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I’d like to take a moment right here and talk about how freaking amazing my mother is. If you know her, you will understand why I say that while of course everybody’s mom is special, I am somebody who has seriously lucked out in the mother department.

So, a year ago, partially inspired by the Artist’s Way, I quit my lucrative day-job to run my theatre company and make some plays with uninterrupted focus. I decided to live on my savings account for as long as I could in order to complete the two-part project of Medea Knows Best, apply for our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status (which we are shortly being awarded! Whee!) and start building the infrastructure for a company that more and more I am beginning to regard as my life’s work.

Did my mom freak out at my abandoning a stable income for an artistic dream that makes me approximately $0 annually, at 27 years old? No. She got excited for me, told all her friends how proud of me she was, donated money to Nebunele, and traveled to San Francisco with my dad (who helped build the set) to see the finished product.

This month, I decided to leave my cute little studio apartment on Capitol Hill to move into a beautiful big house, farther out of the city center, with partner-in-crime Claytie. We needed a third roommate to make the house affordable, and for a time were considering a good friend of ours who also happens to be an ex-boyfriend of mine. When I told my mom about that, she let me know that she thought it was a bad idea, as that would have the potential to create emotional storms that could wreck my relationship with him and make my living situation difficult. In the next breath in that conversation, though, she told me that if the landlord of the house was dubious about renting to me because I am currently unemployed, she would be happy to co-sign with me on the lease.

EVEN WHEN SHE DISAPPROVES, my mom supports my choices! She’s honest with me about how she disagrees, and then goes right on doing everything she can to help me out and make them happen. Such a generous, loving mom is straight out of a storybook, and in so many ways, I cannot even believe that I am so lucky.

I can talk to my mom about everything—my fears, my pride, my love life, my mistakes. I have been raised with an unshakeable faith in her love for me. My parents’ home is open to me any time—and not just to me, but to my friends, who tell me after they visit my parents that they feel they have been welcomed home. When I floated the idea of someday developing a show on their beautiful and secluded 5 acres in Trinidad, they didn’t even blink at the notion of hosting a bunch of actors and theatre technicians for months. My mom over the course of my life has helped me develop a strong sense of self; an independence that can only come from knowing that if I need it, I will always be taken care of; the belief that I am attractive and intelligent and capable of whatever I put my mind to. I could not be who I am today, doing the crazy things that I do, if it weren’t for the support, applause, love and validation that I have gotten all my life from my mother whenever I needed it, and often even when I didn’t.

Not only does she support me in a hundred thousand ways, she also happens to be intellectually brilliant, beautiful, an amazing musician, an admirably straightforward communicator, intuitive and compassionate, accepting, inquisitive, generous, and creative. I’ve spent much of my life looking up to her, learning from her, and emulating her. To be blessed with a truly admirable person as the woman who raised me feels like extra, like oh-my-gosh-what-wonderful-thing-did-I-do-in-a-past-life-to-deserve-this, like even more than I am entitled to as a human being growing up in this crazy world. If I stray into sappiness, forgive me. My mom deserves sappy. My mom rocks.

Thanks, Mom! I love you!
xoxo
Alissa

So much energy into gaining speed down the runway, engines grinding and swearing and panting and hollering, heavy effortful pushing that focuses so much on that drive forward, this heavy bird trying to run fast. And then—a flap drops, light—and we are airborne. Inside, people yawn and do crossword puzzles and meanwhile we are FLYING. Flying. Those Wright brothers and whoever else—I mean, holy cow, here’s something we can’t do and they freaking DID it! Left the ground. Not coming back. Freedom. Like fantasy. Man’s wanted to fly since he saw a bird. Hard to think that at that moment Evolution didn’t look up and go, with a satisfied nod, “My work here is done.” And what I think in the upward-rush-downward-press of that moment of liftoff is “I love, I love, I love. I love, and I am leaving the earth.” I want sex then, something naked and free and thrilling and hard. Flight! Think of it! We are all so jaded, we passengers. But the pilots know. Oh, they know the miracle and they hold it quiet in themselves while everything else goes on, the world, people running about. The pilots take people and put them in the sky. They know what it is they do. And then they bring us gently down again. And we, we put our magazines away and jumble inefficiently out the tiny exit, nodding at them as we fish out our cell phones. I will never get over this modern world. When I die and meet all those people in the afterlife who must be in such high demand I will hunt down Da Vinci and pull him aside and confide in him in a voice husky with emotion, a hoarse whisper because I won’t be able to manage a full voice, and I will say to him, “Leonardo,” I’ll say, “when I was in life, I FLEW.” And he will meet my eyes gravely, and the awe in mine will make his twinkle, and he will understand and be glad.

The Frost poem sat comfortably in the front of my mind this morning as I wandered out into the redwoods at the back of my parents’ property, thinking of the imminent death of my grandfather. The young woods back there are fairy-tale-storybook beautiful, and in the morning sunlight, bejeweled with the billions of droplets generated by the last week’s drizzle, they are a magical kingdom.

I was blessed with an almost unfairly happy childhood here in Humboldt County, California. I was sustained by jolts of remarkable bliss, even ecstasy, so that even as a child I noticed and wondered at the profundity of my joy. I formed a theory that somehow the happy-chemicals in my brain were responding to some sort of unusual always-on stimulus, and figured I was biologically lucky to have such an excess of well-being. And of course I lived in a loving home in a beautiful part of the world, with enough money and enough time, and was successful in school and made good friends, and I’m sure all these things conspired to make me as bizarrely happy as I was.

As an adult on my own in the urban landscape of Seattle, with ups and downs that seem more within the range of normal human experience, with heartbreak and stress and angst and worry and loneliness and depression along with the fun and the joy and the love, I occasionally hark back to my pre-adolescent days of peace and enthusiasm and wonder what changed. On darker days, I think that all the gunk of life, all the baggage of failure and self-doubt and broken hearts that are the normal obstacles in a wearying adult life have so silted over and corroded my natural capacity for joy that it is irretrievable. That never again will I be capable of experiencing the simple, almost spiritual happiness of my childhood. That being grown-up means being necessarily complex and corrupted.

Except—I just took a 10-minute walk in the woods of my childhood. And the very first moment I stepped outside into the dewy, shining morning, peering into the sunlit mist of the shady redwood forest carpeted with ferns, the old joy bubbled up again instantly. And gradually, like a developing photograph, all the human-made follies of thought: that life can be bad or broken or free of wonder; that anybody is evil; that there are irrevocable mistakes that make life worse forever; that I am unworthy of success; that success is even important; all these follies faded and became transparent and were revealed as the filmy, substance-less constructs that they are. And like soap bubbles, they popped. And I was alone in the quiet woods of my childhood, realizing: it was not that I was innocent or un-jaded or free from the cares of the world that made me so happy here. It was that I had the great good fortune to occupy this magical place, these powerful woods of peace, and allowed them to have their effect on me.

I love Seattle, and I love the urban lifestyle, and I suspect I will be a city-dweller for most of the rest of my life. But it is good to remember that I was born a creature of the forest, and if I don’t return occasionally for a solitary moment in the trees, I will waste away into a terrible existence full of irrelevant cares. It is so easy, living in the city, to forget how little all those stressful things matter. For just a moment, taking in a redwood tree, it is obvious that we will live and die and the earth will go on, and my most massive strivings will melt back into the earth and out of memory, and that I lived at all will matter much more than all the things that filled my life. I cannot help but be part of the cycle. My most important work is being done already, without my lifting a finger. I’m okay. And the earth is turning along majestically. Damn, but we are lucky beings.

With gratitude and joy,
Alissa

So my relaxing hometown holiday week got diverted when my grandfather, who has been struggling with cancer for the last little while, took a turn for the urgent-health-situation worse. After I arrived at my parents’ house in Humboldt on Christmas Eve, we all boarded a plane early Christmas morning to come to southern California and spend time with him and the extended family for the holiday instead. Since this will likely be the last time I get to see him, I’ve been so grateful for the chance to be around him and the family; there were a few days in which I thought I would never see him again, and I hadn’t felt like I’d been ready to say goodbye the last time.

This is my first time trying to say goodbye to somebody who I know will die soon. It is both a very special and a very awkward opportunity. I find myself really shy around him during the limited time he has energy to hang out and chat–I want to talk about the fact that he’s dying but I’m nervous about bringing it up. I want to know if he’s scared or resigned or annoyed or if he has regrets or triumphs or if he wants another glass of water. But I mostly sit there, round-eyed, trying desperately to think of something to say besides “How are you doing?” to which the answer, of course, is “terrible.” I make banal comments on the weather and compliment his house. I kick myself after leaving his room to let him nap.

He is frailer and smaller than I have ever seen him, of course, but he’s still the same man. I find myself soaking up his face and voice with total pleasure, just marking him down in my head, drinking him in–yes, that is my grandfather. That is the man who put me through college, who didn’t understand my decision to pursue theatre but who supported me every step of the way anyway, who told me not to wait another minute when I told him I wanted to start my own theatre company ‘in five years or so.’ We had that conversation three and a half years ago, and I have now been working on my theatre company for three years. To say that he had an influence on my life is a vast understatement. This is his face. This is his voice. His affection when I saw him the once or twice a year throughout my life was gruff but unmistakable. His first concern is for whether or not I have enough money, and then come questions about my theater and my love life. He is characterized by generosity, a lovable wit, a way of telling you things frankly that make you feel you are in his close confidence, a wry smile, a pleasure at being in charge and making sure things are done right. If he is at the table, he is picking up the tab. There is no discussion permitted about this. A desire to personally ensure that everyone is comfortable. This is his face, and this is his voice. Both are the same as they have always been, though his body is failing. (I am grateful that his mind is perfectly intact; he is still very much present, alert, and smart, and so this time with him feels worthwhile.) I wish that his approaching death did not strike me dumb the way it does, because I want so much to tell him over and over again how much I love him, and see in his face that he understands. I’m afraid to cry in front of him because I don’t want him to feel responsible for comforting me. I realize this is silly. I shed a few tears talking to his stepdaughter on the patio today, when I had escaped the house to read in the sun, but otherwise I’ve been hanging on to them for more private disposal.

The house is full of people–my grandmother’s children from a previous marriage as well as his own children and their families have all come to the house to lend support and bid farewell. Despite the somberness of the occasion, for me it is wonderful to see so much of the family at once, especially Joan’s children, whom I’ve never had the chance to get to know well. We eat, talk, clean up after ourselves, drink, occasionally weep unashamed but restrained tears. There’s lots of love in the house, and preemptive grief, and caution about treating each other well, the sides of the family that don’t know each other enough yet to be quite comfortable with all the messiness and emotion that comes down when somebody dies. So many people have a claim on this man, because he has loved so many.

The presence of so many people in their house seems both stressful and pleasing to my grandparents. This contributes to my shyness. I’m overwhelmed and a little full of unshed tears, but I keep being suffused with inexplicable little throbs of happiness and contentment. Christmas dinner was beautiful and wonderful. I am happy to be down here with everyone even for a few days, I’m very happy that I get to touch and talk to my grandpa one more time, and aside from my pernicious social awkwardness, I feel at peace with the grief coming on.

Oh, there’s more to type, but it’s late and I’m tired for once. Sometime someone remind me to write something about my personal fear of the coming indignity of other people overriding my own decisions “for my own good” when I reach this stage myself. Of course, in most cases, those upstarts will be right, and if I’m as together as Papa is, I’ll probably notice that myself and hopefully acquiesce gracefully. But since reaching adulthood, it sure has been nice to be in charge of my own life. I wonder what it’s like to start sacrificing some of that control again. I doubt it’s totally pleasant.

I am surrounded by sadness and love, and they fit together nicely. I hope you all are having holidays that are meaningful and full of goodness. Holy crap, every year I get another inkling about how important family really is. I have been occasionally slow, learning this lesson. But I’m getting it a little bit, finally. More next year, I bet.

xoxo
Alissa

I started to go in to bed with everyone else, but
as I turned to close the sliding
glass door, I caught sight
of the light.
Those hard cut-out shadows cast
by the patio furniture
were not from any streetlight,
but the nearly-bursting moon,
fervently beaming all over the valley,
crackling through hushed desert air,
slamming light off the concrete.

My grandparents’ mansion reclines on a hill
looking out across Dove Hollow in ranch-land, southern California,
into the holdings of other palatial residences
one hillside over.
They face each other in uncomfortable
camaraderie—it feels safe, cozy, this night-time curl
of inward-facing millionaires, but a little
too easy to look through each others’
illuminated picture windows.

Swimming in the infinity pool
with my mom this afternoon
were a dozen stupid and angry
bees, who must have thought a dip looked
inviting. We scooped them out
with the same long-handled pool net that,
later,
my dad used to capture the baby
black widow
we found under the lip of the Jacuzzi.
As I sit here on the patio,
I’m in the middle of one of the light-colored squares
of concrete ringing the pool.
I was going to sit on the edge
of the planter, but today Joan warned me
that’s where the black widows were most infested.
Here on the light concrete, I reason,
I’ll see a little dark shadow coming towards me
before it’s too late.
Joan also told me about
the scorpion she found in the front doorway,
and how before they had the exterminator come
they would go to the bathroom at night
with their feet hoisted in the air,
out of the invisible scuttling insects’ way.

The people here have orchards
for tax reasons.
They keep a whole room off the kitchen
to store the booze.
You can look across the way and see fences
rolling beautifully across acres
of empty, arid land.

A neighbor’s Chihuahua’s throat
was slit ear to ear by coyotes,
a few months back. They say
the coyotes call to the dogs, invite them into the pack,
then turn on them and attack them.
Well, when the neighbors found their Chihuahua,
they took him to the emergency vet straightaway
and saved his life.
But the very next time that dumb dog heard the coyotes calling—
“Here, we’re here, your wild desert freedom is here—
Your rough & tumble gang
from the wrong side of the tracks—
Your brethren cauterized by hard life,
your tough brotherhood, your tarnished paladins—
We’ll take you in
if you can take the heat—“
That crazy dog ran away to join them
a second time.