Story, The First: The Pug Who Moved To California

Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.

Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.

I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?

(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)

(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in which case he probably really IS going to tell you everything. And you’re probably going to want to break all of his fingers by the time you reach page 500.)

———-

Before Thanksgiving I drove from Portland to San Mateo and back in a single weekend* to give Iggy a better home. He traded a one-bedroom apartment he was forced to occupy mostly alone while I worked and worked and worked some more for a house near the beach with a sun-soaked yard and multiple laps to occupy at all hours of the day and night.

I know how many of you appreciated and loved him, and anyone that ever met Iggy can attest to how surely he loved you right back, so routinely did he nearly asphyxiate himself out of sheer excitement whenever anyone walked through the front door. Letting him go remains one of the most emotionally challenging decisions I’ve ever made, and yet one of the easiest, too.

I didn’t talk publicly about my decision or the trip until it had already begun, and while it certainly might have looked abrupt from the outset (most decisions do when you’re not privy to the emotional or physical backstory), it was a decision a long while in the making, and the best for all parties involved, but most especially for Iggy.

I held him close the entire trip, paid attention to how and why I would miss him, took an excessive amount of pictures. We ran in circles at rest stops and made new friends in San Francisco and fell asleep listening to Pacific waves cresting and crashing steps away from a tent I pitched at midnight in Half Moon Bay. Like so many mornings prior, I awoke with a snoring pug curled against the small of my back.

The day after I said goodbye I started sobbing mid-run, still in San Mateo, sun warm on my face, the San Francisco Bay in front of me so bright and beautifully blue. Two days later I found this picture in my inbox, taken after Iggy’s first walk in his new SoCal city, and I haven’t cried since.

*Not at all recommended. Unless of course you have an Erin to play co-pilot, and a Hans and a Jen and a Matt for triple-team text support, and another Jen to play gracious hostess/distractor/non-judger as you start crying while petting her boyfriend’s dog.

———-

If you’re good at inference reading, you’ve probably already surmised this isn’t the only story I’m going to tell you. But it’s the only story I’m going to tell you today.

Tune in tomorrow (or maybe the next day) for more radical life changes!

Story, The First: The Pug Who Moved To California

Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.

Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.

I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?

(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)

(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...

Found

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked → Read more...

On Hoarding

I’m collecting my favorite corners, like the one with the stunning oak tree on display for an entire neighborhood to see, its limbs shading a bustling crosswalk shooting confidence into pedestrians like electric currents of white light, fresh graffiti on a nearby curb: an infinity symbol, black and simple.

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly → Read more...

6.2

We rose before dawn and drank smoothies and small cups of coffee and danced our way from our sleepy Seaside inn to a bustling Port of Astoria. We boarded a yellow school bus that sent my memory rolling back to high school basketball away games, the sound of tennis shoes scuffing newly polished gym floors while crowds cheered loudly through popcorn kernels in their teeth. We saw the bridge we were going to run up close for the first time, → Read more...