Rise like lions!

I have so much to be thankful for. The love and unconditional support of an amazing family who understands the need to constantly push one's self to achieve, to realize potential, to never stop the quest. No matter how divergent the ends might be. That I was born with intelligence, and that my parents encouraged me to excel in my studies. That I have always been a tomboy, and thus athletic, and had Emily to compete and practice with. That I have no doubts in my physical ability and might, at times, even be confident to the point of illogic in that regard. That I was hired so quickly and by such a professional department. That I have an unlimited career ahead of me. That everyone there wants me to realize my full potential.

That I understand why the phrase is so important to Emily, that Life is Fucking Hard, and that it's important to me, too. That we can both use that knowledge as fuel for a hot and intense fire instead of dwelling on it darkly.

That one of the most sexist and closed-minded people I have ever met respected me at the end of my tour with him, and that he called me Annie Oakley and told Reed that it was a mistake that his agency didn't pick me up. That I was able to change his opinion that thoroughly through my actions and not anything else.

That I have the love and support and reassurance of so many successful law enforcement professionals already, even before I take this next step. That I know, deep in my core, even when my hands shake and my lips quiver, that there is nothing I can't achieve once I've made up my mind. And that my determination was passed down by generations of my forebears.

That I am sure we will be unvanquishable.

The half-boy cometh.

Try to reason with anxiety and nervousness; tell yourself that worry and doubt will only drain you of your energy, and believe it because it is true. Remember that there is no part of you that they can take or change or kill. Remember what all the guys have said so far about it being a mind game; that you wouldn't be offended by a small child, and that their words can't hurt flesh and bone, much less that stuff you horde on the inside.

Carry the words of the lieutenant in your back pocket, that pain is weakness leaving the body, and be proud to remember that you have so many unlikely yet devoted allies. Let your family be the trump card that you pull out in the middle of the night, when no one else is looking, to remember why you're there. To remember that life is really not so serious as they'd have you believe.

And above all else let the words of the emperor ring softly in your ears: that nature has intended everything for you, that whatever you may need it has already provided.

Eighteen weeks is not so very long.

Would you watch my six?

It's not supposed to be this hard I tell myself after the conversation is over, phone is folded up neatly and tucked back into its case. The bile taste in my mouth sliding back down my throat, my cheeks burning just a little less. I. Feel. Empty.

He tells me that living out west is important, that so is family and the practice and again the casual interjection of transferring my certification and how I could be a cop anywhere and if he was important to me I'd be willing to make that compromise. And like a lion my voice storms out of my gut that moving to the other side of the country is not a compromise, hair standing up on the back of my neck. (When you were a kid, didn't your parents tell you to stay away from a dog that's been hit? That they're the most vicious?)

The anger comes in waves and after it's crested the little reason I have left was able to weakly analyze all the countless other words and syllables into a mental image of me buried by a huge pile of shit and him walking calmly away, clean finger pointing back. Damn you Pyrrhus and your fucked up need to have your point be made. Don't you know it's easier to just go downhill?

Ten or fifty minutes later the phone tells me that maybe there is a way for it all to be worked out and for no moving to be involved, no compromises of that kind, but that he needs to feel safe and that it's up to me. And like a bastard I piss out yeah like what, you need me to play the fucking game and be able to guess what you need me to do to make you feel safe.

And the phone. Says. Yeah.

Over the last year or so my patience has run out on me, the bastard, in search of a gentler life. My tolerance is waning, lord, and my belief in love is endangered. I can be hard and unkind and outspoken and by most things remain unaffected. I try to steel myself, to not let the pokes and jabs and disappointments penetrate my skin. The thing he doesn't get is that I have to be this way, in this circumstance, that I would never survive my job if I couldn't, and that I wouldn't trade any small piece of it for lily-white serenity and a sterile sense of happiness. Bob and Marianne taught us that life is beautiful because it can be so ugly.

A postcard.

It happens more slowly than you think it would, change does. It's really not the way that movies would have you believe, where one day you wake up and everything is different and you feel like a new person, sun shining in through an open window and birds chirping from a nearby tree. It's more like a grain of sand being constantly underfoot and eventually, over months and years, your gait has changed to compensate for the disturbance. But that is too negative an analogy. It's mostly been up and up and up. A dusting of cobwebs and the downsizing of emotional clutter.

Though it is more romantic to say something like, "and one morning I woke up and I felt like a completely different person, and I knew I had made the right decision." Kind of boring really when it's delivered like it happens in real life, "I looked back over years of struggle, searching, victories and losses, and I realized that I had done alright for myself, that I thoroughly liked the person I had become and that the journey to get to her had been worth it." Life is mostly boring though I suppose. A handful of big events and several stretches of coasting in between.

My brain is too non-committal for a decent post. All I know is that the half-boy cometh.

onetwothreefour

It came back to me like a lightning bolt, like sitting around the little table we made for our dorm room, eating Raisin Bran and it still smelled like varnish. Like the summer in between semesters when I went in for a midnight shift with dad and Fran was working and we talked about philosophy and how good grilled cheese was with tomato soup and how there was a pregnant potentiality in the heavy, humid 3am summer air. Like being in Deadwood, SD with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah on the radio, espresso coarsing through the veins, like I was the only one in the entire world who wasn't a cardboard cut-out, walking down the street like Seth Bullock all 50 feet of me.

Unrestrained hope pouring out of my little-kid heart. There is nothing you can't do. I drive with the moonroof open at night so that I can see the stars when I look up.

It's in the black of his eyes, the untethered hand, the gold chain peeking out like a mid-life crisis. It's the 4am comraderie that I wish could somehow stretch out forever or at least until I get tired again. It's the drive home through cornfields and cow pastures with the sun coming up and most of the households still asleep. It is the fact that each and every moment is perfect and complete and there for the taking.

Don't go looking for what you already have.

Three months ago today.

My sister found the verse, in college I think, and it was something so simple and so true that it burned itself into my consciousness. Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell. Each time the half-boy resurfaces my brain's first defense is that line, over and over like a mantra of resignation.

Life is suffering. The thing is that one can choose to take on the suffering like a Spartan. If you cannot kill me you will only make me stronger...

It was one of the hardest things I've had to do in recent memory. That's not entirely true, the decision was the hard part; it was agonizing and torturous and even when I made up my mind I completely doubted myself. The action of saying goodbye was mostly surreal. (I should realize that sleep deprivation also played its part.) The Irish face so much like my father's, every row standing at attention, all of the sweat and frustration and sacrifices I'd made these last three months and I was saying goodbye.

Perhaps it is selfishness. The thought of starting over from scratch, going through all the same motions but under three times the pressure is severely daunting. It makes me tired to think about. Perhaps it is partly because I am losing the only stability I've had since April. Now daytime means being home, confronting the silence, the emptiness, and the ghosts that remain. Daytime is like a war-zone between confidence and all the chaotic doubt that hides behind corners and phone calls.

Read this in a year and remember where you came from, the road you walked to get into that uniform, how totally fucked and ridiculous some of the days were. You are way more capable than you will allow yourself to admit, kiddo.

The Gaelic Club

To my grandfather, for his genetics and everything that entails. For walking the beat when Terry v. Ohio actually happened, for the boxes of cases with his name signed as investigator, and for the beginning of so many of us to wear blue.

To my father, for being the best role model anyone could have. For teaching me to do what is right and what is necessary, despite personal discomfort or awkwardness. For being my moral lighthouse, so that I never feared the dark and choppy sea. For choosing to be fair over being popular, and the importance of why. And most importantly for his name, for giving us such a valuable gift.

To my mother, for her unwavering tolerance and compassion. For her ability to understand human nature but to not become a cynic. And for the untold burden she carried while paving the road for my generation of women in blue.

To Emily, for her intellectual and physical prowess, which has always kept me at the top of my game. For the questions she asked, and for not explaining the thought process, but making me trace it back to the original problem on my own. For leading me to the stoics.

And to Libby, who started everything by sending me a single text message last summer. For not ever doubting me, and for being the most loyal friend anyone could have.

The new blue bloods.

His photo is washed out and pixelated on the copy announcing his memorial that they hung in the dimly lit basement corridor where we have our academy. Two youthful eyes peer out at you from behind a motorcycle helmet, it looks like he's revving the engine. And when I walk past the photo to go to class, I find myself wondering who held the camera.

The street in front of the church was lined three deep with shoulder-to-shoulder police blue as far as the eye could see, until the heat and humidity of the day claimed the horizon in heat waves, making it impossible to focus. Sweat ran down my face, along the veins on my neck, pooled in the hollows of my collarbone and spilled out, soaking my shirt. If I lead, will you follow? We stood watch with thousands of police officers and when the bagpipes started we moved as one to attention, and held a long and sorrowful last salute.

They carried his casket into the catholic church, bagpipers and all, and the air outside became still, weighed down with the humidity and the mourning. We stood there in the oppressive sun, sweat bleeding through our clothing, wishing there was more suffering we could take on for his family, for his department.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. And although it means a paltry little, he will never be forgotten.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

She was the Irish girl with a lilting step she inherited from her father. The talkative tomboy with a reckless smile whose eyes lit up at the first sign of mischief (still do). Born a fighter. When she was 10 she filled page after page of construction paper with drawings of Air Force jets that she hoped to someday fly. When she was 13 she borrowed Carl Sagan from the library and mispronounced infrared but loved his poetry of possibility. She didn't understand when the mother of the kids she babysat laughed at her answer to what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up; an astrophysicist or a blue angel.

She had no conception of what could not be accomplished.

Lately I've been thinking of that kid most every day. Running lap after lap at too fast a pace just to keep up with the boys, to make the men's time. Needing the amazement and the congratulations and the whispers and the stares from the others when I finish above the men's average. Scoring 100% on every test or not being satisfied. Drawing my sidearm and firing 2 rounds into the preferred area in 1.14 seconds and still thinking of ways I could do it faster. Reading ahead, researching weight displacement and muscle control to not permit my size to be my limit; pushing, lunging, grappling my way to unquestioned competency.

Accepting no limits.

I can still see her, when I look in the mirror. She's in my eyes somewhere, and in my smile when some thing's afoot. She reminds me to be stoic, steadfast and unquestioning in my ability, and I offer her an unflinching resolve and the spirit of a warrior. There is nothing we cannot do.

They called me Annie Oakley.

I took the twelve-gauge and he said, are you going to show them how it's done, in that joking way that is meant to be demeaning. My fingers fed four rounds into the hot metal of the gun, my hand pumped the action and I stood ready. My blood pounding with hate and the will to fight. He gave the command and I worked four huge holes into the unfortunate paper silhouette 50 feet down-range. I locked the action open and passed the shotgun on to the next shooter and ignored whatever derogatory marks he was making, still had my "ears" on and the wind carried his words away with it, away from me.

Later we were examining the the red welts on our shoulders, the texture of the gun's butt impressed upon our flesh from the sheer force of its discharge. He caught one or two of them and told us that it was an excess level of estrogen that caused the skin to turn red. Shit-eating grin on face the entire time. Me being the only female in the crowd. Me shooting daggers and him never making eye-contact.

All the others were looking at me though, like they always do, wondering (I'd like to think) how I can take it, why he doesn't know it's wrong to say, (hopefully not) why don't I say something back.

My blood burned and my mouth tasted like bile. My brain was only capable of processing the need to fight, the need to win, the need to be better and better and better. The next qualification I was all this-is-no-fooling-around-I-mean-business and I nailed each and every shot, each and every move, and I was one of only two to pass it the first time around. The others congratulated me and even one of the other teachers told me it was nice shooting, but when I glared at him he was looking away.

When I was the only one to nail two shots from 75 feet he approached me. He said some crap about me being a chick gunfighter and from there it developed into bullshit about gender and how women are mostly incapable. The shark circled away again and my boss, who had been standing there the whole time, looked at me and said, he has never liked women, he's gotten better lately though. He's just a grumpy old man.

As if that could possibly make it acceptable. As if that could even come near to explaining any of it.

I am one of the best shots in the class. I pass the academic tests with flying colors. I can PT with the best of them. I take this shit seriously because this is my calling and I have a mega-fuck-ton of natural ability. But damn if that guy making some statement about how the female newborns in his family are smothered at birth because they have no need for women doesn't make me feel like I'm not cut out for it.

Like a Tumbleweed.

She once wrote,
Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops at all,
And I thought of it today, after he left the note for me to find.
She left a note and our grandmother found it
under such different circumstances
but the spaces between the lines are still full of parting,
and a quiet sadness.

The advice of my mother and the strength of St. Michael;
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.

I was not born a warrior and the inside still has places that are soft and weak and insecure. When I go to bed instead of prayer I offer up the Code of Ethics and when I wake I remind myself that it's a choice I've made to be a sheep dog and not a sheep. That it's a choice and to not ever get complacent.

Moxie, grrrl

It wasn't what I thought it would be. She seemed nice, intelligent, strong. And then she looked at him and said, I feel for you, I know where you are coming from. All I got was a blank stare and a warehouse load of guilt. And confusion.

I went in with expectations, but you can't help it. We deal with new situations by trying to put them into a familiar context. We assume.

This whole time I've been convinced that my actions have been reasonable. That the root of the problem is our shifting view of life, not that I'm asking too much. That I'm not a bad person for knowing what I want and being determined to acheive it. That it's not outlandish or sinful to want to live near my family.

Maybe she'll quit, maybe she won't like actually doing it as much as watching it.

I thought about my dad, and my mom, and how much bs mom put up with on the force 20 years ago. And still she loved the job.

Maybe he has problems with the thought of his wife getting shot at.

I thought about Nate and how he said he wanted to be a Ranger, or a Seal, the high hopes he had and how he just always knew. How it seems that some people are called with such undeniablity that it's not even a choice.

How would you feel about not starting the Academy right now? Maybe that would make him feel better, lessen the tension.

And I thought about Pittsburgh, and how small life can become if you're not vigilant, if you sell yourself too cheaply.

In the end it's shadow and dust. You do what you can to be true to yourself before the winds claim your ashes. You don't regret, you don't compromise your integrity, you are always honest with yourself, and death finds you smiling.

You lie to yourself and may the gods help you.

I won't set aside an hour a week to meditate because I can't betray myself like that. I won't delay the Academy because that would be death, and would breed contempt. I will keep an open mind, I will be honest, but I will not sell myself cheaply. That would be unreasonable.

Praetorian!

The sun beat upon the worn concrete road in waves and washed over the car, heating the steering wheel and forcing my eyes into a fierce squint. The sun retreated back from the street in mirages; at first like water pooling and then like heat lines from an oven. My gaze swept from the approaching intersection on the left back to the street and past the police badge dangling from the rear-view mirror.

Dad told me once about Joe and his wife almost crashing at that intersection, about how his quick thinking and faster reaction time saved their lives. My eyes drifted to the rear-view, checking for the ghost car they avoided more than two decades ago and I thought about how many times in a life fate, or the gods, or whatever guidance that might exist intervenes on our behalf, keeps us traveling towards our destinations.

Like Marcus Aurelius said,
Nature has provided for us all that we need.

I was baking inside the car, waiting for the light to change, when that particular feeling began to well in my solar plexus and radiate out towards my extremities: you are doing what nature intended for you, nothing could ever be wrong. It was like laying on a warm beach after swimming in the ocean, the salt drying on your skin and hunger beginning to register in your brain. It was the feeling of not being sated, but of being satisfied, there is no way you could mis-step.

I thought about the community that I am a part of and the Praetorians of Marcus' day and about all the generations of warriors that existed between then and now. I thought about how easy a decision it was to make, how I didn't actually make a decision at all, I just knew. I just knew. I thought about the bagpipes at the funerals and the stories and all of the "choir practices" and the brotherhood.

I thought, What we do in life echoes in eternity.

The light turned green, I shifted into first gear and made my way back home, grateful for my last name and this sense of purpose.

My Monkey Suit.

My twin is the greatest photographer ever. Look at how cool she made me look in my uniform!

Night Shift

It's four o'clock am and you begin to hit the wall. Your vision takes on that quality of a cheap flourescent light, where it flickers just slowly enough for you to feel like you might lose consciousness; your body trying to conserve its resources. Sitting in your chair you worry that, would it be required of you to stand up, you might just fall down instead. You think about the road home... and your bed... and how good it is to sleep.

Four o'clock am is when you really have to wait and think out your phrasing before you press the transmit button. Otherwise it'll just be broken sentences and breathing. And then the embarassment of listening to yourself on the recall radio. It's also the beginning of a two-hour window where you pray that no one on your shift comes into dispatch because it would be too hard to be coherent. Six o'clock is better because you're so slap-happy you'll laugh at anything, and the others will be too.

Four o'clock the voice of the younger guy from the water department flows out of the phone's receiver like someone standing close, whispering. Their breath warm on your ear. You wonder what his name is, what he looks like, and how he fills the hour and fifty-nine minutes between calls.

Four o'clock begins the unexplainable pains and fevers, your body carrying on with its purification despite your lucidity. A twinge starts in the abdomen and spasms down your thigh and into your knee. Your sternum has a dull and hollow ache. Your skin goes from flushed to chilled and clammy. Your eyes burn like the fire of a million candles.

Four o'clock actually lasts seven-and-a-half hours, the rest of the shift is like an easy walk on a nice day.

***********************

Yesterday morning on the drive home I found myself by the county airport, surrounded by vast expanses of corn fields and soybean farms, oak trees and weather-beaten homesteads. The eastern sky was cloudy and as the sun crested the horizon the whole thing lit up like an outrageous watercolor painting. Red, orange, purple, magenta, pink, blue. It was the first day of spring and the earth was showing off. It was marvellous.

Book Ten

12. Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can. If anything gets in the way, forge on ahead, making good use of what you have on hand, sticking to what seems right. (The best goal to achieve, and the one we fall short of when we fail.)

Book Nine

28. The world's cycles never change -- up and down, from age to age.
     Either the world's intelligence wills each thing (if so, accept its will), or it exercised that will once -once and for all-and all else follows as a consequence (and if so, why worry?).
      One way or another: atoms or unity. If it's God, all is well. If it's arbitrary, don't imitate it.
      The earth will cover us all, and then be transformed in turn, and that too will change, ad infinitum. And that as well, ad infinitum.
      Think about them: the waves of change and alteration, endlessly breaking. And see our brief mortality for what it is.

No fate but what you make.

We were talking in the truck, on the way somewhere, and he told me, "you can't let someone trick you into thinking that their happiness is dependent upon you, because it's not." It's not, and I know it, but damn if it isn't hard to remember that sometimes. He comes home and it's a son of a bitch to not feel responsible. The sadness that comes with failure, the depression of something that is broken and you don't know how to fix it.

And there is my dad, and his truck that smells like safety, like nothing in the world could ever be that bad, and me feeling guilty for being angry but not worried. I know that no matter what happens there will be corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's day, a warm fire in the shop every New Year they own that house, there will be a great hullabaloo on every birthday, and thousands of celebrations and congratulations along the way. I know, without question, that no matter what happens, each and every one of them will be there for me and would even give me the shirts off their backs if needed. And that I would, too.

And then I think, does he have that kind of unflinching support? When his brain tries to get him down, of whom does he think, which spirit offers his soul some comfort? And my corny neurons fire up the image of Linda Hamilton, alone in her cage and doing pull ups on her over-turned bed, and I think no fate but what we make... every one of us has taken each step down the path which has led us to where we stand in the present. If we are in need of people to support, nurture, inspire, comfort us, then we need to seek them out.

The only constant is change. Always, always, always.

**********************

I had a dream last night, I don't remember much of it but Emily and I were trying to get somewhere in a very old car. It was some old manual racer and I was driving and we came to this very steep, very muddy, very terrifying section of road. The farther up we made it the more I down-shifted until we were in first gear, barely crawling. I was afraid the car would tip over. But she knew we would make it, I remember looking over at her and she wasn't worried at all..... so we crested the hill and kept driving.

Poor Isaac.

I was anxious because of the formality he was trying to force, and so I blurted it out. "Okay, but I don't believe in God." My mouth is my worst enemy when I am embarassed. It is a mutinous bastard, completely liberated from any inhibition that would like it to just shut-up.

And he looked at me for a minute, processing. Looking for the right slot to file away the new information. He teased me about it, my face went as red and hot as a matador's cape, and after awhile he went back out. Left me alone with my thoughts, feeling insecure as ever about my doubts, about my weaknesses.

Later he came back, and I could tell he had been thinking about it and that part of him felt bad for the abuse I had suffered by his taunts. (Didn't stop him from twisting the screw just a little more though, but only at first.) He wanted to relate to me, wanted to understand, and so he tried by explaining the foundation of his beliefs to me. He said, "I just think about shit like waterfalls. There is no way that man could ever make something like a waterfall."

Mercifully the phone rang, and when I hung up the subject had changed.

But I can't get the vision out of my head. I can see him contemplating the holy beauty of nature while he's sitting in his pew Sunday mornings, arm around his wife, everything being right with the world. I can imagine him giving thanks for the mountain bike trails, the getaways to the ocean he takes every year, for his daughters and for a life that is honest, good, whole. The picture I have of it makes my joints weak it is so convulsively beautiful. I lock it away deep inside, in the hopes that some of his faith might leak into my bones, like some kind of divine osmosis.

But the doubter knows it won't. The doubter dwells on the story of Job and Abraham and wonders who the hell would want to believe in such a petty, insecure God. The doubter thinks about the paganism of a Catholic service and how it is a sin to not believe that the communion wafer is actually the honest-to-god flesh of christ. The doubter is too occupied with her skepticism to notice the small miracle that is a waterfall, that is the silence of a dense and lonely forest.

So she invests her faith with Marcus Aurelius and waits for some kind of sign, some kind of proof. She is almost completely convinced that it will never come.

Thank you, Owen Meany

He said,
"IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT--IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT,"
and I earmarked the page.

It is one of the most beautiful books I have picked up in a long, long time; I will be sad to lose the characters when it's over. And it has thrown my head into a tumultous fit. Anxiety. This is good for the soul, I keep saying to myself.

I suffer from a profound lack of faith. This has been true of me at least since confirmation class in the ninth grade, and was probably true of me before then, I just didn't have the vocabulary to realize it. In truth, my agnotisticism is unassailable. Perhaps doubt is a form of a priori wisdom, perhaps some of us are just born with it. I remember being very young --still sleeping in a crib-- and waking up early one morning wondering why I was born, "what was the point of it?" When I was older I prayed for boys to like me, and for us to win softball games. I never took it seriously.

But I imagine how comforting it must be, to have the ability to believe. To know that God exists, the way you know that the walls are full of electricity, even when the lights are off. How much of a sense of belonging there must be, to have a moral code completely spelled out for you, to even have a book to refer to when one's mind gets clouded with desire! And I'm not talking about your average "weekend christian" or "sunday catholic". I am talking about holding fast to a faith so deep and nourishing that it changes the entire shape of one's life, a faith along the lines of Alyosha Karamazov or Guy Fawkes.

But I just can't make the leap.

----------------------------------------

Maybe I am being too naive about it. But my fatalism knows no bounds. And my beliefs are not completely without christian influence.


One must approach life with an unfailing sense of virtue; in all things strength and honor.
You will encounter many ignorant people who would like to harm you with their words and actions--treat each occurence as a way to build up your humility and compassion.
Be wary of anyone who has a subjective sense of right and wrong.
The object of each day is to be truer to your sense of justice than you were the day before; a static morality is one that has atrophied.
Remember that your name is priceless, let it be devalued by no action.
Do not succumb to anxiety about the future; you will meet it with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.