If You Live Through It, Turn It Into a Story

Back by popular demand and repeated request…published in High Desert Journal last year…the story of our ill-fated rafting trip down Hell’s Canyon...my essay Passing Through the Green Room…alternately titled, The Time My Husband Tried to Kill Me.



(well, he didn’t mean to, and it did turn out to be a good story, after all)


Click here or see http://www.kimcooperfindling.com/, “Chef’s Special”

The Perils of Working From Home

So, just a few minutes ago I was diving into today’s projects here in my home office—gearing up for some magazine copy editing, prepping for a phone interview with a college prof at 10, trying to think of what the heck I am going to write about fly fishing, when I heard the doorbell.

Obediently I padded down the hall in my bare feet, glad I'd gotten around to getting dressed. I opened the door and was greeted by a tall fellow in a suit. He handed me this.

I can't really pass on all of the “happy news” he intended to share, because quite quickly I scurried him away by informing him that I actually WORK here, and not just the laundry-and-scraping-crayon-off-the-walls kind of work.

But I just had to take a minute and share this with you all right away, despite my deadlines, because isn’t it such good news? All suffering soon to end. It’s about time, really. Suffering is so Dark Ages. Personally, I am completely over it.

I’m not entirely sure what the moose has to do with it, but I suppose we’ll find out when we get there.

Super Moms, Unite!

Happy Mother's Day to all you super mamas! This card came from my own superhero mother. She's awesome.

Since Captain Daddy is working today, I'll be performing all stunts myself. Now--faster than two small children high on maple syrup! More powerful than a mile-high pile of useless plastic toys! Able to tranform a disaster area into a functioning kitchen!

Wait...is that a cup of coffee I see? And the newspaper?

Hmm...come to think of it, no one but me will see the kitchen until Tuesday...

Seven Candles, Burning Bright

Today is the seventh anniversary of the birth and death of my first child. There was a time when I thought it would get easier each year. Now I think, it doesn't.

First comes a frantic stemming of the tide. But it comes anyway—a massive tidal wave of grief. I cry for days. I mean, really, why not?

One of the most challenging aspects of this whole affair (yes, there are many) has been the inherent loneliness that comes with being the bearer of something so miserable that most people won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. From the get-go, the edges and depths of this experience were something only a few of my contemporaries even tried to comprehend, let alone address. I can count on one-and-a-half hands those who have really gone there with me in seven years, and several of them are bound to me by blood, married to me, or I had to pay.

Perhaps the death of a baby is just one of those life-situations irrevocably fraught with peril. I’ve always known that everyone did what they were able. But that didn’t make it any less lonely.

One silver lining of this whole affair (yes, there are many) is my chickens. Not just their blessed existence, of course, but their reaction to this day. I always intended for our family history to be something that was out in the open for them—not overly dramatic, but truthful. So once a year we go to the cemetery to visit the brother they never knew. And each year, I am surprised and delighted by the ways that Noodle and Little transform the experience for us all.

Last weekend, Chicken Noodle began the planning. “What will we bring to him? Ooo—candy,” she moaned, like it was crack cocaine.

“How about a bouquet?” said Chicken Little, who is three and prides herself on her growing vocabulary.

“Candy,” sighed Noodle, still lost in an imaginary-sugar-induced fantasy.

“Candy,” agreed Little with a reverent whisper.

“No, I know,” said Noodle, who is five and has to have the last word, even if it means trumping her own idea. “We’ll bake him a cake. But we’ll eat it! At his cemetery! And we’ll leave him one piece right there by his name. And we’ll put heart candles on it! And we’ll sing”—she broke into a warbling tune—“’Happy birthday, lovey boy!’”

All I’ve wanted was for someone to validate his existence, honor my pain, love me there, and make me laugh. I could never have guessed that it would be my own children who would do this the very best of all.

Off to bake a cake…

How's Saturday Night, Tom?

When I was a kid, I thought that all of the bands were actually at the radio station, playing live music that was then somehow funneled into our living room hi-fi.

It seemed rather complicated—difficult logistically. I couldn’t quite figure out how they switched to a new band between songs so quickly. Multiple studios? And wasn’t it kind of a bother to set up a whole stage for one song? I mean, each group was only at the station for, like, four minutes!

I recalled this last weekend, when Tom Petty, for whom I nurture a small obsession, turned up on the cover of Parade Magazine.

“Guess who this is?” I asked the chickens. Expectant grins. I threw them a hint. “He sings to us in our kitchen.”

“Tom Petty!” yelled Chicken Noodle. We’ve spent many a pajama-d morning dancing to “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” Noodle can identify a Petty song in about two measures (Ah, the joys of indoctrinating one’s young in our own sweet obsessions).

Noodle greeted Tom’s image appropriately. She began kissing the page, landing passionate smacks all over his grizzled 59-year-old face.

Then she became puzzled. “Is he playing the music right now?” she asked, pointing at the Ipod and screwing up her face.

“Here’s how it works,” I said confidently, proud to explain what I’d finally figured out all of those years ago. “He plays the music in a studio and records it so that we can listen to it anytime, without him here, which is handy, because he’s famous and probably wouldn’t come to our house.”

“Oh!” said Noodle, missing the main point of my little soliloquy and instead clinging to a much better idea. “I know! Someday can he come and be our babysitter?”

Just putting this out there, Tom. I pay $8/hour. For you, I’d go $10. I know you’re busy, so you pick the night. We’re flexible.

Snakes Are For Girls

Last weekend I encountered a mom who was having a bad day at the festival. We were in line for face painting, and her daughter wanted to be a tiger. She was fretting.

“I’ve been trying to talk her out of it for the last half-hour,” she confided. “I said, wouldn’t you rather be a princess, sweetie? How about a fairy?”

I nodded sympathetically, holding my tongue. I couldn’t relate to her plight, but neither did I want to be impolite.

Captain Daddy had no such similar nagging inner voice. “She wants to be a snake,” he said, pointing at Chicken Noodle. “I think it’s awesome.”

I thought it was awesome, too. I take it as a sign of victory that in this princess-saturated world, my five-year old chooses of her own free will to have a gigantic blue snake painted on her face. She climbed up into the hot seat after the tiger was led away by her mournful mother. Ten minutes later Noodle had a life-sized reptile winding from her forehead to her mouth. Then she got up on stage and learned to belly dance with Rasha. It was beautiful.

My father was the sort to haul my sister and me into the woods and expect us to love it. We did. Mostly. If we complained, he told us that hardship in the outdoors built character. It did.

Now I want the exact same thing for my daughters.

Yesterday, we took a big long walk in the woods. There was dirt and discovery and rain and crying and running and falling and exploring and laughing and bugs. When we got home, Chicken Little put a fairy and a snake in a chariot. They were on their way to the ball. The fairy’s name was Rainbow Butterfly and the snake’s name was Lola Rose. They were best friends.

After the ball, everyone went to bed happy. Especially me.

Glory

On Monday, I walked to a meeting. The route was a stretch of Nye Beach in Newport, Oregon. The destination was a local pub. The person I was meeting was my publisher. On my back, I carried 160 pages of paper—my book manuscript, completed last week and fresh from the printer.

The sun shone brilliantly, there was barely a breeze. I was all alone. Two miles of packed sand, open Oregon air and exercise lay between our rented beach house and my fate.

Of course, fate doesn’t work like that. There isn’t really one defining moment that sets a course of everlasting glory in a regular life. Glory comes and goes, is persistently fickle. Every happy ending is interwoven with the beginning of another new challenge.

I thought about a lot of things on that two-mile journey. How much outside validation I need from my writing, and if I can learn to just enjoy its creation and appreciate the successes that appear. My family, and what really matters. How rooting around in your past and trying to craft it into something salable is as dangerous and messy as my friend Jessica said it would be when I started this project. And, just what the heck might happen during the next two hours.

But when I quit thinking and looked up into the stunning sky, at the powerful surf, breathed the sea air, I thought about how lucky I am. How incredibly metaphorical this walk was! My story about growing up on the Oregon Coast was literally on my back as I marched down the Oregon Coast to deliver it to someone who would decide its worth. Sort of like the pearly gates, but with kites and sandcastles.

Judgment is still to come. But on the walk back, after a great discussion, with a pint of Oregon ale in my belly and my backpack much lighter, when the beach glowed even more marvelously and I felt like skipping over the sand, when I located my chickens chasing seagulls and Captain Daddy ready to hear my story, I simply chose to revel in the glory for however long it lasts.

I knew the true worth of that paper-bound journey, and almost didn’t care what anyone else thought of it at all.