Where yat, Keith? When I arrived in Seattle in the summer of 1991 I landed in Keith's house. I first met Keith in 1988 when I came through Seattle on a road trip, crashing at his house for several nights before heading for Cape Flattery. The junction of the Pacific Ocean and the Strait of Wanda was somehow important to me, just like the junction of Spring Creek and the Chipola River was to my brother. Meaningless geographic trivia, but the one was the site of my first camping trip ever, and the other introduced me to the Washington wilderness coast. La Push became my favorite getaway for a big stretch of my life. Keith was from Louisiana, the home state I left when I was four. He taught me key things about my home state, like how to say Yeah you right just right. There wasn't room for me move into Keith's house when I first landed in Seattle, but a room opened up a few months later, by the time Ruby was done with me. Anyway, I drove around to PCCs to put shared housing wanted flyers up on the bulletin boards. On a whim I drove over to the Kirkland PCC to put one up. Turns out that whim was actually Leela's guidance. The only response to my flyers came from Kirkland.
Ruby. I got a call from a woman with no name who lived in the Bridle Trails neighborhood in Kirkland. She did have a name of course but I'll just call her Ruby. She claimed local radio personality Ruby De Luna had stolen her real name and she was without one; seemed legit. We hit it off, the rent was reasonable, and the house was nice in a suburbanish way. I moved in.
Clutter. Parts of the house were extremely cluttered, tables and countertops stacked high with junk. No dirty dishes or trash, just assorted objects that never found a home. I was used to keeping everything neat and put away but what the hell. It was no big deal. Oh I forgot to mention: Ruby was drop-dead gorgeous, and the chemistry between the two of us off the charts, right from the start. Within a week we graduated from housemates to lovers. Ruby baby! (that chord on miiiiiine…!) I never said a word about the clutter; I'm not that stupid. But soon after I moved in the clutter began disappearing, one little area cleaned up at a time. Before long all those poor lost objects had found a home somewhere.
Rain at night. Ruby's house was my first home in the PNW and I loved it. I was enthusiastic about the climate. I still am. I lay in bed at night listening to the steady trickle of rain and quietly rejoicing. I loved to hear the rain; I still do. I have a mild case of reverse SAD: more than three or four sunny days in a row is too many. I start to feel battered by the sun. I'm always glad when gray skies return, my lovely gray comforter. I like gray a lot, especially with a touch of violet, like #554c5c.
Ruby and I shared neopagan leanings. For me this was an after effect of majoring in comparative mythology and some mostly benign magical thinking that engendered. We celebrated a few cross quarter days by having folks over for potluck dinners with silly solemn seasonal recitations. We even went to the Camlann ren faire joint in Carnation for a medieval feast once. That's as close as I ever need to get to the SCA, thank you very much. A subscription to Parabola was more my style. I was a subscriber for many years, from Tallahassee all the way here to Seattle. It had the scent of aspiration about it, at least for me. Just enough of a whiff to keep me from completely forgetting why I came here, in the dark days of my marriage.
Tigers Lily and Lulu. Ruby's household sort of included two cats: Tiger Lily and her daughter Tiger Lulu, both gray tabbies. They had belonged to a previous housemate who just moved out and left them. Ruby wasn't interested in the cats, so they had gone feral. But there was a cat door into the garage, and Ruby put dry food out for them regularly. I loved sharing my flat with the cats I adopted in Tallahassee. I was fascinated by the two feral Tigers. I started feeding and hanging out with them in the garage. At first they ran out when they saw me there, but hunger got the better of them and they got used to me. During the time I lived with Ruby I was able to redomesticate Tiger Lily. I was even making a little progress with Tiger Lulu, who'd been abandoned as a kitten so had never really been domestic. Tiger Lily was extravagantly affectionate with me. She liked to hang out on my chest when I would lie down and nuzzle my face, giving me sandpapery little cat kisses. Even better, every now and then she would reach her head up and ever so gently bite me on the nose, a love bite if ever there was one. Just melted my heart. Tiger Lily moved with me to Keith's house. I didn't get far enough with Tiger Lulu.
Subud and salsa. Ruby and I were both interested in Subud. Latihan reminded me of my dance assignment in Tallahassee: freeform movement as part of the spiritual quest. We got opened and started going to latihan. I soon lost interest. I knew what progress with love feels like, from spontaneous meditations I had as a kid and I never felt that in latihan. But Leela moves in mysterious ways: Subud gave me my first exposure to partner dancing. A Subud social event included a beginning salsa lesson. We were both hilariously inept as we struggled to walk through even one salsa basic. But the seed was planted.
I needed a job. I got hired as a waiter at André's in Bellevue, a mildly upscale Vietnamese/French fusion restaurant in a strip mall with a mostly Vietnamese staff. André's wife was impressed by my credentials, a maitre d' with ten years experience. But André's was nothing like Mataam Fez. Dining at the Fez was leisurely; diners sometimes lingered for hours. Mataam Fez was dedicated to love in the form of the gracious hospitality you might find at a friend's home in Fez. I was valued for my ability to connect with people and make them feel welcome and at ease, that gift for service I never knew I had before I worked at Mataam Fez. André's was a normal restaurant: high volume, fast turnover. I just couldn't adapt. It was the first time I ever got fired, a sign better days were coming. I just needed to get fired one more time to get the message.
Gardening. I put another flyer up on the Kirkland PCC bulletin board, this one advertising my services as a gardener. My dad got me started vegetable gardening in the 1960s. He gave me my own little plot at one end of our huge vegetable garden in Asheville. There I tried, with mixed failure, to grow things he didn't, like carrots and pumpkins. In the real garden he grew corn, tomatoes, snap beans and summer squash. By the end of the summer our basement freezers were chock full of those plus South Carolina peaches we bought from a man in a truck. I used to keep a spoon in my bedroom downstairs. I'd pull out a tub of frozen peaches in syrup and scrape bites of frozen peach syrup off the top as a secret treat. This in addition to my massive candy habit. I did some vegetable gardening in Tallahassee, most notably my failure with watermelons, and in Boulder I became a Master Gardener. I went to classes for a few months then volunteered to sit behind a table in a Boulder mall with flyers and an enormous ring binder of gardening information sheets, dispensing garden wisdom. In Seattle I finally had a yard of my own, or so I thought. I learned about community property only after I decided to get divorced. I went nuts, transforming my quarter acre of lawn into an overplanted bamboo jungle. Working in the yard was an integral part of my journey down into a miserable ease.
Mucking stalls. I got a response to my gardening flyer from a woman who had a hobby farm in Woodinville. She needed help with her yard and her horses. There was a picture of me being led around the enclosure on Blue, the gentler of the two horses we had in Pineville. That was the extent of my equine experience. But hey, she wasn't asking me to ride them. I didn't ride them but I did fall in love with them during the short time I got to pick their turds out of the straw. I felt something about those horses I'd never felt about an animal before. She saw what was going on and took the time to explain just a little. Cats and dogs are predators, she explained; they have hunter instincts. Horses are prey animals, keeping a keen eye out for predators. They're quick to shy, but exquisitely sensitive in a way predators aren't.
Walking papers. Ruby wanted us to get married. At first I got excited about it, but from my current perspective it's easy to see I was just swept up in new relationship energy. Common sense prevailed. Somewhere deep in me I always knew that marriage wasn't right for me. I was right, it wasn't. I had to find that out the hard way. But not with Ruby. I didn't rise to the occasion, and soon after that she handed me my walking papers; it was all or nothing for her. Luckily Keith now had a room in his house. But I loved my time with Ruby in Bridle Trails; there was a lot of richness packed into those few months. And lo and behold Tiger Lily came with me to Keith's house. She lived with me until I got eclipsed by marriage, dying the day before my wedding, a cold omen of things to come.
Coda. The Bridle Trails tale has a highly significant coda. Ruby and I had been planning to start a partner dance class shortly before our breakup. Ruby was not one to back out of anything, so despite being broken up we went ahead and took Swing 1 with Walter and Nancyanna Dill in June 1992. It was awkward being together, but we toughed it out through the full six weeks of class. Ruby disappeared from dance after that, but I was well and truly launched.