The last 10 months can kind of be summed up as follows: good news, sad news, hello, goodbye
Good news
My last semester at RISD was
spent prepping for the first weekend in May—the Spring Conference for the New
England Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators. This is a huge
networking event in which writers and illustrators wander the halls of a huge
hotel and trade business cards with everyone they meet. So I had to design a
business card. But I needed information to put on the card, and the only
information anyone cares about on said card is a website. So I had to make a
website. So I made the website and it turned out to be as good as it gets when
you learn the basics of writing html and css code in a 6-week crash course on
web design for dummies.
And then I made a
promotional postcard, which is like a business card, but you mail it to art
directors, hope they hang it on their wall, and that maybe they offer you a job
in 5 minutes or 5 years.
Just for fun, I decided to
send samples of artwork for the Ann Barrow Illustrator Award, because if you
win, your name is announced at the NESCBWI Conference and for two seconds, 500+
people know who you are and possibly make a mental note to check out your
website. The judges claim to have sifted through a lot of applicants and that
it was a hard decision, but it’s a small recognition, and I kind of wonder if I
was the only one who entered…
I also redesigned my book
dummy so agents could read it without wondering whether a one-armed, blind 2nd
grader drew it. Making a book dummy is a multi-week project that includes
taking breaks to sleep and eat, OR, an all-night project if you wait until 12
hours before the conference starts to stay up all night finishing the drawings,
scanning them into PhotoShop for touchups, and sending the digital file at 6:00
am to be printed so you can pick it up on your way to the conference a few
hours later. Which is what I did. Because there was no other way to do it.
Overall, the conference was
really fabulous. I got to hear Jane Yolen say things like, “To do this job, you
have to have fire in your belly, passion in your heart, and always, your butt
in your chair.” And I heard Peter Reynolds tell the story of how The Dot started by accident when he fell
asleep one night with a Sharpie resting on a piece of paper on his chest.
Sad news
All my project deadlines
made me antisocial.
I designed an awesome
promotional postcard, ordered 100, and when I opened the box, I realized there
was a typo on the back. If anyone would like to wallpaper their child’s room
with purple rhinos, let me know.
Good news
I graduated from RISD.
Sad news
Our trip to the Philippines
began with Uncle Frank’s funeral. He was one of my mom’s closest brothers and
died without giving anyone advance notice.
Good news
Death is a venture to such
“unpathed waters, undreamed shores” as noted in The Winter’s Tale. Uncle Frank is on a magnificent journey. I just
know it.
In Cebu we reconnected with
cousins I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. We stayed in Alex Tan’s house, where my
cousin Ariel has been the caretaker since my uncle died in 2006. It’s a lovely
house of which I have no memory, likely because I don’t think Alex didn’t lived
there in 1992 when I was last in Cebu. The house has a garden with trees that
shed pink petals every morning, and it was strange to look out the upstairs
windows and watch my mom doing yard work at 6:00 am, sweeping up piles of
petals in shorts and a tank top. So far removed from Kotzebue where our yard is
a plot of lifeless gravel and a labyrinthine maze of drab scrap wood piles, old
snow machines, and rusted oil drums—my dad’s domain where only he does the
outside chores.
It’s hard to sleep in Cebu.
Mainly because of the heat. When you finally do fall asleep, it’s only a few
hours later that all of this happens: roosters start crowing at 3 or 4 am
instead of at dawn like they’re supposed to in the movies; motorcycles zip up
and down the streets all night, trailed by the occasional SUV blaring last
century’s hip hop music; dogs bark, and neighbors shout back and forth. All
this peripheral noise, plus a completely screwed up circadian rhythm prompted
Ariel and my mom to go to the market at the bottom of the hill every day at 5 am
to buy lapu-lapu, danggit,
squid, octopus, and shrimp to cook for breakfast. And “breakfast” in Cebu was bowls
heaped with steamed rice, a chicken or seafood dish (sometimes both), eggs, and
plates piled with mangos, pineapple, or avocadoes. We could eat several
platefuls each without feeling disgusting and bloated because the food is
lighter and fresher, and we went for hours before eating again in the late
afternoon. Dinner was usually breakfast leftovers. For about five minutes, I
thought how life changing it could be to cook dinner for breakfast. The grocery
store was right across the street. How hard could it be? Stop & Shop with
its overpriced produce and aisles of processed food was totally uninspiring
after perusing stalls filled with tubs of chicken heads and dried fish in the
market at Consolacion. In Rhode Island, we just went back to eating cereal every
day. Besides having personal chefs make me dinner for breakfast, I miss only
one other thing about the Philippines: the bakeries. Pregnancy cravings drove
me to consume excessive quantities of pan de coco, a roll filled with brow
sugar and coconut, and ensayamada, the
ubiquitous Filipino sweet bread that you can buy in miniature, or in rolls the
size of hubcaps.
And snorkeling. I miss that
too, which is weird because I don’t like swimming and generally don’t get in
the water unless I have to. But for half an hour, I don’t mind strapping on a
life vest and sporting those hideous goggles that moosh your face into
grotesque proportions. I think I like snorkeling because all I have to do is
lie face down and stare at the fish and no matter what I do, I won’t drown. At
Boracay, we forgot to bring crackers on our snorkeling excursion so someone on
a neighboring boat loaned us a hotdog bun. Jesse simply held it in front of his
face and the fish darted straight toward it. The excitement of being swarmed by
tropical fish underwater is enough to make you forget about what processed
white bread might possibly do to their digestive systems, but oh well.
I should also note that
Filipinos love to sing. Karaoke is probably their favorite modern invention of
all time. Ariel cleans the house every day after breakfast and sings to the
sound of Kenny G blasted at full volume. This was good practice for the musical
number he would be performing at his sister, Lovella’s wedding reception, which
was scheduled for the day after our departure. When Lovella happened to turn 38
while we were there, birthday celebrations were in order, and where did we go
to celebrate? An open-air seafood restaurant with a karaoke bar upstairs. While
we ate, we were regaled by teenagers singing off-key renditions of Taylor
Swift’s Love Story. I knew we would
be next but felt strangely at ease, knowing that there would be no audience
because the restaurant was pretty empty. But when we got up to leave, I
realized we weren’t going upstairs, but to another
karaoke bar an hour away because they didn’t have subpar microphones. It was
already hours after I would have gone to bed so I could hardly form coherent
sentences, I had eaten too much and couldn’t zip my pants, and I just wanted to
go home and eat part of the cake Ariel brought home for Lovella. But how do you
tell your cousins that you hate karaoke and just want to go home and eat their
cake?
Neither Jesse nor I can sing
on key. We cursed ourselves for joking about being willing to sing karaoke at
breakfast when Ariel first suggested it would be a good way to spend the
evening. We really just wanted to listen to him sing. We warned Ariel that if
we did karaoke, it would be bad. This didn’t curb his enthusiasm. He probably
thought we just being modest.
We sat there poring over the
song catalog and hoping a typhoon would sweep away the foundation of the
karaoke bar before it was our turn to “sing.” Everyone else in the bar was drunk,
and even so, they each could have been fierce contenders on American Idol as they belted out the
high notes of Mariah Carey or Dionne Warwick’s greatest hits. So Jesse and I
thought we’d pick something easy and
different to mix it up. I was hoping they’d have anything by Ke$ha because she
can’t sing so all we’d have to do is sing talk in our best valley girl voices
as quickly as possible for 3 minutes. No such luck.
We chose “Poker Face.” It
was a bad idea. We were already a few beats behind by the time they handed us
the microphones and we figured out how to turn them on and make sense of the
lyrics as they bounced along on the screen in front of a montage of Victoria’s
Secret swim suit models (these images played on a continuous loop no matter who
was singing). I thought I knew the song “Poker Face.” But the lyrics mention
glue guns and muffins and Texas and I don’t even know what it all means. I got
all the words in the chorus right though. Jesse kind of saved the whole song
and carried us through, even though he was sick. That’s true love, I tell you.
The Filipinos in the bar undoubtedly thought we were idiots. Luckily, they
ignored us after they realized we were
idiots.
We sang first. Then Ariel.
He got a standing ovation when he ad libbed in falsetto to Luther Vandross’s “Dance
With My Father.”
I was too pregnant and it
was too hot to enjoy doing much of anything else in Cebu, except sitting in
air-conditioned spaces like the mall—which is the least interesting thing to do
in the Philippines. But whatever made me less irritable was good enough for
everyone else.
Hello, Goodbye
On July 6th, we
got one step closer to saying hello to New Haven. I was released from my church
calling as Primary President. Sunday morning before the alarm clock went off, I
woke up and thought of the kids. I cried quietly so I wouldn’t wake Jesse. It
was fast Sunday and I was holding it together until J—, the new Primary
President, got up to bear her testimony. She was already in tears before she
stepped up to the podium, and that’s all it took to get me started. I soaked a
few Kleenexes before she was done saying, “Nobody is more upset about this than
my boys. When they heard I was the new Primary President they turned to me and
said, ‘Mom! Why did you say yes?’…” JM claimed that her kids thought
Primary had been fun for the last year and a half and that I had done well,
etc. The whole time I was thinking about how much I had complained about how
hard it was and all the things I might have done had there been more, if I’d had
more patience, more love…But the real reason my tear ducts went haywire was
because JM reminded me that the one thing I would always miss about Rhode
Island would be our friends.
These are all the things I
thought about when JM stood there bearing her testimony:
I’ve never had many friends
because I never needed more than one or two truly reliable people—I had one
childhood friend, one person I trusted in high school, and in college, I had
four stellar roommates. When I got married, Jesse was my friend. Before moving
to New England, Jesse and I went to school and we went to work and minded our
own business because nobody needed us. I suppose we were partly to blame for
not having friends because of our insanely busy schedules and because we’re
introverts. Because it takes much
more effort to get to know an introvert (in my opinion) and because a curious
phenomenon of life in many places in Utah is that
your-family-probably-lives-next-door-so-why-go-out-of-your-way-to-make-friends,
we sort of blended into the walls. When we moved to Rhode Island, we were still
insanely busy. But here, we found people who lived thousands of miles from
their nearest relatives and who didn’t think we were completely weird; if they
thought we were weird, they didn’t care. And for some reason, without even
trying, we were suddenly interesting.
For the first time in my
married life, I met people who: invited me to go bowling at 9pm on a Tuesday
night; wanted me to go see the late night showing of The Great Gatsby at the mall (and who later called after midnight
to make sure I wasn’t still driving around in circles trying to get out of the
parking garage because that happened once); talked about you-know-what for
miles while training for the half marathon; celebrated my birthday by making
Italian food and poking around on Pinterest to find ideas for DIY décor in my
favorite colors.
When we arrived in 2011, I
would never have expected to be missed. Or that I’d miss anyone when it was
time to go. Without moving to Rhode Island, I’m not sure we when we would have
realized that we’re not boring, we’re just quiet.
***
Lots of people came to help
load up the moving truck. JM was last to leave because she insisted that since
I was 7 months pregnant, I should not be cleaning baseboards. In the morning,
the Rehons came to see us one last time, and the Taylors almost made it, but
baby Max needed his mom, so we postponed our goodbyes.
Jesse had to drive the
moving truck. I had to do some last minute errands so I drove away first. Twenty
minutes into the drive to New Haven, I received a text message from JM: Sorry I missed you! Tell Jesse to save one
for you! She had driven all the way to Allie’s Donuts—half an hour away—to
get us breakfast and see us one more time.
It made me cry. Had it not
been raining and had I not needed to watch the road, I would have cried all the
way to New Haven.