drewd The Adventures of Carlos d'Avis

We had not prepared a Thanksgiving dinner here, at my childhood home in Hamilton, for over twenty years. The turkey came out well, all the same—I did not dry out the white meat. My sister and her husband Mark (the vegetarians) stuffed and subsequently baked a pumpkin that was not nearly as large as Nicole's pregnant belly.

My family traditionally spends Thanksgiving at Pinkham Notch, at the base of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. We hike, eat a meal prepared for us by the lodge staff, and enjoy the rustic comforts (read: reading by the fireplace). This year, icy alpine roads and distance from Boston physicians were not exactly favored criteria for the holiday weekend, no matter the other qualities.

Our menu was as follows:

• Beet Soup
• Biscuits
• Herb Butter Turkey
• Whole Pumpkin, Stuffed with Rice, Kale, & Cheese
• Brussel Sprouts with Mustard Vinaigrette
• Stuffing
• Mashed Potatoes
• Cranberry Relish
• Turkey Gravy
• Mushroom Gravy
• Llajwa
• Duckhorn 2006 Napa Valley Merlot
• Apple, Pear & Cranberry Crumble Pie with Whipped Cream
• Coffee

I would say we did stupendously, for my family being a bit out of practice. Have I mentioned that my favorite color is beet soup? Have I mentioned that I adore food? Have I mentioned that I am living on the East Coast through the end of the year? Wow.

The last time I spent more than two weeks in Massachusetts was the summer of 2001, having returned to live at home after my first year of college. How old was I? 19? Yes, 19. I will go ahead and call this, now, the first time I will have lived in Massachusetts for a significant period as an adult. I am not sure what to expect from this time.

Well, for one, and most importantly, I will become an uncle. Nicole and Mark are less than two weeks away from welcoming Blueberry into this world. Our family is getting bigger! I suppose our family is already bigger by virtue of Nicole's belly enormity. I love you, Nicole, and this is the best ever, but your belly is huge. You were always little Colie—once I got taller than you at least—but you're little Colie plus a watermelon now.

Tell me, again, how we became adults and this all happened?

Truly, I could not imagine being away during this period. Blueberry is coming! I need to be here to see Blueberry! I am so thankful for my present circumstance, that I can pick up and fly to Boston to be close to family. The religious or spiritual connotations of the word are not my favorite but allow me, please, to say that I feel blessed. Lucky is hapless and banal and I do not feel lucky. I feel blessed.

Etymologically, blessed is consecrated by blood. Allow me to redefine to suit my purposes: blessed is made dear by family.

Blessed is having been raised well, loved and cared for, in a warm family and home where hugs were given and hot food was served (however infrequently it was turkey). Blessed is the camaraderie, support, roofs, and shenanigans offered by that larger family, my friends in Seattle and San Francisco and everywhere.

Blessed is experiencing the wide world. Blessed is receiving an education, an inquisitive and critical mind, and the means and confidence to make my own way. Blessed is making that way, losing that way, and accepting that lost and found are all part of it. Blessed is knowing that I am never truly alone.

Blessed is returning home to my family glowing, reunited all about Mark and Nicole in this new consecration. Blessed is goofing in the kitchen and playing dominoes after dinner.

Blessed is love, blessed we be, and blessed be Blueberry. Thank you.

I have, just now in this moment, finished reading another farcical fiction, another over-mystical navel-gazer, by Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker. Although in fact featuring prominently other themes, the novel opens with and focuses on "one serious question." Who knows how to make love stay?

I will not offer my own wisdom on the matter—unproven as it would be—and I will not transmit such lessons from the book. Rather, I intend to offer meteorological portraits of Robbins' most beloved Seattle, indeed of the conditions in which we have so recently found ourselves:

On the shores of Puget Sound, October had come in like a lamb chop, breaded in golden crumbs and gently sautéed in a splash of blue oil. Indian summer, some characterized it, incorrectly, for technically, Indian summer must follow a frost, and there hadn't been a sign of frost since that freak freeze back in April. Rather, it was an extension of summer, summer had uncoiled and stretched itself out, like the garter snakes that, having heard no call to hibernate, still sunned themselves in the blackberry patch; snakes, all belt and no pants, startled from their prolonged laze only by the occasional fall of a berry, grown fat as a dove's egg and black as a curse in this longest of summers.

And to tempt and hasten the weather that surely blows near:

On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, gray rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin room making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things.

One cannot claim that Tom Robbins does not write like Tom Robbins, or that he does not love Seattle.

I will claim that I begin again to love Seattle, weather be blessed or be damned, and that I read as always I read. Of love more archetypally I have nothing to add, well, perhaps just one opening sentence like a bag of bricks, having prompted me to purchase without further consideration Winterson's Written on the Body:

Why is the measure of love loss?

Truly? No, surely not. Truly? I suppose I will read on and love on and puzzle out the answer one of these years.

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This is what I looked like on December 19, 2008.

This is what I looked like on April 2, 2010, the last time my hair was of this length.

And this is what I look like today.

My hair does seem to be the same length as it was some four months ago. Has my face changed? Do I look older, wiser? More caffeinated? More handsomest?

Please say yes. I drink these gloriously poisonous cups of coffee to burn through another day, to pay my way to some brighter future one bit of liver health at a time. Two years have passed, and forever, and what can I trust but that my face ages gracefully?
Another cup of coffee, please.

Play a game where you close your eyes very tightly, and when you open your eyes, you have amnesia and you must draw the details of your life from your surroundings.

AM/PM by Amelia Gray

White ceilings. Purple walls. You like the purple. You are in bed.

You find a passport on the bedside table.
CARLOS ANDRES D'AVIS

You have visited Lichtenstein, Costa Rica, and Germany. Bolivia. Spain and México.

You discard the game. Life has uncertainty sufficient.

You tell your mother, But that's not really my name. She frowns at you from across the dinner table. Days pass. Months.

You drive to a party and spend those blocks considering the name you will use tonight.
Which will require the least explanation?

Everything in your life requires an explanation, a footnote, citation and full bibliographical reference.

When you get tired of explaining, tired of talking, you shrug. You throw up your hands and cast down your eyes. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

You trip and falter every time, every single time you leave a message for your sister.
Hi, this is ...

I feel as if I have so much to say , so much building up in my head and heart, but then fail over and over to embark on any descriptive journey. Shall we? Let us. Let us go. Let go.

I have a tendency to remark, seriously and sometimes not so much so, "The moon is full. I should be traveling." I said as much last night at dinner on a friend's balcony. The moon is full tonight and tomorrow I fly to Boston for two weeks with the family. I should be out walking underneath the full moon right now. How far to the Atlantic?

I caught glimpses of Mount Rainier at sunset last night, from the aforementioned balcony, and then again this evening while swimming in Lake Washington. When I arrive late for my swim, and the sun is already hidden behind the hills and trees, I can stroke away from shore and back out into the daylight. At the buoy, with the low sun on the chill lake, the mountain is there. Here, in Seattle, you say the mountain—the mountain is out—and no one doubts as to your subject. Here, in Seattle, the weather and landscape so dominate our perspective. There, there is our mountain, Rainier: wonder at its majesty. Here, here we are in Seattle, where the rain falls always and life is still somehow marvelous.

Saturday afternoon I will swim again in a small lake, quietly beautiful in the Northeastern way, no grand jagged mountains, no salmon somewhere down there in this same lake as me. But beautiful, with its own little bass: I will swim again in New Hampshire with my family.

I departed for Costa Rica in January and have not seen my father, sister, or brother-in-law since. (My mother visited me in Peru.) Good then that I will reunite with them, that I will join them in a week of escape. Well, relative escape: I will still be working remotely. What's new?

What is new, what is nascent? I will see Nicole, my sister, for the first time since our fateful May 3rd conversation, me in a Mendoza hotel room and she in Boston. She, newly aware, told me she was due with her and Mark's first child, due on my birthday December 9th. This woman, this Colie Wolie, has a little Blueberry in her belly.

I am so excited. Life will continue and our family will grow. And Nicole and Mark will likely not enjoy so many naps in future years. Sleep, then, now for me and perhaps not then: what uncle will I be?

Rare is the morning when I can just sit down and start working. I check web comics first; I look at Tumblr, Flickr and Facebook. I tweet a twittle. I try to get my mind running and engaged. I attempt to care about life enough to motivate my working.

What does it take? Sometimes, a happy song.

Sometimes, a sad song.

Perhaps I'll consider an old photograph of me and Whit, 2001 say.

And then I'll marvel at a new photograph of us, thanks to Dave for the capture.

I'll think about breakfast with Faye and I'll think about my swim yesterday and the cool lake water yet to come in New Hampshire. Okay, I can do this.

I am sitting in my house, having just finished a bowl of Joe's Os with raisins, drinking French press of Victrola's Guatemalan Huehuetenango. Funny that, how you can leave the country for half a year, travel all over, and then still find it acceptable to eat the same breakfast as you always did. I am the same Carlos as always.

Today is Friday the 13th; I returned two months ago to Seattle from Ecuador and all. I have spent the last two months fully tangled up in work. I have spent the last two months up and down emotionally and, overwhelmingly, trying to puzzle out who I am now. I am some version of Andrew.

I was driving up I-5, all the way from San Francisco to Seattle, on no reasonable schedule at all. The time was five in the afternoon, perhaps, and I was nowhere close to the Oregon border. I had been seeing signs for Mount and Lake, all Shasta and gorgeous and northern California.

California was good—so good. Claire, Whit and I ate In-N-Out for our first meal back in the Golden State. I saw my cousins and I saw my aunt and uncle: love. Maren and I drank so much good coffee and ate so many delicious foods. (Brioche doughnut holes at LaMill Coffee are for real.) I had drinks and hugs and laughs with the incredible community in San Francisco.

Whit and Claire's couch felt like home. Sparkle Motion felt like home.
I was good, glorious ol' Drew.

So I was on I-5, right? And I saw the bridge approaching, and I started thinking, Am I the same, the same boring? Driving to Seattle without any magic or perspective?

What am I leaving? Where am I going? Fuck it, I need to jump in this lake!

I crossed the bridge and pulled off the highway, winding my way down a dirt road and nearly bottoming out a few times. Funny that, how I make poor driving choices on country roads whilst in fragile emotional states.

I parked. I made my way down through the brush to the rocky shore and slipped out into the cool milky blue. I am still traveling.

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The universe is shaped exactly like the Earth
If you go straight long enough you'll end up where you were