may we all be so lucky...

My great-uncle Joe Kokoszka died this week. He was married to my grandmother's youngest sister Mary for 60 years. My mother, also the youngest sister, was named after this aunt.

My grandmom is about to be ninety-three. Her three sisters range from 83 to 91. Her older brother died just shy of 92. They lost a brother in the Korean War when he was in his early twenties. They lost a brother to cancer when he was about 40.

The remaining five siblings' lives where and continue to be intertwined throughout their long lives. They took beach vacations together. They attended the weddings, showers, parties and funerals of each others children and grandchildren. They occasionally feuded or fought. None were big drinkers or smokers. None were teetotalers. They were neither athletes nor couch potatoes.

I don't know the secret to their longevity  Perhaps it is the network of loved ones they created. Their long marriages and large, close-knit families.Perhaps it is their Catholic faith and simple, healthy lifestyles. Their ability to talk about loss, grief, happiness, politics, weather, music. Ability to accept life's pleasures with its pains.

My grandmother's spirit is sharp and strong. She speaks her mind and loves her life. She sings when she does the dishes. When she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins-Lymphoma at 80, she told the cancer that it was not going to get her.

This is my idea of a successful, happy life. May we all be so lucky.

Saddest Year

I started and stopped writing this several times which is why it is posted so long after the fact.

In September 2011 I wrote:

A few days after Jon and I broke up one of my friends said that it had taken her a year to get over a break up from a man she had loved but needed to live without. At the time I thought that was crazy. A whole year of tears and pain? Four days into this breakup I was still crying myself to sleep and had physical pain over it. I had never experienced pain like that before.

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September 2010:

Jon's statement: "If we had a baby, you would have everything you wanted and wouldn't need me anymore." ended our relationship.

He moved out at the end of the month.

October 2010:

I watched his dog Sammich, a pug puppy I had bought for his birthday that spring, the weekend Jon moved out. When I dropped the puppy off in Harrisburg at Jon's trendy loft apartment across the street from the capital building, he was completely unpacked. The pictures were hung on the walls. He took me to dinner to thank me for watching the dog and said that we could get back together and date. I asked if he still felt like I wouldn't need him anymore if we had a baby. He said yes. I said that did not work for me.

He attended my low-key Bingo birthday. My mother, wondering what would bring my ex-boyfriend to my birthday celebration, said that she thought he would propose. He did not. He got me a book and a CD. He left Bingo early.

 November 2010:

Jon told me that he did love me. That the things I wanted with him were not too much to ask. That I was the only one for him. That he wanted to get back together and that he wanted a future with me. That he needed to take care of me.

I did not feel happy like I thought I would. I felt cautious. He had broken my heart. I said that I needed to think about it.

A few days later I drove out to see him. While there my car got towed from the spot where he had told me I could park. Jon got stressed and irritable about it. He loaned me the money to get the car out. Knowing he made $70,000 a year and knowing that he was aware that I was working two jobs at an average of $8.50 an hour I thought the loan was strange since he had just said he needed to take care of me.

I mentioned that if we were to get back together, I would want to take it slow. He would need to earn my trust again. His snappy reply was that it would not be ok for us to see other people and he was not going to jump through hoops. He wanted to pick up where we left off in September. I thought of the chest pains the loss of his love had given me.

I thought of how stingy he was with praise, compliments, affection. I thought of how content I had been living with him in the suburbs of Elizabethtown. In my mind I had everything. He fucking left and was so eager to be in his new apartment he unpacked in a day. He would get jealous and weird about me having a lot of friends, loving to dance, talking to everyone. I thought about what I would need to be happy with him again. I considered whether he would be able or willing to give me what I needed.

After a week I told him I couldn't do it right now, even though I loved him. He asked where I had been the night before. I had decided to keep plans for a second date that I had made before he swept in with his declarations. I confirmed that I had been out with another dude and he hit the roof. I literally ran after him to finish talking about us. He said that I was throwing everything away and he was done. I was upset at how the conversation went but also felt like I had made the right decision given his reaction.

December 2010:

Jon refused to speak to me for several weeks. I tried to call and text him. About three weeks after our fight, I saw on Facebook that he was in a relationship. I called and left a message yelling that he should have told me before I found out on fucking Facebook. He called me back and I yelled at him some more, fucking furious. I continued to be furious for the rest of the month, occasionally calling him to let him know. I was mad at everything. I was mad at Jon, mad at killer whales (documentary-related), mad at my jobs, mad at the economy, mad at my hoarder roommates that kept the house at 53 degrees. My therapist said it was ok. Be mad, it is a part of the process.

January 2011:

Megan moved in with Jon. I am working at That Fish Place/That Pet Place.

February 2011:

Jon proposed to his girlfriend of three months. My tennis racket was still in the trunk of Jon's car. On our second year anniversary Jon told me that he thought we were still getting to know each other.

June 2011:

They had their engagement pictures taken by a friend of mine, in Lancaster at a spot I have been going to since high school.

July 2011:

Jon and Megan buy a house together.

September 2011:

Jon and Megan get married in Lancaster. What the fuck? Get out of my town, assholes. Go back to Harrisburg and let me put this worst year ever behind me.

Happy Place

After a few months of applying to numerous jobs, I have received one lonely response from a prospective employer for more information. I haven't gotten any requests for an interview and I am discouraged.

Work has been stressful and shitty. Line cooks call servers lazy which is insulting to half of us and apparently is a cue to the other half to show them exactly what a lazy server looks like. Restaurant guests consistently tip 8%. A table with a $56 check left me nothing last night. Makes me glad to get 8% and wild-eyed with desire to get the fuck out of that restaurant. See above...I am trying, with no results so far.

It is cold. Buses do not always come when they are supposed to come. They also run infrequently at night when I get off work. It gets dark early and I work second shift hours so when I wake up there are only a few hours of daylight left which is depressing. My hands and feet are constantly sore and chapped from work and the cold.

Half an hour before the restaurant closed last night, the shift reached the pinnacle of shittiness. I wanted to be in my pajamas with the covers over my head. I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the food for one of my tables, trying with partial success to remain calm.

I took deep, cleansing breaths. I stood straight, elongating my spine. Imagining my idea of paradise.

I had off today, which is rare for a Saturday. I walked my dog for about forty minutes this afternoon. It was about forty degrees and the sun was shining. I was content but longing for warmer weather and to walk my dog on clean rather than litter-strewn streets. Again I found that I was daydreaming about my idea of paradise.

Puerto Rico, spring of 2004. Laying on a net in the front of a catamaran. Blue ocean: sparkling, clean, perfect, surf spraying my legs. Sun. Fish swimming in schools. Pina Coladas. Snacking on kiwi and strawberries in between aquatic pursuits.

I was active duty Air Force, about half-way through my enlistment. I was engaged to be married that summer. I was 24 years old. I thought my future would be filled with sunshine and snorkeling. Michael Cunningham said it beautifully in The Hours:

“I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling. And I...I remember thinking to myself: So this is the beginning of happiness, this is where it starts. And of course there will always be more...never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then."

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and its perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.” 

DeGaetano Christmas

I went to Lancaster for Christmas last week. I overbooked at Thanksgiving and had a pretty stressful visit so this time I tried to keep my Christmas schedule breezy.

My mom picked me up from the train station at 10 am Christmas Eve. We went to the mall and spent a few hours finishing our Christmas shopping together. At 2:30 we met up with my dad at Valentino's, a little bar that my family likes to go to. My mom and I happened across their Christmas Eve celebration last year. The first round is on the house, they have a complimentary buffet and a packed house. It was nice to get a few relaxed moments alone with my parents. Mr. Valentino, who is at least 85, played the accordion to our delight. He stubbornly played marching tunes with a twinkle in his eye while his daughters begged him to play Christmas songs. Bethany and Stephen joined us for the tail end of our time there, which was a pleasant surprise.

 Back at the house, my mom put a ham in the oven and sequestered herself and my dad in a spare bedroom to wrap presents. Ben, Kara and the kids arrived and everyone worked on dinner together. I had started to make an apple crisp and my brother said that I was trying to cramp his style since he had previously announced that he was making the dessert. His dessert would be made with duck-fat (a separate blog entry would be required to properly document Ben's relationship with duck-fat), and how could I compete...what was I using...butter? A dessert-off was declared and much shit was talked to everyone's amusement/irritation.

 Fearing the crisp would not be big enough for everyone (and realizing after the crisp was in the oven that I forgot to add flour and it would probably taste like sugar and oatmeal and that was not an option since I was in a dessert-off), I also made molasses cookies. Ursa, three months shy of three, announced that she wanted to help me and I let her crack the first egg to humor her. Standing on her highchair, she tapped the egg once and neatly delivered a shell-free egg into the bowl with her tiny fingers. No big deal. When I commented, Kara said that she has been letting Ursa make her own eggs in the morning. Supervised, she added after Ben's surprised/proud/delighted/scared/high-pitched "WHATTT!!!"

 Naftali, six at the end of February, had been observing and helping quietly and at one point we looked over and he had used the chopper to chop a cup or two of walnuts and combined it with a cup or two of sugar in a bowl. Rolling with it, Kara said that he was going to make cinnamon rolls. Naftali, busily stirring the sugar/walnuts with a spoon, agreed as if that had been his plan all along. Ben welcomed him into the dessert-off and explained to him that everyone would vote after they tasted all the desserts and a winner would be named.

 Bethany made the brussel sprouts. Ben made the fingerling potatoes. My mother emerged to check the ham. Orla and Steve were playing records and scoping out the growing pile of presents under the tree and by the fireplace. I announced that I had started Christmas crafts a month ago and they were still not done yet so only the kids were getting actual presents from me. Lauren called...Christmas was not quite perfect with her and Skyler in North Carolina. Kara sliced the bread and made an antipasti tray that did not quite make it to dinner. We were hungry.

 After dinner, the presents.
After presents, the dessert-off.

The apple crisp was ok but not great due to the missing flour. The molasses cookies were really good but not amazing by Christmas cookie standards. The dessert Ben made...in the words of Orla, "tastes like cheeseburger and fries." Ben took one bite and declared it to be terrible. Perhaps the beloved duck-fat should be saved for savory dishes. The cinnamon rolls were amazing. The pastry was buttery and flaky, melting in the mouth. Bethany and I asked Kara how she did it, but then we saw Naftali. He was silent, watching everyone's reactions to the desserts. It was official and we let him know: Naftali and the cinnamon rolls were the official winner of the 2012 dessert-off. He took the news in stride with a pleased closed-mouth crooked smile.

I said I would give it a year...

My summer in NYC was spent on my bike, riding around. Drinking beers with new friends. Getting tan at the beach and while at the park with my dog. Flirting with boys and finding my way around this bulky old town. Having as much fun a broke single gal can have.

That abrubtly ended with the unraveling of my relationship with my roommate/friend/crime partner upon whose insistance I had moved to New York. The first week of September we had our third ugly, marriage-style fight that started (as the other two did) because he was being possessive of me. I put a stop to further fights by deciding to move out. He took that as a betrayal and did a couple super-shitty things as a result of hurt feelings.

I spent September and October feeling stabbed in the back.

Out of last minute necessity because everything of course went wrong, I moved to Washington Heights on W. 177 St in Manhattan. It was a dump but I could afford it, they allowed my dog and did not require a security deposit. Good thing: In September I earned about half the amount I had easily made in August. The door locks? Great, I'll take it.

I have been practically living on the train. It takes two hours for me to get to work and sometimes more than two hours to get home. Then Hurricane Sandy arrived the last week of October and rocked NYC. I am grateful that I did not experience power outages or flooding. But the transit system was not back to normal for about two weeks.

During this time my birthday came and went. I was so depressed that I canceled the few plans I was able to make post-hurricane. I barely got out of bed. I hate my job. I hate my commute. I am so fucking broke. I am so depressed that I am a thirty-three year old waitress. I have no man. I have no children. I have nothing.

In addition to all that, I am like the worst dog owner ever. I can't imagine what Spencer is thinking. At the park I was talking to a man whose dog was fifteen and still going strong. My heart actually sank at the thought of Spencer living seven more years. Then I was furious with myself for wanting Spencer to not have a long life because I am tired of taking care of him. At Thanksgiving I am taking him to my parents house for a few weeks or months so that he can receive care from nice people who are home enough to not only care for his most basic needs but also might even occasionally have the energy to play with him.

And then I got hit by a car while riding my bike...

Friends and family began urging me to move back home. I would call my mom and cry about being lonely and broke and homesick. I would stare at the pictures of my nieces and nephew on my phone.

But I feel like moving back at this point would be giving up. I moved here to try and use my degree. To see if this town is all its cracked up to be.

Trying to rally my battered spirit, I started to look for jobs. I cleaned up my resume and have been applying to a new place every few days. I am getting my bike repaired. I am moving back to Brooklyn and in with a close friend. The first week of December I will be living with someone I love and trust. I will be a twenty minute bike ride from work. The world will not actually come to an end.

I will reassess my relationship with New York when I am here a year, on May 1. It's a date.

Concrete Jungle

I moved to Brooklyn, NYC 2 months ago. It was time for a change. I loved Lancaster and was happy and content there but needed to have more going on. More job opportunities, more chances to have adventures, a larger pool of interesting men, etc.
My faithful dog Sir Spencer Rooney and friend Kris moved with me.
Kris and I became friends working at the same restaurant. We have both travelled quite a bit, both lived abroad for a while. We share the same longing for adventure and better career-related opportunities. We both love Belgian White beer, ice skating and smoking cigarettes. He tolerates Spencer but "doesn't do dogs" which I find to be unconscionable. I snore and he sometimes wears earplugs so that he is able to sleep.
Spencer, Kris and I moved to Brooklyn into the tiniest efficiency apartment the world has ever known. Kris and I share bunk beds. Spencer's bed is located under the desk. This desk doubles as the media stand, table and occasional ironing board.
Since moving to New York City we have been arrested, mugged and lived through a two month rolling brown-out. We went without running water for 5 days. I inadvertantly hitch-hiked at 5 am and received a free ride from a cabbie who asked me out. I went out with the cabbie.
Kris learned the true meaning of the what it is to de-louse.
I have locked myself out of the apartment three times, once for 3 hours where I finally made it into the house by conning into our upstairs neighbor into letting me climb out their window, down the fire escape where I jimmied our windown open and climbed in.
Kris passed out on the street and came home with a chipped tooth.
Spencer eats chicken bones and donuts off the street and likes to chase the rats and feral cats.
More to come.

Highs and Lows

This blog will be about three things: tickets, moving and anxiety.

1. TICKETS. Usually I am very Zen about tickets. I get a lot of them and rarely let them get me down. Speeding tickets, parking tickets, tollbooth tickets, overdue library book tickets for chrissakes! I just park where I want and drive how I please and pay the fucking fines. But tonight I got a ticket at 11 pm and I am down about it. The cop was rude to me. He pulled me over for an expired registration that I did not even know about. He told me right away that he was giving me a ticket, even though I said that I did not receive notice that it was expiring and thought that it did not expire until the end of this month. He and a cop that emerged from a second cruiser shone their flahslights into the cab of my car and asked if I had any drugs or weapons. A third police car crept slowly by and I started to feel kind of paranoid. And I am trying to save money because I am moving so I am bummed at having to pay this damn citation...........speaking of...

2. MOVING. I am moving to NYC with my best boy friend, Kristopher Horner and of course my beloved dog Sir Spencer Rooney. We are going to see if that big old city can provide some opportunities that Lancaster is not able to provide. We are certain that there will be hijinks and adventures although I have plenty of those in my beloved Lancaster. I am happy with this decision and know that if I do not like it I can always move back. I am sad about leaving but it is time.

3. ANXIOUS. My anxiety has been through the roof recently. I am really sad about leaving Lancaster. I love it here. But I have not found a fulfilling job and I really want the chance to have a more rewarding career. I am anxious that it is not the job market, it is me. I am anxious that Spencer will not be happy in New York. I told that to my parents tonight and they said that he will be happy as long as he is with me (after having a good laugh that I would worry about such a thing). I am trying to just breath and act logistically. Make a list, slowly check tasks off the list. I am trying to remind myself that once I am there I will be fine (this is true of all of my big moves). I remember the weeks leading up to leaving for the Air Force Basic Training I had feelings similar to the ones I have now. And actually now that I think about it, I was really nervous to start college. As a 27 year old freshman that had gotten out of the miitary only days before, I felt old and did not know anyone. Driving to campus at 8 am on that Tuesday morning I wanted to throw up. But after the first class I knew it would be fine and I could do it. Change is hard and scary but that does not mean it is wrong. I need to follow this through.