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Christ, you don’t know the meaning of heartbreak, buddy

Sunday, April 15, 2012

The title of the last blog post I wrote was “Anywhere you lay your head,” which is a reference to a Tom Waits song. It was 7am on Saturday when I typed that — too early for any of this — but I started listening to the song while lying in bed. And after a few rounds of that, I started writing a story about the first time I heard Tom Waits, and that became this whole piece about dating and drinking and the person you once were, etc. etc. So that’s what I get for naming blog posts after Tom Waits songs. The piece ran on Salon on Friday.

Anywhere you lay your head

Saturday, April 7, 2012

On Friday night, I got an email from a woman who reads this website, who has recently moved from the cool-kids enclave of Vancouver to a teensy tiny town in Northern Ireland where her mom lives. The basic reaction has been: Why would you do such a thing? And this woman is dealing with all the mental seesawing that accompanies such a transition. Why am I doing such a thing? Was it a mistake? Is there something here for me, that I have yet to discover? She talked about what it was like to live in a city whose greatness everyone agreed upon:

“Every time I tell people I’m from Vancouver, I wait for the oohs and aahs that I almost always get. Oh, it’s so beautiful. Yes, yes, yes, I say with pride, as if I’d given birth to it.”

That made me laugh. I totally get that! The pride of other people loving the place you’re from. Such a cheap and easy high. You get hooked on it, and then you move somewhere else and it’s all … blank stare. Nobody knows what to say. It’s awkward. I think people like to oooh and ahhh so much because they just like having something to add to the discussion. My friend Thomas is from Edmonton, Canada, and when he told me that it was like: Uhh, OK. What is an Edmonton?

I think, eventually, you get a weird thrill from people not knowing where you live. From being different than everyone else. A friend who lives in Montana tells me she likes the confusion people express when they discover she has the nerve to build her (highly successful) life outside Los Angeles or New York. Another friend lives in Alpine, Texas, and for years I was all, “WTF are you doing in Alpine?” and then I went to visit and was like, “OHHHH, this is what you’re doing in Alpine.” Because that place was amazing, a little bit like visiting the moon, if it had really great Tex-Mex.

This planet is so big, and there are so places to plant your flag. I plant mine in Dallas these days, and I recently wrote a story about that on The Morning News. But I’d like to engage in a little reader experiment, which I haven’t done in years. Please send me a picture of the place you live, and tell me a little bit about it. You can tell me what you love about it. You can tell me what you hate about it. It can be a place that is two blocks from where I live, or it can be a teensy tiny town in Northern Ireland where I may never visit (but then again, I might!). I’d like to learn more about wherever you have landed. I’d like to learn more about the world, and the people in it, and particularly the ones who are kind enough to stop by these digs on occasion, on their way to someplace else. You can send it to: sarahhepola@gmail.com.

The ability to read early warning signs

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

On Tuesday morning, Bubba was acting weird. He skittered up and down the stairs for no particular reason. He stood at the foot of the bed, making eye contact with me, and emiting a slow, strange meow. It had extra syllables. Meeee-owwww-rrrr.

There are only two reasons why my cat gets like this, and I was pretty sure I knew which one was to blame. On Sunday night, I had returned from Austin to discover that not only had my cat vomited but he also sported a ring of blood around his anus. I called Jennifer, who told me it was probably just a stress reaction and prescribed a paste for his tummy, but of course I was going to worry, and of course I was going to spend the next three days sifting through the litter box like I was panning for gold and lifting up his tail to spy underneath, and other invasions of privacy that come with caring for another living creature. I understood vomit and constipation as early warning signs of some medical emergency that usually ended in tears and fluid injections at the vet’s. I wanted to avoid that fate if I could.

So I decided to take action. I pinned him down in the kitchen and administered a baby enema, and it shows you how far I’ve come that I could do so while staying calm and unblinking. “Growing old ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis once said, and while she wasn’t talking about inserting a lubricated tube into the clenching poop hole of your 15-year-old tabby, the aphorism still applies.

But oddly, constipation didn’t seem to be his problem. He ran to the litter box every 10 minutes afterward — glycerine swirling through the rectum will do that — but nothing substantive emerged. Had I read this wrong? Had I been mistaken? After 10 years, I feel utter confidence in my ability to communicate with my cat. He tells me things. And that Tuesday, he was definitely telling me something was wrong.

Like I said before, there are only two reasons why my cat gets like this: When he’s constipated, and when there’s a big storm coming.

Oh, wait a minute. I looked out the window, at the rumbling sky.

Three hours later, a tornado hit.

These are the stories of pet owners who love too much. Bubba had given me the early warning signs of a terrible storm, and I stuck an enema up his ass. He had diarrhea all afternoon. As the sky clashed outside, thunder shaking the home we share, he curled up on my bedroom floor. When I went in to check on him, he stared at me, calm and unblinking. He did not make a sound, but I read his message loud and clear: You suck.

In the event of a tornado, you will all be OK

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

I got an email from an old friend who lives in Kansas City. “You OK?” it asked.

“Umm, I am OK,” I wrote back. “Was this supposed to go to me?”

I assumed it was a slip of predictive text. Perhaps she meant to email some other Sarah in her contact list. But in fact the email was intended for me. This friend had just watched a semi in the Dallas area fly across the highway on CNN. So did several friends, and their emails and text messages and instant messages started popping up within minutes. You OK? You OK? It was nice people thought of me, but it was starting to worry me a smidge.

I mean, I think I’m OK. Is it possible I’m mistaken?

I knew there were tornadoes in the area. I also knew the tornadoes were bad enough that my guitar teacher canceled our lesson today. He told me the weather guys on TV were freaking about the tornado, and we had a brief laugh at the weather guys’ expense. Those poor dudes. They always take the blame.

From where I sat — in a red and unlit kitchen, staring out at a large, leafy backyard with an unused trampoline — everything seemed fine. It was pouring rain. I mean, buckets. But that seemed like a good thing in Texas. Every once in a while thunder struck, and the house trembled a little. The house was built in 1915. Sometimes it shakes when I run too fast.

I checked Facebook, which was a stream of anxiety. One friend was evacuated from her office building. Another heard sirens outside. Several sent out their best wishes to “D/FW folks,” which I guess is me, so I guess I appreciate that. The rain had picked up, along with my worry. The power flickered off, and came on again. I began to hear the moan of emergency vehicles. I can never figure out in these moments — is it good to be connected to people, or bad? The more I talked about it, the more fearful I became. Then again, the less isolated I felt. What a weird world we live in. Where people in New York and Kansas City are the ones give you updates on the tornado a few miles away.

I have lived alone for so long now that I forget how scary it can be. I had roommates through college, but the first night I spent in my own house at the age of 22 — a funky garage apartment in Austin, which I painted in the colors of an Easter egg — I thought all the trees scratching at my window were some guy outside. What a huge mistake, I thought, to ever try to live alone. For the next week, I drank myself to sleep with bottles of white wine, but eventually I came to understand what bristles and whirs were a part of the ecosystem, and which should send shivers across my skin. That was back before cell phones and the ubiquity of the internet, when I’d sleep with one hand on a push-button phone. I can remember how marooned I felt, even when it was just raining. That tiny house was like a little island of one. I didn’t even have Bubba then.

In New York, where people are all around you, the fear of dying in your apartment is legendary. Everyone imagines it. The slip in the bathtub, the cigarette left to smolder after you passed out on the couch. I couldn’t watch “Law & Order” without wondering what the guys at the bodega would say about me. “Oh sure, I know that girl. She was always coming in here for cat food and Sierra Nevada.” One of the minor reliefs of leaving New York is leaving behind the fear of dying in New York.

But I can still be prone to freak out. At 4am the other day, I woke up to a spectacular crack right above my head. I had the sensation of being yanked out of a deep hole, and when I finally sat up and opened my eyes, I found Bubba in a defensive crouch on the floor. My heart was a kick drum. Later I would come to understand that a large limb from one of the giant trees had fallen in the middle of the night, but at the time it made no sense, had no words or shape or origin, it was all fear and waiting. I wish someone had texted me at that moment: “You OK?” I would have felt so much better. Instead, I just lay there staring at the ceiling, twisting in the sheets. It took an hour to go back to sleep.

I guess you could argue it’s an empty phrase. You OK? But I have come to rely on it, and appreciate it, even when it’s not needed. I am OK, thanks for asking. How about you?

The answer to the riddle you have long puzzled over

Monday, April 2, 2012

Yesterday I went to Barton Springs with Thomas and Alan, who were visiting Austin from New York. In my 20s, when I lived in Austin, I never went to Barton Springs because I understood myself as a person who stayed inside and watched reality television hungover and drank beer at 4pm and certainly, definitely did not wear swim suits in public or, for that matter, anywhere. Mine was a defiantly swimsuit-shunning existence.

But I’m not that person anymore, which is nice, and Thomas and Alan and I spent four hours at Barton Springs on Sunday. Alan was doing crazy back flips and double lutz-fantastics off the diving board and Thomas and I were making our way around the perimeter of the springs, cold and perfect, and talking about the things we talk about when we’re together (work and writing and Jeremy Renner) and I would say, for the most part, I had no complaints about that afternoon. Even the drum circle didn’t bother me.

Around 3pm, I checked my voicemail, and one of the messages was from Mary. She said my cat had thrown up, and it pitched my stomach into turmoil. I didn’t want to bring that minor note into our afternoon together, but I guess I’m the kind of person who does that anyway, even when I don’t mean to, and Alan said, “Something just happened on your phone.”

I waved it away and said, “Oh it’s my cat,” which sounded like code for “it’s something terrible and private that I won’t discuss in public” but in fact it was perfectly accurate: It’s my cat. I don’t really expect anyone to understand.

I drove back to Dallas that night trying not to worry. Usually when I leave town, my brain is on overdrive, imagining terrible things that could befall the cat while I’m away, but I have gotten better. It’s just that throwing up is the worrisome thing he does these days, and it reminds me that his system is winding down, and it reminds me that he is going to slip away from me, and it reminds me that as much as I might love spending a weekend with friends in Austin, he is not really down with it, and it’s an awful split feeling, to want to be in all these places at once.

On Saturday night, at the wedding, I met my college buddy Dave’s wife, who is about as lovely as a woman can be, and she was joking that she never meant to be the kind of person who showed pictures of her son to people she just met. Like, she always thought to herself, “Who cares about your kid?” but now it’s HER kid, and so of course she cares — but the truth is, I cared too, and was glad to see a picture of her son. And partly to be funny, and partly to stay true to form, I showed her a picture of Bubba, curled up beside me on the bed, eyes closed, and she said, with love in her voice, “Look at your baby.”

And I said, “He’s not a baby! He’s 15.” And I got a lump in my throat when I said it, because the force of so many things hit me in that moment: That a cat is not a baby. That my is my baby, and that he is 15. That my friends Lisa and Craig had put their dog down that morning. That I was alone at that wedding. That I had been alone at a whole hell of a lot of weddings. That if being alone at a wedding is the worst fate you must endure, then you’re doing OK. That I was lucky to have been included here, and that when I go to my college friend’s weddings — or when I meet my friends’ partners in general — usually what I am struck by is how good and right these other halves are, how well they chose for themselves. I have the satisfaction of learning the answer to a riddle I have long puzzled over: Ah, yes, of course! That’s it!

Later, as I was leaving, Dave said something to me that was so sweet and true it made tears spring to my eyes and I drove back to Austin under a big clear sky singing along to Radiohead and The Decemberists and Michael Jackson and Queen and Xanadu (always with the Xanadu) not really knowing how my life would turn out, what the answer to the riddle might be, and feeling a little bit sorry for myself over the people I have to let go of and feeling a little bit freed to do anything I want.