Dear PenMen: Contemplations on Everyonceinawhile and Other Moments in Time

Seeing as how we might, at this point, be the only ones reading each other's blogs, I figured it was okay to directly address the two of you. Plus, I had this feeling of wanting to write, but what? And then I thought I could just write what I would tell Pen and M.

It's raining here right now, and while soothing, I find this greatly disappointing because I need to mow my lawn. I was all geared up for it, too: The First Mowing. But I know if I actually do that after the torrential rain (accompanied by copious thunder and lightning) that I will have wet grass stuck to my ankles and big clumps of grass clippings to dig out of the bag. That seems like not the experience to have for The First Mowing, and so I will think of my ever-growing lawn as a verdant carpet instead of an overgrown grass pouf to ease my conscience.

I finished reading this book last night that was so good - one of my indulgently trashy romance novels. And sometimes, they're just like reading candy - totally empty calories that go in and pass through with no real nutritional value. But everyonceinawhile, I find one that's more like...designer candy. Still no real nutritional value, but something extra luxurious about the indulgent experience. I think it could have to do with the fact that Mom and Dad went to see Anna, and I was blissfully alone and slept on the couch when I got home and then woke up and read and read and read - skipping dinner - until I finished. That's the kind of reading one needs to do everyonceinawhile to really fortify the soul.

Yesterday was a fantastical, magical day at work. Everyonceinawhile, a very great while in fact, the stars align in this way that you get exactly what you work so hard for the other 3oo-some-odd days of the year. To get a story in the ACRONYM Today is something of a Holy Grail of PR. And then, to find out later that the pitch you made to a certain other nationally renowned publication like FOUR-BES, actually got picked up, too? Well, it just doesn't get any better than that. Except that it happened to be my three-year anniversary with the company, and The Linguista and I went to my favorite Mexican restaurant and drank frozen margaritas at lunch.

The Exotic is getting so close to her due date, and it's starting to make me a bit sad. What will I do without her calming presence in the office? She does yoga so I don't have to, and she offers me zen-by-proxy when I need it. I think I will feel spectacularly off when she's on maternity leave.

I am, however, excited about the next couple of months, which are rife with the kind of adventures I never have. On Monday is David Gray/Ray LaMontagne, the dreamiest of dream concerts. I'm taking one of the Big City interns with me, and it will be delight. And then we will enter the string of weeks from September to October when I have something all the time rather than everyonceinawhile to keep me occupied. Like a trip to D.C.! Mountain Day! Dallas to see Joel McHale with my Texas Twin in our Texas office! Valle Crucis! Company retreat! Oh my! Plus there are two volunteer events on my calendar in September and one in October, plus dinners and drinks with friends (yes! friends!). At times like these, I feel like...maybe I'm doing a better job than I think of carpe diem and not letting the fact that I'm not exactly where I want to be on The Great Life Continuum keep me from doing things that make this place on it so much better.

Despite the rain, I think it's time to pack the Rav and take a load over to My House where I will clean the bathrooms and dress them nicely with the bathmats and matching towel sets I purchased last week. And then I will stand back and contemplate that I could actually be moving soon in a way that is good and comfortable. And then I might be able to think about new companions for my sad heart - still so hard to let go of Kudzu, but so clear to me that I need that comfort from the four-legged varietal.

Wishing you both everyonceinawhile days.

xo,
Ash

Perfect Happiness: In Pictures

Gettin' Down to Biz-ness

* With the fancy schmancy cocktail party at the Atlanta office tomorrow. Rah.

* With the college homecoming festivities - I can hardly wait for fried chicken on the hill. And I've charged my camera battery so that I can take approximately 800 photos.

* With yet another business trip to J. Island that promises to be...interesting. Leaving Sunday and gone on Monday and Tuesday. And packing my flack jacket for the angry mobs that are likely to be staking out our meeting.

* With yet another big opportunity at work in Atlanta on Wednesday - again, hand-picked by the creative director. And he reviewed my work from last week's meeting today and said he was so proud that he nearly teared up. And then I nearly did in turn.

* With a less fancy schmancy cocktail party next Thursday hosted by a friend of mine at a downtown hotel. And despite its lesser level of schmancy, I'm looking forward to time with friends.

* With pondering items about The Professor...the significance of the fine line between "when" and "if"...i.e. remarks like "When you meet my parents who live in a far distant state on the other side of the country" as oppose to if. Like it's a done deal. Like yesterday, he said "when" in reference to a family reunion. And then there's the EX Factor. As in his ex is coming for a visit - a closure visit, I guess? So. Yeah. She's here all next week, and I'll just be...waiting??

* With subsequently considering when or if to pursue dating someone else (no one in particular - unless Christian Bale is available)...but just...someone to keep if from turning into when so fast. Plus, I'm a hot ticket - wildly successful in my career, fantastic taste in shoes, and I'm smokin'. So maybe I should share the wealth.

* And then with thinking, Who am I kidding? It's 10 o'clock and I just want to go to bed and finish Twilight.

Spooky Little Girl

It's that time of year - I knew it when I heard the ghost tour outside my house through the open window on Saturday night. I've never been on the tour, but I could tell the guests were getting the extended All-Hallows version of whatever haunted tale accompanies my house.

And turning on the TV, there's the deluge of scary movie marathons and ghost documentaries and VH1's new show that sends five B-listers on a similar journey as the old MTV show Fear. For a girl like me, this time of year is scary. Because at every turn there's something to scare me out of my wits.

I scare easily. I admit it. I find being scared both delicious and agonizing, and my imagination knows no bounds when it comes to whipping me into a frenzied terror. I slept with my brother for almost a year when I was nine after watching an Unsolved Mysteries episode on aliens. In fourth grade, Flowers in the Attic scared me so badly, I threw up six or seven times from sheer anxiety. My brother was forbidden to let me watch a full movie trailer for Nightmare on Elm Street because my terror of Freddy Krueger had me unnerved day and night.

As I got older, I learned to tolerate the scary movies - even like them. At a high school sleepover, we watched The Changling, which is to this day, the scariest movie I've ever seen. But it was a delicious, hilarious kind of scared with half a dozen girls laughing and screaming. And then when I went to college, I had my own set of paranormal expereinces between the old dorm where I lived and the old house where I worked.

I guess every college comes with its set of stories. Ours involved a girl who hung herself in an upper floor study room - students swore they could hear her feet scuffling about in the closet. Or the hall in one of the dorms that supposedly had a pentagram on the wall that appeared through innumerable coats of paint. A tall shadowy figure was said to lurk in same-said dorm's parking lot. A pair of lovers biking up the mountain road were supposedly struck and killed one foggy night. Legend says if you pull up on the bridge where they were killed, turn off the engine and the lights and honk three times, you can see a ghastly face in your rearview mirror. The town itself boasted a road where you could supposedly take seven people, leave them each at a bridge, and on the way back, you would only encounter six friends, one lost in some alternate time warp until you retraced your initial route.

I always believed in ghosts until then in the sense that I feared them. But it wasn't until college that I had real experiences - not a one involving the standard fare. My freshman year, I had my first strange experience in an all women's dorm. I woke up several nights in a row hearing heavy footsteps above me - even though the attic above me was only accessible by a key held by one student in the building. Until one night, I sat in my room, up late studying, my roommate out and about. And I heard the footsteps and then the indescribable feeling - and you doubters will call it an improbable feeling - that I was not alone. "Please go away," I whispered. And then it did - whether I was sending away my own feeling or a ghost.

The second dorm I lived in came with a forceful banging under the floor. Furnace? Radiator? Hot water heater? Likely. But one night, I stood brushing my teeth, trying to ignore the persistent banging. Until I not only heard it, I felt it. Directly under me. The floor feeling like something was going to come up through - so insistently that I jumped back out of the bathroom.

At the founder's house, I gave tours, starting with the second semester of my freshman year. The origin of the house is unknown, only traced back into the early 1800s when the founder's family acquired it. Over the years, I experienced all sorts of strange feelings, unexplained noises, closing doors and eerie presences. I admit I never saw anything manifest. But at times, it was so palpable - that feeling of not being alone. A shift in the energy or temperature or pressure or smells.

We played hide-and-seek from time to time in the winter months. I once hid in a closet - the closet that housed the founder's old trunk with its travel decal from a ship that sailed shortly after Titanic. The musty smell of the closet somehow became heavier with each passing moment. I was so overcome with fear that I started to cry.

Once while vacuuming the mother's room - the room in which she died - I could tell I wasn't alone. Not only that, but I could tell whatever was with me was disturbed, angered by my presence. I dropped the vacuum and ran. Another student I knew who worked in the summer once lay on the bed in that room for a nap due to a headache. She came down later to thank a fellow worker for checking on her - which her coworker had never done.

I heard the sound of the upstairs doors closing like dominos, only to find them wide open upon inspection. One weekend when working by myself, I heard the front door open, stepped into the hall to see who had arrived, to see the door closing again as though someone had left from inside the house. Jenny Ray and I once sat on the second floor landing, the only people in the house, and listened to the unmistakable sound of tinkling crystal and clinking silverware as though the maid was setting the dining room table.

I arrived at work one day to relieve my friend Laura who had been working alone. She launched into how she was washing dishes, felt she was being watched and turned to see...and I interjected, "The little boy in red." She had never heard the story and was astonished that I could guess such a thing. A woman with a "sensitive" little girl told us one day that her daughter talked to the little boy upstairs.

Other students heard 1930s radio...heard footsteps...saw the doors open and shut. I was always uneasy when I was alone in the house. And never, ever went certain places by myself like the servants staircase that began just outside the kitchen and wound in tight, narrow flights up to the attic. Another off limits space - the attic was eerie and musty and fairly begged to be considered for a horror movie set.

In the house on Grace, I've felt scared a few times. Thunderstorms in this apartment can make the back of my neck prickle with fear. But I don't have a distinct sense of anything like I did at the house in college. Nonetheless, this time of year, I try to be careful about how much TV I watch - limit my intake of horror flicks and scary movie moment countdowns and Most Haunted and Ghostly Travels. Otherwise, I'd just be so paralyzed with fear I couldn't hardly breathe. And I've already got a black cat crossing my path at every turn, so I best not chance getting spooked.

Sheer Perfection

Mountain Day was absolute perfection from beginning to end. It started with coffee in the morning with Mom & Dad and made-to-order weather. It was crisp and cool with enough of a chill in the air to bite at you a little. We drove the Rav up to pick up my brother & sister-in-law. She's quite pregnant, now that we're less than 100 days from the due date.

The afternoon at B.C. was an exemplary Mountain Day. Old friends, lots of hugs, catching up. A bucket of chicken, grape salad and cookies. It was so relaxing, reclining on the blanket under a big tree. We talked about the sun coming through the leaves and took pictures of everyone comparing his or her belly to Eva's. Dad may have won that one.
Afterwards, we drove up into the mountains to look at a piece of land Dad wanted to see. It was incredibly peaceful with the trees creating a full canopy over the road. And it was a thrilling little drive for me navigating the curves and hairpin turns after the flatness of Wilmywood.

We closed out the afternoon by visiting with my old work supervisor, who is 78 going on 79 and just as spry as she ever was. She's the person I think about from time to time when I need perspective on life. She always had the simplest, best advice. In fact, one day at lunch, after a professor had trashed one of my poems, she said, "Well, we'll just have to pray for him."

On the way back to Justin & Eva's house, I got to feel Sprout move! I've never had the opportunity to feel a baby move, but it felt like a little balloon was in there bumping against the ceiling. It was amazing! And the doctor's told them he's going to be a big boy!

I couldn't have ask for anything more. But like all good fairy tales, the day came to an end. And nothing made that clearer than the lonely, miserable drive home in the rain I had yesterday. Even Kudzu and I were at odds after I scolded him for attacking the headrest with his claws. All in all, though, it was about 16 or 17 hours in car, but worth every minute. Mark your calendars for next year.

Out of Context

I'm headed out of town tomorrow to go to Mountain Day, so I thought I'd leave you all with a little writing exercise before I go. Oh, and the last John Mayer post for at least a week. Cross my heart.

I read a recent interview with him - maybe from Entertainment Weekly - that included the following exchange.

Interviewer: I'd like to quote you out of context. You may begin.
John Mayer: All three at the same time. All equally as snug.

So, I'd like to quote you, kind readers, out of context. You may begin.

Way Up in the Hills of Georgia

I opened up the windows tonight since I noticed a good crisp in the air when I got home from work. Something about the air and the crickets chirping made me think of my Alma Mater, the ol' B.C. I'm headed back there the first weekend in October for Mountain Day. What, praytell, is Mountain Day you ask? I'm glad you did.

Mountain Day is our college homecoming and it takes place, well, on the mountain that is part of the 26,000-acre campus. It's been going on for the better part of a century, celebrating the founder's birthday. In a tradition known as The Grand March, students line up according to year. Underclassmen girls wear pink, boys blue. Senior girls wear blue, boys white. And they march down the mountain single file and throw pennies (one for each year of their age) into a basket. Then they come down two by two - and where girls outnumber boys 2 to 1, you're lucky if you get a boy before your junior year. And then there's four by four and so on until you march 16-abreast down the mountain with arms raised and sing the alma mater. Sound bizarre? It is. But hey, we didn't have a football team. Initially they celebrated with barrels of lemonade and cakes. I prefer a bucket o' chicken from the KFC.

I've been going to this shindig since I was in the sixth grade since my sister was a freshman. And did I mention B.C. is where my dad went to high school? So it's a bit of a family tradition. Every year since I've graduated, I waffle about whether or not to go. But then I think of the leaves turning on the mountain and I realize that autumn doesn't really start until Mountain Day. Any of my fellow alumni planning on attending? If so, I'll see you there. But, P.S., this blog does not exist to my parents or siblings, so shhhhhh. By the way, the title of the post comes from the first line of the Alma Mater. And, yeah, I'm a total dork. I know it by heart.