone down, the word terrible echoed in my head. I called her right back and told her I’d be there immediately. I could hear the relief in her voice. 

On my way there, I had a sense of dread. I was going to have to recommend more care to them. My patient would hate it: strangers in their home, a hospital bed. Just the day before when I visited her, she had declined the bed, shaking her head and smiling. I’m not there yet.

I walked into their home. My patient was lying on the couch and I saw immediately that she was dead. A wave of shock hit me. It was so sudden, I had not seen any signs the day before that she was this close. My own grief washed over me at the loss of this extraordinary woman, and then I realized that her family member was in and out of the room, that she didn’t know, and I was going to have to tell her.

She came back into the room. I summoned all my strength, took a breath, and told her. I remember that my exact words were “I’m so sorry, L, she’s gone.” It seemed like such a small, naked word for what had just occurred: gone. We stood there in the living room and the tsunami of her shock and grief swirled around us. I watched myself go in and out of disbelief, just as she did, but I also felt her emotions jog me back into my professional role. I watched myself put my feelings over to one side, something that I have been adept at doing my whole life, for better or worse. Shock! I’ll deal with this later. For now, what do I need to do?

I stayed there an hour, until more family members arrived and I felt it was okay to leave, promising in response to their request that I would return later in the day to sit with them and the body. 

My team leader had texted me, asking me to call her when I could. I called her from my car, and quickly told her the story of the death and how shocking it had been, how sudden, the anguish I felt that I hadn’t had time to prepare them in the way I like to. She listened compassionately, as she always does, and then she said I’m really sorry to have to do this Sara, but I have some bad news to tell you. A coworker nurse of ours, they had just found out at the office, had taken his life the day before.

A second shock wave hit. Wait! He’s dead too? This was a young man, very beloved at hospice, an excellent, meticulous and very kind nurse. He had a partner and many friends. She told me the manner of his death and I cried for a minute in desperation, thinking about how he must have felt in his last moments. I felt myself casting about for a way to incorporate this information into the day I had already had. It was too much, and at the same time, I knew I could handle it. Again, I remember consciously putting my feelings over there, to the side, where I would deal with them later. I had three more patients to see, including my other lady who was actively dying, and honestly I did not know what else to do at that moment besides to go on with my work. It’s what I know how to do, it’s what I need to do right now. I knew that in my own shock, it would ground me to have to enter the homes of people in great stress and help them to deal with their trouble. This was not altruism, but the knowledge that dealing with someone else’s suffering was preferable at that moment to dealing with my own.

One of the great benefits of working for hospice is that they really know how to respond to death. A gathering was organized for 3pm that afternoon. About a hundred of us sat in a circle around a photo of our coworker and some flowers. Led by our chief spiritual counsellor and another grief counsellor, we were encouraged to share not only stories of him and how we knew him, but specifically what we were doing when we heard the news, how we heard it, and how we felt in our bodies and hearts when we heard. 

What was I doing when I heard the news. The phenomenon is familiar to anyone who lived through the assassination of JFK, the day John Lennon was shot, or 9/11. But it is also familiar to many people who have had someone close to them die. The moment they heard the news is imprinted vividly on their brain: what they were doing, where they were, how they felt. It’s an important part of grief work to be able to tell that story. All of us in hospice have listened to those narratives a thousand times.

As the stories poured out, some themes emerged. Why didn’t he reach out to us? Did we miss the signs? Were there red flags and we didn’t see them? It struck me how often the nurses in the room used the word isolation. Hospice nursing in the field can be a very isolating job, particularly for intake and night and weekend nurses. We talked a lot about the need to take care of ourselves, to detach from the job, do things we love, and be with the people we love. That bears repeating: be with the people we love.

I finally worked up the courage to talk, which I sometimes find hard in gatherings like that. I told how I had received the news immediately following a shocking patient death and watched myself put my feelings to one side to deal with later. I told how a patient later in the day had asked me how I was and I heard myself say I’m great! I wondered aloud when I would be allowing myself not to be so great. I know I was far from alone in the room in my way of coping. 

That Friday night and Saturday, I went out with friends, listened to music, and cried a lot. I also went on a long bike ride. Just the act of clipping in and rolling out made me feel deeply calm and reminded me of the pure joy in my life, the simplicity of watching my wheels go round and round. Riding distills life down. All I have to do is focus on the road, staying safe, getting up this next bit of hill to the corner. I rode to a place where I knew my patient had gone on her last outing, and it healed some of my sadness to think about her there.

Sunday morning I checked my work phone, because self care only goes so far and I have poor boundaries. My other patient had passed very peacefully early on Saturday, just 44 hours after the first. 

Riding Fool Accidentally Rides a Century

It’s been over a week since I rolled out my gate on my independent challenge Climate Ride. Four days later, I rolled back in my gate, tired but extremely happy. Thanks to my generous donors, I had raised over $2300 for climate action. Since then, my body has consistently felt like it got run over by a Mack truck. But the happy has remained. I am so thrilled I did the ride, and I will probably never do it again.

On any such endeavor, there are standout moments. Some moments stand out because they were funny or uplifting, and some for other reasons. Accidentally riding a century on day 3 was one of those. How do you accidentally ride your bike a hundred miles? I will give you a hint: it involves being a moron. 

I planned my ride down to the last detail. I knew the mileage of every stretch. I packed just the right amount of gear. And I booked the hotels months in advance: Jenner, Mendocino, Jenner. So the distances in miles for the four days were 64, 87, 87, 64. Perfect!

The Jenner Inn didn’t have a vacancy for the third night so I had to spend a hideous sum on a room at The Inn at the Tides. Still, I had always dreamed of staying there, and I reckoned now was a good time to treat myself. But strangely, when we rolled into Jenner on the first afternoon, I couldn’t find it. This turned out to be because it isn’t in Jenner. It’s in Bodega Bay, eleven miles to the south. Adding eleven miles to Saturday’s ride put me at 98. How I laughed.

One of my other favorite moments was applying chamois butter in the middle of the road. We were stopped at a roadworks red light north of Jenner and there were two trucks right ahead. It was Day 2. My body was protesting that it really did not want to do this riding thing again today and could we not just lie down for a few weeks. Some way in to the ride that morning, I had decided that after my loved ones, chamois butter was my favorite thing in this world. I just hoped the truckers were not looking in their rearview mirrors as I applied it. If you have never encountered this butter, I’ll just say this: it does not go on your face. 

Before I did the ride, people kept exhorting me to be safe. I ride a road bike in Marin, I know the dangers. But as the ride grew closer, the concern got more insistent. Several people asked if I had a will. Some wanted to know what I was leaving them in it. Like any fanatical road biker, I remained entrenched in denial. I’ll be fine, I kept saying airily. And no, you can’t have my jewelry.

But out on the road, the dangers of pedaling up Highway One were hard to ignore. Some of the bigger trucks passed so close I could apply my lipstick in their wing mirrors. The only problem with that scenario is I don’t wear lipstick. The RVs would come up behind me and crouch there, growling like cougars, waiting for a straight stretch to pass. I could feel their hot breath on my neck. Seriously: drivers of California, have you ever heard the term clearance? Do you have any concept of what three feet looks like? 

I thought that Day 3 would be the hardest day, but to my surprise, it was Day 2 that nearly did me in. For one thing, my legs let me know pretty early that they did not appreciate this weird new daily workout. Then there was the Jenner hill, followed by a number of lesser and yet very challenging hills. I would ride around a curve and see a small mountain rearing up ahead. I would pretend I did not have to ride up it, that the road somehow went around it. This pretense would last a short way up the small mountain, then it would fall apart. On one hill, there was a short stretch that just seemed vertical. It felt like riding up a wall. I really wondered what the hell I was doing. But then I reached the top and saw the view, up and down the Mendocino coast. I remembered what I was doing.

The other reason Day 2 was so hard was that mid afternoon, about two miles out of Gualala, a mad wind kicked up out of nowhere. We rode into it for a half mile, then it turned to crosswinds with gusts that just exploded at our bikes. On one scary downhill we both felt we could have been blown off. By the time we rolled into Point Arena a half hour later, we were exhausted and clear: riding on to Mendocino was just not safe. Nor was it feasible: google maps estimated 5 hours to ride the 28 miles.

We installed ourselves in the co-op market on the main street and considered our options. They were not encouraging. There is one bus from Point Arena to Mendo and it goes in the morning. We tried to book a Lyft. Nothing. We asked around: nobody was driving north. I even asked in the one bar in town. This was a big stretch for me. I’m the kind of person who hates to inconvenience someone to throw a life-raft to me just because I am drowning. But here I was in a strange bar in a strange town offering $60 to anyone who would drive us to Mendo. A beer-swilling bar patron called out that he’d do it for more, and what was I offering. Yeah, no. As the barmaid quietly pointed out to me, it was a bit dim to be asking a bar full of Friday afternoon boozers for a lift.

I headed back to the co-op and we trawled the Internet on our phones. July 4th weekend, no hotel rooms for 30 miles around. I made a pathetic sign on a piece of paper and we stood on the side of the road for a while. Lots of trucks and vans, no takers. I was beginning to think we might be sleeping in a field. Then a dusty black Prius pulled up. It was Nick. We had talked to him earlier down at the co-op, a sweet, friendly guy who seemed unduly perturbed that he couldn’t think how to get us to Mendocino. Now he had a plan.

This was where the day turned a little strange. Before stowing our bikes, Nick had to empty his car of a month’s worth of recycling. He politely declined any help, so we stood about watching as he laboriously tore up cardboard boxes and stuffed them with endless empty water bottles into a blue wooden recycling bin outside the co-op. Eventually, the car was empty enough to fit our bikes and after he had carefully wiped down his dashboard with a wet paper towel, we set out for Mendocino. 

For 28 long miles, I listened to him tell me about his health issues. They were legion, and I really felt for him, but I also longed to be stretched out on my hotel bed after a hot bath with dinner in my belly. Nick was in no rush. At one point, he pulled off the road to show us how the ocean at that spot appears to smile. It was all very lovely, but I caught Emma-Louise’s eye and I knew what she was thinking. Dinner. Bath. Bed. And please Nick, don’t be a serial killer.

Eventually we arrived in Mendocino. Nick drove us into the center of town and we reassembled our bikes, thanking him profusely. I tried to pay him with the $57 in my wallet, but he wouldn’t take a cent more than the gas cost. After painstaking calculations, he figured this was $2.16. I pressed my $57 into his palm but he would only take $2.16. 

I rode away from Nick with some very confused feelings. Relief, definitely, but also sadness that he was having such a hard time in life. I wished him good health, and happiness. Then, just as our hotel room was swimming into my hallucinogenic view, he pulled up beside us again. He had recalculated and gas had only cost $2.02. He wanted to give us fourteen cents back. I am not making this up!

We checked into our hotel and the lady behind the desk told use we could leave our bikes in a room off the reception. Life seemed like it was kind of returning to normal. We hobbled up to our room, changed into real clothing, showered, and headed down the town to have dinner. 

The Hillside Inn is a sister hotel to the Mendocino Hotel, but it has no restaurant so patrons are given a 15% voucher to have dinner at the Mendo Hotel and this is what we did. Imagine our surprise when we were tucking in to our giant plates of pasta and we looked up and Nick was standing by our table. He was holding my plastic water bottle. He was also holding a piece of paper with our hotel room number on it written in blue ink.

We warily invited him to join us, secretly hoping he would not, but he declined saying he had to get home. He had driven thirteen miles back with my water bottle. I felt bad. He disappeared off into the night to drive the thirteen miles home, and when we left the hotel after dinner, we left by a side door and scurried back to the Hillside Inn. I think both of us thought we might find Nick lurking in the grounds. I also think we have seen way too many horror movies.

After the trials of Day 2, Day 3 just floated by, despite being an unplanned century. By this time in a long ride, you get on the bike and your legs just start pedaling like that is what they do every day now. Because it is! Twelve miles south of Mendo, we met up with our friend Kendra who had driven up from Marin to join the ride. Emma-Louise sadly stashed her bike in the car and set off back to Marin to pick up her kids. Kendra and I set off.

I already had 135 miles in my legs. Kendra was fresh as a daisy. Plus she is a really strong rider. Feel free to go at your own pace, I told her. We can meet up at the next town. She said that was fine and then she promptly streaked off into the blue yonder. I watched her go with a little envy at her freshness. I had learned the importance of pacing myself. It felt to me that if I had to do a single extra mile, or arrive home a minute later than my goal of 2pm Sunday, I just wouldn’t be able to deal.

The ride south on Highway One from Navarro to Bodega Bay was stunning, stunning, stunning. The weather rocked it, 70s sunny and calm, and the hills seemed more down than up. I know that this makes no sense, but I was in a great headspace and that makes all the difference. Yes, I accidentally had 98 miles to ride instead of 87, but the scenery was so spectacular and the people we ran into so great and I was eating half my body weight in delicious food at every snack stop and really, life was excellent.

The Inn at the Tides was worth the extra 11 miles. It had a pool, and a hot-tub and a fabulous restaurant that looked out over Bodega Bay. I felt so lucky. I was heading into the home stretch, and we had all survived. 

This nearly changed outside of Tomales the next morning when Kendra was almost run off the road by a giant RV. Cycling a hundred yards behind her up gentle hill, I watched in horror as the RV passed too close by her and then left her so little space her bike wobbled dangerously over a huge drop-off. Both of us screamed at the driver but I doubt he noticed that he had almost just killed a bicyclist. Sobering. Some giant pastries and coffee at the Tomales Bakery were in order, and we rode the last 30 miles to San Geronimo quietly and carefully. Life is sweet. Neither of us were at all in the mood to give it up.

Like I said, headspace is crucial on a ride like this. As I rode down Nicasio hill into San Geronimo where Kendra lives, I realized that if I got off my bike for more than a few seconds, I would not get back on it. I would have to call my boyfriend and ask him to come pick me up. Five miles from home.

Kendra and I said a quick goodbye and she took a pic of me heading off to Fairfax. Some random biking dude had stopped and asked us directions to San Francisco. Ordinarily, I would have been happy to fill him in. But I couldn’t even explain to him: dude, I just rode 271 miles, if I stop and give you directions to San Francisco, it’s all over. He must have thought me kind of rude. Sorry random biking dude trying to get to San Francisco from San Geronimo last Sunday!

I rode in my gate at 2:22pm. George was there to meet me, a very welcome welcoming party of one. I made it! I kept repeating. I did it! George agreed, yes indeed, I had done it, and I was safe. He politely refrained from telling me what a wacked out nutter I was for having attempted such a thing and eased me to the couch where I decided I would stay for several months. And there I still am. Apart from having had to go to work every day this week. I still feel like my body was run over by an 18-wheeler. 

If I have one takeaway from my epic ride it is this: don’t ride alone. I’m eternally grateful to Emma-Louise and Kendra, and the other friends who started the ride with us on Thursday. Their company was crucial and even though I planned for it, I just don’t think I could have done it alone. Thank you riding buddies! Do it again next month? Yeah, no.

Let Go, Hold On Tight

When you are riding a roadbike downhill, you are going so fast you have to be aware of your surroundings every millisecond. You have to look out for debris in the road, for potholes, for ruts and glass and gravel. You have to watch for deer and squirrels. You have to check for cars behind you and cars approaching. You have to brake appropriately so you’re not too fast or crossing the median on a corner. You have to watch for stones and wet patches and sticks and cracks in the asphalt. Apart from that, you can really just zone out and get some thinking done.

Last Thursday’s ride, I found myself thinking about my daughter. She was in Paris, at the start of a 6-week backpacking tour of Europe with her boyfriend. This is really great and exciting and I am very thrilled for her and not at all terrified that my baby is six thousand miles away and I have no idea where or how she is most of the time. Plus France is recording its highest temperatures ever. It’s all fine, though, she’ll be fine. 

On the day they left, I drove them to the airport. We took her Jeep because it is really fun to drive and because while she’s away I’m secretly going to use it when I’m sick of my goody-two-shoes electric car. As I was tooling through Marin, I got a quick tutorial from Jessie on the quirks of her vehicle. Oh mom, she said, right as the car made a huge screeching sound rounding a corner, my car screeches sometimes. Not sure why. Then, because it was 94 degrees, I tried to put the driver side window down. As it went down, a weird coiled sort of cable snaked creepily up and then the window disappeared and I could not get it back. That’s so strange, Jessie said. It’s never done that before. She needn’t have worried. Being the driver of old Jags for so long, I felt kind of comforted and at home. Any more quirks? I asked her, secretly hoping for something extra quirky. The gas gauge is broken, she said. This was not the kind of quirky I had hoped for.

We drove to Oakland Airport with the freeway wind howling through the open window. It didn’t matter. The mood in the car was upbeat. The teens were heading off on an intrepid world adventure and I was  successfully ignoring the fact that I was about to say goodbye to them for six weeks and would have zero control over their destiny until August. Jessie turned the music up till it was loud enough we could hear it over the wind. 

By the way mom, she said as I pulled in to the departures curb, sorry about how messy my car is. I pretended not to have noticed. I’m good at that, because I have been doing it about her bedroom for years. We hugged goodbye on the curb, I told them seriously how much fun I expected them to have, took a couple of pics of them looking fabulously young and intrepid, and then drove away. I only cried for about fifteen minutes. 

Since they’ve been gone, I have been driving her car a lot. It’s just easier than dealing with the good-for-the-planet-but-how-far-can-I-really-drive electric car. Every time I get out of the Jeep, I take a few items of car trash with me. Bottles, ancient mechanic receipts, and tupperware containers full of science experiments. One was so bad I had to throw away the tupperware too. It was just too frightening to contemplate washing it out. Her car looks very minimally tidier now, but it’s still a work in progress. I just shut the door on her bedroom till she gets home.

The missives from Europe have been short and sweet. Mom, I just spent four hours trying to book a train from Amsterdam to Barcelona, can I use your card for flights? That was a yes, because the flights proved almost as cheap as train tickets and because I am a hopelessly unboundaried parent. Mom, the hotel lied about having WiFi. How will I know how much it costs to call you?  I told her to just call. She went down to the hotel foyer where the WiFi was at least sporadically available. We talked for a few exciting transatlantic minutes about all the challenges of navigating Paris, and how wonderful and fun it was. They climbed the Eiffel Tower. They were off to the Louvre. They got lost, and it was okay. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction that my daughter is finding her way on the other side of the world. 

Every morning, I light a candle for her safety. It burns during the time I’m getting ready to start work. Then I blow it out. I whisper be safe, Jessie and Alessandro, and head out to see my first patient. 

When you are riding a roadbike downhill, you are sometimes going so fast that in a strange way, as tightly as you have to hold on, you also have to let go.