I Long to Be Gone Like Never Before.

This week, we celebrated Edie’s 20th birthday, with the family and her dearest friends. We usually go, for this occasion, on a multi-family camping trip, lots of young adults who have grown up together, lots of parents who enjoy hanging out, tents, heat, metal bear boxes to hold our food, the smell of citronella, never enough ice, a long cool river for tubing and swimming. But this year, schedules wouldn’t permit. Lucy (21) is working in Arizona, so we are in Flagstaff in the mountains. It’s cooler up here, and close enough to where Lucy is working in Phoenix as a tech on one of David’s shows.

One of the most beautiful sounds in this life, I think, is being in an unfamiliar house, listening to our kids and their friends. I’m not eavesdropping so much as taking them in. The laughing, easy camraderie of people knowing each other their whole lives, gossiping, giving each other a hard time, breaking out into uproarious laughter over something I can’t, and don’t need to understand, so physically connected as to be in constant contact, legs over legs, while watching Obsession for the 10th time, piled on top of each other in a barcalounger when the whole living room is available, the language of knowing each other well just by virtue of having been in each other’s company for the sum of years.

Sometimes the young folk are playing ping-pong in the game room downstairs, the older ones drinking, the younger ones happy to be invited to sit in on the game. Edie comes to get me so I can join in, and dance with them. But I would rather observe anyway. There is joy and reformation in observing. I sit for awhile, narrate the vicious ping pong tournament happening, let the movement and music and peels of shouting envelope me, and then quietly retreat.

And there’s the mornings, where the house is quiet and I hear David and Lucy quietly chatting about work, on the terrace after hitting Starbucks. I do not hear what they are saying exactly, just an occasional phrase, but I’m lulled in and out of sleep by the cadence, and the musicality of their conversation, their comfort with one another, the understood silences, the shifts in tone and conversation, the way they love each other so naturally. It is the perfect way to wake up and to be in the world. With them in my brain.

Sometimes it’s about sitting on one of the side terraces outside of our bedroom, listening to the night, the stars crackling, watching the kids take pictures at the hot tub with their instamatic cameras, because the analog is so novel to them. It’s about how Desi (11) gets overwhelmed, and on the brink of melting down, and I can feel the reverberations of a panic attack welling up in her. I prepare for the worst, thrown items, hurling insults, and then have to stand back when Lucy intuits what is happening, swoops in, and soothes her. The next thing I see are sisters laughing and I marvel at how Lucy has a short cut with Desi, and what a gift it is for Lucy to have honed that super power. and what a gift this will be for Desi throughout her whole life, to be loved and understood fully by big sisters.

It’s about Raffi (15) taking a side quest with Edie to get Dirty Doctor Peppers at Maverick, a convenience store with an ample drink station to rival Swig (IYKYK) in Utah and Nevada. The side quest is their thing, and he will come out of his gaming trances to be with her, and venture out into the world, to let her adultness give him new entry into the world. I love this for them.

It’s about finding the crab legs Edie wants to eat for her birthday dinner. The seafood boil is tradition, afterall, even if there is no fish monger or Costco in Flagstaff. (What???) But the butcher at Safeway goes into the back freezer, and pulls a big case of frozen snow crab, and saves my ass. I make us a seafood boil, all spread out across the outdoor table on butcher paper, which Safeway also gives me, with spicy corn cobs, sausage and potatoes, cod, shrimp and little necks.

I fall into cooking, choreographing and curating when we take these trips. David helps organize the day with the young folk, caving, zip lining, treks through the woods, thrifting, driving to Winslow Arizona so they can stand on the corner, like the Eagles song, and be the girl, my lord, in a the flat bed Ford, slowing down to take a look at me. They have photo documentaion. Their IG accounts fill with entries. Proof of life! I cook, provide snacks, meals, fun surprise treats in the freezer. It might look trad-wifey and labor intensive from the outside, my mother would’ve complained ruthlessly that this is hardly a vacation for the cook at all, but this is also the way I love people. I don’t know any other way. Or if I do, it doesn’t come as naturally. I lean in.

I know better than to buy or make a cake for Edie. She hates having to open presents in front of people. She hates being sung to en masse. When the cast of one of David’s shows serenaded her in Miami, years ago, she dove face first into my chest, mortified. She hated it. The same at age two as she is at age twenty. Edie reminds me that we are who we are, inclined to certain experiences and feelings, from birth to death.

David asks me, after he had hiked a large and grueling peak, if I’d ever want to live here in Flagstaff? We play this game wherever we go. Can we live here? What would our lives be like? Could we be happy? Who are we if we live here?

No, I say. I’m quick to answer.

Too cold in the winter. No Costco in Flagstaff, I say and he nods knowingly.

We take sips of our morning beverages and continue looking out to the mountains, the goat farms next door, the soft whinnying of horses below us. I like a quiet morning. I like the offerings of a quiet house. I like reading a paper book with a blanket over my lap. I like floor boards that creak in places. I like a fridge full of leftovers. I like not having Internet rage dominate my brain. I like not being mad at every rotten injustice. I like living, real living, with other breathing, wanting, annoyingly-human bodies, moving around in the physical world. I like the friction of pushing up against other people, and having them push back against me. I like that Jake, the guy at the local store, recognized me because he had met Lucy and Edie, one of us calls up the others. I like that the get-away, not quite a vacation in price, magnitude, expectation and pressure, offers a complete refresh.

We are home now and Raffi is thrilled to be back with fully functioning Internet LOL. Overnight, at home, our conversations turn toward the future, back to college, plans for the rest of the year. The time away is a reset. Conversations and thoughts had on vacation get applied now in the land of the living.

I’m going out to grocery shop after I post this. Re-stock the fridge and the pantry. We gave Lucy all the groceries and leftovers for her rental in Phoenix. Tomorrow I get back to Pilates, and will respond to comments on that essay - I loved your comments and have so much to say! The weekend will get us even more right with ourselves, I believe. Being away, remarkably, helps clear my brain, and in its place a solution for a problem with my new book. I’d been stuck, without even realizing it, trying to dig my way out of a stubborn challenge, burrowing in deeper and deeper, when what I needed was to build a path around it, to see things anew.

Doing nothing, observing, simply being, is integral to the creative life, to writing, to making art. Doing nothing matters. I’m thinking of what the artist Gustva Klimt wrote while visiting Lake Attersee, Austria, away from his home in Vienna: I long to be gone like never before.

And now, I’m happy to be back.

Thank you, as always, for reading and supporting. xo Kim