when i first moved from los angeles to seattle, i welcomed the change for a few months. then the honeymoon stage abruptly ended and the reality of the friends and fun scene i had left behind set in, bringing with it bitterness and regret.
then i took a 5 day trip to la and had a great time restaurant-ing and coffee-ing and visiting favorite places with favorite people. by the end of the 5 days, however, the sheer number of cars and people and pollution and prices clouded my selective memory.
as luck would have it, what i returned to was fall in seattle. a real fall season for me, after spending 13 years living in a city with a faux fall, evident only when i drove down a few selective streets in beverly hills that were blanketed in colorful leaves.
i had missed the anticipation a real fall season brings… that inexplicable feeling that hangs in the air…the leaves changing, the remembrance of how excited i was to start a new year of school again. hope and anticipation. only my new, improved fall will not prove to bring just another mundane school year in new jersey.
i started writing this whilst sitting on the deck of the treehouse, watching the squirrels jump from high branch to higher branch. but i just had to move inside because it suddenly threatened to rain. i guess seattle fall will bring with it rain, too. crap.
anyway, after almost a month of showing our steady stream of summer visitors around town, i have returned to seeing this city as beautiful and exciting and fun and interesting and unique. our last visitor was elise, who was enthusiastic about every single thing i showed her. that is just what i needed. a reminder of how i saw this city the first time i visited. thanks, girl.
so i hung out with my neighbor eleanor the other day. she invited me over to tour her house and garden, and to show me where she suspected that raccoons had had a party in her pond. they ripped out the long fountain hose and everything, and left it splayed across the lawn, which immediately told me they must have used it to funnel beer.
a few nights later, i heard some strange noises coming from the side of our house. i grabbed a flashlight and shined it out the window. i couldn’t see anything, but something growled at me from a very close vicinity. scared the bejezzus out of me, it did. i imagined a dingo jumping through the window and eating my head, leaving my headless body to stumble around looking for it, just like in my favorite episode of the young ones when vivian stuck his head out of a moving train and had it lopped off. remember that? no?
next i got rob involved. he took the flashlight outside to the side gate and got as far as putting his hand on the latch to open it. then he must have had a similar vision of losing his head, because he thought it safer to retreat back to the bedroom to peer out the window. shining the light again produced another growl that i believe to have come directly from the depths of hell. as we watched, wide-eyed, the source clawed its way up the fence in front of us. it was a mammoth raccoon, followed by another and another and another and…. another. a gang of coons. just two feet from us, at eye level. who knew raccoons funneled beer and growled? of course, the animal lover in me still wanted to pet them and perhaps give a cuddle, even though i suspect that is something one would do just once in their life.
so back to eleanor. she showed me around the house she now occupied by herself, and its filled with photos of a life fully lived. a handsome husband who, sadly, recently passed, and four kids and many grandkids. and a lot of watercolor paintings she had created when she still could see. now she cant even read the newspaper, her sight has deteriorated so. but i have been thinking about her life a lot the past few days, and i think its so great how she really lived and loved and created.
am i living and loving and creating? not so much. feeble attempts, at best. but at least i can say someday on my deathbed that i wrote about interesting things like raccoons. but just to be safe, i quickly went to the art supply store and secured some paint and canvas.
as i got off the phone with one of my very nice clients tonight, i had the old familiar feeling that he thinks i’m kind of an idiot.
i pictured he and my other clients snickering and rolling their eyes at each other every time i spoke during a conference call, or bounding into one another’s offices to relay the latest inane thing julie said or did. and perhaps this shared view brings them closer together. maybe they have even started a club.
sinking deeper into despair, i thought back to the last clients i had in advertising and realized that they, too, clearly thought me an idiot most of the time.
but then i remembered something even more disturbing. i mean besides the fact that i am very clearly lacking in self esteem. my co-workers and i all thought our clients were complete fools, too. fools who made bad decision after bad decision. we sat around over coffee and free vendor pastries and lamented over this daily. and we laughed and laughed. and some of us felt a little sick and convicted afterwards.
i thought about how many times a day i mutter the word “idiot” to fellow drivers who thankfully cannot hear me. and how i basically find any customer service people i have to talk to insipid, as well. and then i remember how i cant understand how people can linger and make barista small talk at the starbucks drive-through at 8:55am when everyone in the long line in back of them has to secure their coffee and get to work by 9.
the moral of this story is that i have strong convictions that each of us pretty much walks around thinking everyone else in the world is an idiot. does that make us all pompous asses like myself? definitely.
its kind of infectious. we just don’t respect one another anymore. or have the time and patience to better understand one another. we are too defensive and self-protecting. and that, in turn, makes us all idiots. every last one of us.
(the above may not apply to any of my friends or relatives or current or former clients who might take offense to it.)
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