out and back

My long road trip: let’s start with the very transcendent. A very good place to start.

In a small wooden hall on a pier over the Atlantic, dozens and dozens of my extended family danced so hard there are concerns about structural damage. Boy cousins had dance battles. An MVP cousin directed all the gentlemen on the speed with which they should unbutton their shirts, until our final pictures a feeling of dedication to craft.

I danced until I felt nauseous, had some water, danced some more. You know me.

We had two little kids out there, and they were twirled and taught to be pulled in and whipped out by a friendly arm. They were bounced back and forth, and they joined bent arms to swing their partners.

Even my uncle who has legs that barely cooperate was out there slow dancing with his wife.

I was clever enough not to catch the bouquet. (Once I picked up a cursed bouquet after it had fallen on the floor, I did not catch it, for the record, but don’t tell me how to live, and don’t make me try to catch things, I’m not good at it.)

The Atlantic was cold. I forced myself in, feet, ankles, knees, and then all the way, to swim sloppily parallel to the beach, and grabbed a boogie board to put my head on it and just bob away for a while.

The last time I swam in the Atlantic, I was having a final goodbye to the East Coast, a place I fucking love.

This was a reunion of sorts.

She’s cold, and she’s huge.

I walked up the sand, back to our beach house, rinsed off, and was in the pool with some tremendous young people who wanted to be pulled around while floating on an inflatable lobster, to be screeched at with glee, to tell me about things I was not quite sure I understood (the under two set is a language I’m not always fluent in).

In the pool, I thought, this is perfect. This is a perfect day. I felt eerie, even, like maybe I was dead, or we all were, and we would live in this beach house with the water ready every day, and enormous meals served every night by a new team, and all the booze you wanted.

I corrected myself: if this were heaven, Disneyland would be nearby, and they would have a bunch of new rides. And a lot of other people I love would be there, too.

It was close. It was close, in spite of the fact that I had a panic attack in stupid Louisville, Kentucky.

I had left town with just a few of my anti-panic sedatives. In town, I sometimes take a dose as I leave the house. That’s my trigger time. Then I rarely take more.

I have an aunt who spent years mostly confined to her bedroom watching TV, and my guess is that she could have used some of the meds that help me.

Anyway, we stopped in Louisville, Kentucky, me and my right hand man, my mom.

I was excited to be in a town I’d never visited. I’m a huge fan of seeing what there is to see. I parked on a Louisville street in their party district, and acid rose up from my stomach to my brain, and my mind exploded, and I grabbed my medication and stuck it under my tongue. I hustled into the ice cream shop we were headed to, and locked myself in the bathroom stall for a while.

Oh, the bathroom stall, home of the digestively challenged, home of the panic attacking, home of the having a good cry at a wedding, home of secretly checking apps you should’nt check.

I turned on all my anxiety helper phone things: find colors, touch/smell/look/listen, breathing. They help a little bit. I still felt like I was going to die.

I gave it a minute. Someone knocked because it was a onesie, and I was like, FUCK, CAN YOU WAIT

I came out, ordered a bourbon pecan ice cream that was much too big, and pretended to be okay.

My right hand man, my mom, knows all about my anxiety stuff. Talking about it in the moment makes it worse. It gives oxygen to the fire, somehow. I love being very open about my health and what I experience, but not in that exact moment.

We walked around a lovely plant shop, I lapped at my enormous ice cream cone, and then we trudged through the Kentucky heat to see what The Rabbit Hole was.

The Rabbit Hole in Kansas City is a children’s book museum. In Louisville, it’s a distillary.

I don’t have anything against bourbon, but I don’t have anything really for it, either.

The ice cream was perfect.

Louisville looked like a cross between Memphis and Hot Springs, Arkansas.

I didn’t get the horse thing. I think probably we shouldn’t make horses run like crazy for money. And it’s a bunch of rich people in a circle jerk allowing people with less money to lose money betting.

We ordered some good pizza to a moderately scary motel. The latch you can push over had been removed, and I hoped I was not putting my right hand man, my mom, in danger. White older ladies are rarely in danger, though.

The transcendent: part of our reunion was sitting in a big circle, and having each person talk about someone who had had an effect on their life.

I was at the start, so I said FDR. FDR is my heart, but it was also quite an impersonal answer, as people went on to tell about mentors, grandparents, siblings, and friends, and some people got all teared up, which made me tear up.

More than one teacher was mentioned, which gives me that maybe my life isn’t in vain feeling that we all crave.

It was intense.

Maybe we won’t do this tomorrow night, someone said. I thought it would be lighthearted.

I thought, let’s do this every night.

We didn’t, which was fine.

The day after the wedding, I drove north to my brother’s. I had a shakiness that day, which isn’t unusual for the day after a hugely emotional event like a wedding. It was one of those extra happy weddings, where people who have been through some shit now have doubled their family and enriched all of our lives.

I was medium anxious on the drive. It was beautiful, along the coast, Chesapeake, and then Maryland and Delaware, states I didn’t understand at all.

At the Maryland Welcome Center, I went in to ask some questions about the Civil War in that area, and the Civil War, and the lady Deborah laid some great knowledge on me. The Mason-Dixon line bends at the eastern edge. Delaware was basically half Confederate affiliated, and half Yankee affiliated, depending on the terrain of that section. Maryland, though a slave state, remained in the union. Not much fighting happened on the coast, because inland were important places like Richmond, Virginia, and later, Washington, DC.

To top it off, the welcome center had an axolotyl in a tank.

I don’t know why.

Ivy was bright pink like a shrimp, had a transparent tail that showed her skeleton, and nice eyes. She looked dead until I put my bright red phone case near her to take a photo. Then she got wiggly. “She loves bright colors,” Deborah said.

Deborah also explained about how to cook crabs, but I don’t eat them so I just smiled politely and said, ‘Huh.”

My brother hugged me tight and served me pizza. We took a day just to get coffee in a 200-year-old farmhouse, scour a barn-sized bookstore, and rest.

Then New York City. Center of the universe. Times are shitty, but I’m pretty sure they can’t get worse.

On the train in, buying tickets drove me nearly insane. Commuter trains, Amtrak, apps that didn’t work, machines, conductor advice. trying to buy a cheaper ticket and say, “I didn’t know!”

We hit Penn Station. I took another pill. I knew from my last visit, my brain in Manhattan requires a high dose of sedative.

We got to the hotel, then to the art installation I had tickets too.

Let’s skip and get transcendent again.

We went to St. John the Divine, arguably the capital of liberal Christianity. It has always been a mecca for me. They had Madeleine L’Engle as their resident writer, they have a whole corner dedicated to poets, and a chapel for Joan of Arc.

We went to the back chapel where they were having the service. The priest who led it radiated a clear love. I got to say familiar words. I got communion, which I hadn’t had in ages. I tried to take a big gulp. Remember, I was still pretty anxious.

We stopped in the gift shop, and I saw a bunny carved out of soapstone, with big black eyes. I immediately knew I had to have him, even though he was $20.

I have him.

Transcendent: when we finally got back to my brother’s, I took the bottle of wine we’d had at our previous dinner and took like four swigs while he drove. Passenger drinking while being driven is the most cowboy I get.

Jesus I felt better. And Jesus, I felt better!

And bunny, I felt better.

We ate diner food, went for a drive in the winding Pennsylvania hills, and picked up some wooder ice. I had had it before, but swedish fish flavor made it much tastier.

My brother understands. We swap medication info. He, too, knows what it’s like to white knuckle days, 95% of your attention focused on, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, when you’re not okay.

He panics while driving. I panic while riding. He hugged me a lot.

In my hotel room in New York, in Times Square (I know, I know), my panic was so elevated, I could barely leave the room, let alone the hotel. “Let’s get you something to eat,” my poor mom said. “You’ll be okay,” she said.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be, though, and I wasn’t.

My poor mom was stuck with me in a small (but to be fair quite clean) New York City hotel room, while most of the day I curled up in a fetal position and half-listened to HGTV reciting its trances.

I didn’t have my laptop, which was what I usually used to contact my doctor. So I called an answering service, and begged a stranger to beg my doctor to get me meds. One more cute fact here: when they asked me for a pharmacy, they claimed there were no pharmacies near Times Square, certainly not the Walgreens at the south end that I have gone to 100 times. “Can you go with me?” my mom asked. “No,” I said.

She got a cab downtown, to a pharmacy extravagantly far away, a pharmacy (sorry another fun fact) I had once wandered during an even worse panic attack, years ago.

She returned with pills. I took them. Trouble was, I was so incredibly amped up that my usual doses hardly touched my terror.

Not wanting her to miss the show we had tickets for that night, I took her downtown and found the theater.

The show, “The Gospel at Colonus,” was in the ampitheater at the Little Island, a new development on the west side. My anxiety is conveniently agoraphobic AND claustrophobic. That part of town is very open, with huge buildings, which my brain did not like. I walked my mom up. We were half an hour late. They made us stand.

I scurried off to the bathroom, took another dose, and sat on the toilet playing candy crush.

I don’t care about Candy Crush. It is, however, the game of mental breakdowns because especially in its current incarnation, it is stupid easy, but requires just a bit of input. Finally, I thought, I can’t stay down here. I’ll tell Mom I’m going back to the hotel. I just can’t do it.

My world of panic and anxiety is lived in 15 minute increments. Take a dose, set the timer. In 15 minutes, you will feel better. You will be okay. Or set a stopwatch. How long since you took something?

(Let me emphasize again that this isn’t an addiction thing. The drugs I was taking are old, boring drugs, and not addictive.)

I walked back up the hill, on a glorious night, the kind they show you in the SNL credits, when everyone is out, people of every size and color and language, and beautiful lights, and near and far off buildings are lit like tall prayer candles, and as I approached, I heard someone singing, and my heart softened and opened.

And it stayed open, and got softer and softer like old leather, and I knew again art can fix things, many things. They were singing, and singing about great pain and reaching for beauty anyway.

I stayed.

On the way back, we stopped at an ice cream shop. I felt 100% better. I felt perfect. I ordered a giant sundae and ate the whole thing.

Transcendence again: our second morning driving home, we stopped at Target. While we picked up a few things, I saw headbands with huge googly eyes on stalks growing out of them. I immediately bought two, and we put them on and took photos in the car.

Getting to Penn Station, and onto the train to my brother’s, was fairly awful.

Our first day driving, I had to beg my doctor for more meds, we had to wait for them at the pharmacy.

Our second day driving, after the googly eyes, I felt great, totally normal, for hours, and then my panic shot back up, and I didn’t have enough meds to dose myself the way I would’ve wanted to. I tried to nap while my mom drove. I tried to embroider.

Signficant parts of the way home, I thought, I can’t do this. I can’t.

Then we were home.

We had been gone 16 days.

I would say that four of the days included unbearable panic and jump out of your skin anxiety, do anything to make it stop anxiety.

One more transcendent: we stopped in Charlottesville, Virginia. Poor Charlottesville became known for a Nazi rally that killed one peaceful protester. I wondered what to make of it.

I wanted to see the main building Jefferson had constructed for the campus he envisioned, the University of Virginia. We walked up to it, this unusual round building, like a small state capitol without any state. Walking around it, we realized it was open.

The first floor has a series of oval-shaped meeting rooms, and the second floor is a circular space with a dome crowning it.

I could see how this building, with its white, its balance, its clarity, was a rebellion from Old Europe, and its old ideas. I could see how it was human-sized, not inspiring any agoraphobia, even in me. It lifted you, but it didn’t demand anything. It suggested being human was a good and honorable thing.

I have been to the Pantheon in Paris, and the Pantheon in Rome, and though I am a person who loves old things, the older the better, I preferred Jefferson’s parthenon. It wasn’t for God or gods, it was for us.

In a side room, there was a display explaining how the Marquis de Lafayette (namesake of my amazing cat) dined with Jefferson at the rotuda, while it was still under construction.

It’s as complicated as the United States, as ununified as some slave and some wealthy, as ununified as petulantly refusing to pay for a war our crown fought for us, as complicated as Jefferson’s writing beautifully, powerfully, and then raping the women he thought he “owned.”

As broken as a place where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has chased out one college president, where a new fascist Right has ripped away everything that doesn’t flatter them, as broken as a place where they proclaim themselves a Christian country while Jefferson himself rewrote the Bible, removing the supernatural parts because those were silly.

Then we were on our way to multiple pretend tea parties with my cousin’s children, and a seafood boil birthday for an uncle, and a rousing game of mini golf that included a ride on a miniature train. And mornings watching the sun rise over the ocean.

Things can get ugly in my head, but those visions stay, too, and stay longer and deeper rooted the more I raise them into my mind’s eye. I smile.