Climbing

On Saturday we climbed. It's lucky I had new boots because I didn't know what I should have known -- from the foreboding name of this peak, Breakneck Ridge -- I didn't know I'd be scrambling up steep shelves of rocks, placing one hand on the jutting rough, nudging one foot in a sticky crease while the other dangled. I didn't know a fear of heights would lead to getting caught like some splayed out toad on a narrow crest, so the stranger behind me in hot pink with the white gold hair would call out need a boost?, and my stubborn pride would send me flying even over phobias, I don't need anyone's help...not me. 

Getting to the top meant getting nearer to clouds, seeing the water in its green and brown and blue, like smooth camo pants between mountain shadows.

These days I find myself in a forever pattern of wanting too much, too many things, my ponytail swinging over a sweaty neck, ever-gracefully tripping on micro-slopes I hadn't seen beneath the moss because I was moving too fast, my husband having to remind me to calm down but you understand, don't you, that I have to keep up a certain momentum.

And I did want to keep going, even when he wanted to look at the map, when the fallen tree looked nice enough to sit on (but was it really?), when I wondered how many miles we had gone, how many feet we had climbed and someone had to laugh and ask the question, because I certainly wasn't going to, do you want to enjoy the hike or just finish?

I don't know the answer to that question, of course, I don't know, I don't know, my heart beat out at the top of things, because you can hear it when you are that high and there's nothing else, you can hear it banging.

Beyond the Fair

Yesterday was a full, whirlwind day.  Long meetings in the morning, walking the floor of the Javits Center for the annual American International Toy Fair in the afternoon, then running off to a workshop in the evening to learn about writing the news for kids.

Toy fair is a fluorescent lit, starburst try-me shout, wow wow, look here spectacle.  Never good for someone who has a fear of crowded spaces, who panics when over-stimulated with bright lights and loud noises.

At some point, I became delirious, nearly falling over in tearful laughter when someone pointed out a baby-doll with a toilet and a little poop inside it that disappears when you flush, leaving me with flashbacks of a doll I had as a little girl, who came with green-slime baby food that went straight through her pliable pink lips and out her butt into a diaper, which was both thrilling and repulsive at the same time.  

So with head aching, armpits sweating (crowds, crowds, too many crowds), thinking about rubber-bodied baby dolls regurgitating green slime, I found myself in some dark corner of baby sippy-cups with flexible handles and looked up.  Windows.  I had forgotten the Javits Center had windows. I could see sky. And the hint of some gray cloud.

Of course I shouldn't have, of course I'm sure that my badge didn't allow access there, but I walked behind the black curtain skirting this building of trade booths, and there, beyond the spit up and break down of the show behind the show, beyond carts and boxes and tape and scrap, beyond a building of people buying and selling and shouting the magic of play or childhood or something so irrevocably lost it hurts my heart, was one of the most beautiful sunsets I'd ever seen.