Euphemasia

We put our dog to sleep two days before Thanksgiving. Euthanized her, rather. Put her to sleep? Euphemized her.

She was old. Cadi (pronounced like Katie). Fourteen or so. It was a difficult decision because, technically speaking, she wasn't really ill. She had arthritis and trouble getting up the stairs. Sometimes her legs just failed her completely. She was stiff, tired. In more pain than she let on, the vet said. She was almost totally deaf. She'd started pooping in the house almost every day. It was what it was. Her dignity and quality of life were running out.

It's been over a month, but I don't think we're used to her absence. In her old age she slept 23 hours a day, so we hardly noticed her anyway. But she was there. Always there. Sprawled sideways on the carpet, in a nearly unconscious sleep with her pink eyelids slightly open, her toes twitching every so often. She always retained the air of a puppy, the soft coat she had from the beginning. Other than her creaking bones and rotting gums, it was as though she never aged.

For a couple of weeks my parents joked about how it's sad that she's gone but at least there's no more dog shit to pick up! I'd shake my head at their insensitivity, but I realized this was probably harder on them than any of us. I know they are glad to be freed of dog poop duty, but I do wonder if they joke because they feel the sting of loss more acutely. They were here all along, after all. As the rest of us moved on, came and went, my parents fell asleep every night to the light breathing of a faithful companion on the floor by their bed.

My mom, my brother and I took Cadi to the vet for her final visit with the kind Dr. Kapty. My dad refused to go. Said he couldn't do it. My mom and I have done this a few times with earlier pets. There was Lily, the old springer spaniel we rescued from the pound. Our first dog. She was the sweetest thing, but it turned out she was sick and we had to put her to sleep a year later. There was Pajamas, our cranky Siamese who lived for 18 years, born the year before me. His presence in my life was constant, unquestioned, a promise. After him came Roxie, an eccentric kitten with a stub for a tail who liked to play in water and was diagnosed with feline leukemia just over a year into her little life.

But my brother had never come to those vet appointments until Cadi. He never wanted to, for reasons he didn't share. At the vet with her that day, the three of us watched her fall quickly into a drug stupor, the anesthesia softening her, freeing her of any pain or anxiety. My brother lay his big hand on her head and my mom stared blankly and said, "I can't believe this is really happening." Fourteen years is a long time. When Cadi was a new puppy sleeping curled in our laps, my brother was a little kid with bony knees and loose teeth. Now he's grown, six feet tall, covered in hair, with a voice I confuse for my father's.

There at the vet, Cadi just melted drowsily onto the blanket and lay there, a thousand miles away, until she was really gone. Still and just a body. Just fur and bones and other things I can't talk about. The little room was quiet except for our breathing. Our tears. And I realized how we've come to use the presence of these animals to measure the passing of time. Our family history punctuated by the lives and loves of our pets.

She was a good dog.

Airport Security Romance

Well here I am yet again staring at a month since my last post. A whole lot of things have happened since this time in November when Jordi and I were still cruising down the California coast looking for another place to set up camp. We made it back up to Livermore for Thanksgiving after 5,714.4 miles of driving together. Five thousand, seven hundred and fourteen miles. I wrote it out for a stronger impact. We didn't get any speeding tickets, no flat tires, didn't get lost all that much, and we still like each other. A lot. And he's on his way to Central America for 4 months and I'm here. In Livermore. Trying to earn money for whatever I do next.

Saying goodbye to Jordi at the airport in San Francisco was tough. I got used to his constant presence for 3 months, and the prospect of spending an indeterminate length of time on different continents is a scary one. But this is how it has to be. I need to be here to work, he wants to travel, and it's good for us to spend some time apart to focus on ourselves. But as much as my rational brain understands that, there's a part of me that questions it, resents it, fights it like a teenage girl who's been grounded right before prom.

I stood there by the security line at SFO watching him through the plexiglass partition like an animal in a zoo. It's a shame people don't still travel on huge passenger steamliners like the Titanic. I feel like goodbyes must have been much more poignant and romantic back then. I'd be waving my handkerchief and gathering up my skirts so as not to trip as I fluttered along the dock to get one last look at him, tall and dashing in a three-piece suit, before he disappeared on the horizon. Instead I stood there with a couple other weirdos and watched as he removed his belt and shoes, placed them in the plastic container, and stepped somberly in his old black socks through the gray plastic gateway of airport security.

But maybe in a hundred years people will be in their spaceships daydreaming about how romantic it must have been to bid farewell to their loved ones at those primitive, non-galactic travel hubs where people still had to manually remove items of clothing for a security screening. I guess real life is never as romantic and perfectly scripted as we want it to be, and I'm sure people felt the same way a hundred years ago and that farewells at the departure of the Titanic were not as romantic as James Cameron wants us to believe.

Ultimately, the here and now is as much as we can hope for and we ought to be pretty damn glad to have even that. It's ours and the romantic thing about it is that no one else really knows what's going on in your own personal reality (not even the pierced, tattooed lady with a partially shaved head who stood next to me at the airport watching her beloved trek through the TSA line before removing his Dr. Martens).

I just hope Jordi, who I believe is in a plane somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, is enjoying his here and now and will have good stories for me when we see each other again.

How's it been? Um...

I know I haven't written very much about the road trip so far, a combined result of laziness, lack of internet time, and just the sheer fact that it hasn't been all that great.

Just kidding! But I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been hard. Two months of constant every-breathing-second togetherness with anyone is a great recipe for tension and conflict, and attempting to execute a road trip like this comes with all kinds of built-in challenges.

So yeah, it's been hard. It's been getting lost, it's been camping in the rain, ten thousand smelly bathrooms, a leaky cooler soaking the floor of the car, it's been chasing off raccoons, cramming night after night on a twin-bed sized foam pad, the ever-present stench of campfire smoke, broken flashlights, duct tape and tarps and improvised protection from the rain, it's been paying too much for poorly equipped campgrounds and bad food, going several days without a shower, more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than a person is meant to eat in a lifetime, running out of propane before our dinner is cooked through, constant wrestling with all the stuff in the car, it's been cold and wet, it's been exhaustion and stress, it's been yelling and it's been fighting and it's been hurt feelings.

I can't deny any of those things. And many of you may wonder why even bother? Why spend time and money putting ourselves through all this crap? Why not just stay home?

I have to wonder the same things myself sometimes, but then I remind myself that it's also been pure bliss, light as air, clear as water. It's been falling asleep to the sound of the ocean or a river falling over rocks, it's been seeing things we've never seen before, it's been hiking through lush forests, cooking meals that are simple but to us they are feasts, playing and running wild like children in the sand. It's been the whole luminous world contained in our little old tent.

It's been a misty Redwood valley, rounding a corner and coming face to face with a herd of elk, it's been reading by the fire, watching the sun go down over the Pacific, counting stars on the beach, it's been the new Avett Brothers album so loud on the car stereo that any level of thought is impossible, only feeling.

It's been coloring in our route on Jordi's big map, sketching a little tent in all the many places we've slept, it's been new surprise and thrill every time we turn another bend on the Pacific Coast Highway and see the great endless ocean in the distance, it's been the windows down, the wind in my hair and the sun on my face. It's been laughing and growing stronger and figuring it out. It's been freedom. It's been ours.

We've let the mileage on the odometer run since we set off for Yosemite on September 29th, and since then it's been 3,534 miles of everything, the good and bad, the awful, the helpless, the tired, the so ready to go home, the last straw.

But hey, that's travel sometimes and that's OK. Because what it's really been is 3,534 miles of love. And we still have a couple more weeks to go.

The Flying Dutchman

I'm writing this post for two reasons: one is to provide more details about the next few months of my life, and the other is to use that oh so clever, impossible to resist title that I'm sure has you all just tickled. It does, doesn't it? Doesn't it? I know.

Anyway, as we speak, there is a Dutchman flying over the continental USA, soon to land in San Francisco, get in a little Honda Fit, and be swept off to my home town. This mysterious individual stepped foot in our proud country for the first time but one week ago. He visited New York City and Washington D.C., and now he will visit Livermore. Glorious, typical, suburban Livermore. I am dying to know what he thinks. He's from the bold city of Amsterdam, has traveled extensively through Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa, but I have a feeling this place will really surprise him. And cue culture shock.

I have an invested interest in this visitor for several reasons, the foremost being that he is my current  beau. We're, ya know, going steady. Young love and all that sort of thing. His name is Jordi. And, to clarify, that is pronounced "Yordi" as the Dutch "j" makes a "y" sound. He often introduces himself to non-Dutch speakers as Jordi with a "j" sound, as though the real pronounciation is just so foreign and strange that our brains will blow a fuse and we won't be able to talk to him at all. Right.

When we first met and he introduced himself to me using this Englishified version of his name, I laughed and asked if it was a nickname. He said no, but thanks. I much prefer the Dutch version because it's cool and different and, to be frank, because the other version always makes me think of Geordi La Forge, the blind guy from Star Trek: The Next Generation who wore a visor over his eyes that looked like a headband.

 You may also recognize him as LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow.

My mom is a big Star Trek fan--always pining for Captain Jean-Luc Picard--and when we were kids we used to have to watch episodes with her in the evenings while we ate our ice cream. She had all the collectible ceramic plates hanging in the kitchen of our old house. There, I said it. I tell you this because I want you to know that I'm not familiar with Geordi La Forge because I am personally a fan. On that one, I'm guilty by association. But I did enjoy Reading Rainbow. Who didn't?

So, back to the matter at hand. Jordi is on his way here not only to see my roots, but also to join me on a 2-month road trip around California and other states in the West. So far, the trip is only very loosely planned, but there will be more to come on our adventures. After Mr. La Forge... I mean, Jordi... after Jordi leaves the U.S., he'll be flying to Guatemala and backpacking down there until he runs out of money or something else spurs him to go home, or somewhere else. As far as I know, that's his plan. You could say he is, in fact, like the Flying Dutchman, "a ghost ship that can never go home, doomed to sail the oceans forever." We have very different traveling styles.

This difference will account for many of our adventures, I'm sure, but I'm nothing but excited for the places we'll go and the things we'll learn from our surroundings and from each other. I mean, I can go anywhere! There are friends to know, and ways to grow...

But you don't have to take my word for it. Stay tuned.