Secret signs and knowing looks These sunny days will cook the books Happy to take the misery This mortal life can bring to me Don't like the look of this town What goes up must come down Character is lost and found On unfamiliar playing ground - from Public Image Limited, "Seattle"
I’m in Seattle, finishing up a weekend with my son. It was a different kind of weekend – for a number of reasons, I felt able to breathe a lot easier with my son this time around. I didn’t feel quite so much in the bubble with him – that word again – as much as I just felt like I was living in my own, somewhat chaotic world.
Last week there was a snow storm in Portland before I left. 18 inches – or 45 centimeters to you folks in metric locations – of wet, heavy spring snow, and since my sister was in the hospital and my mom was with her there, I did most of the shoveling. I had a 2:30pm departure to Newark that I was hoping to make, but with two hours to go before the flight, the airline cancelled it – which made sense, really, as conditions were garbage, but I needed to get to Seattle for a quarterly divorce counseling meeting with my ex-wife. I was booked on the next available flight which would get me to the Emerald City with twenty minutes to spare before the meeting. I texted my ex and told her what was going on; she understood. I flew to Chicago that night on the last flight out, my father graciously used some reward points to book me a hotel room, and I got up the next morning ready to go.
I got up late, however, and barely made the flight, running through O’Hare like an idiot, spotting the occasional frazzled compatriot who also had overslept or got stuck in traffic or had to do a last minute errand that meant they, too, were also late. I took my seat, grabbed a book, and read through the flight. I got to Seattle and raced to the counselor’s office, ten minutes late past the scheduled time but with ninety minutes on the books, it wasn’t too bad.
My ex-wife and the counselor – we’ve been working with him for almost three years now – both laughed; they had been talking about my travel history. The counselor said “you know what, from what she’s been telling me, you have an uncanny skill to bend time while traveling. Most people would have given up on making this appointment, but somehow you’re here.”
He’s right – I do have that skill, but I don’t think of it as a skill. While waiting for a cab to the airport from the hotel in Chicago that morning, realizing I’d quite possibly miss my plane, I just sort of relaxed and thought, it’s out of my hands. I’ll do everything in my power, but so many things are out of my power – traffic, security lines, even the prior day’s weather – that all I could do was try my best and accept what the travel gods allowed of me. That’s not a skill – maybe an ability? a superpower? It feel like releasing, just being human. I guess I’ve gotten better at it with time, I suppose, given that I do always seem to get the trip I needed to have – and travel teaches you that as much as anything, perhaps only exceeded by parenting in that regard. But skill feels like the wrong word.
Starting on that note, the session felt like a kind of graduation in many respects. My ex and I have developed a very normalized relationship – not a friendship, per se, but a mutual respect for what each is trying to do for our son and for ourselves – and the session with our counselor unfolded with a kind of grace that has slowly been emerging in the last year or so. The fact that our son is doing so well makes it easier, of course, but if he weren’t, we both know we’d be making different decisions and doing whatever was necessary. His “doing well” is, moreover, largely out of our hands now that he’s in school and what not eight hours a day, five days a week, plus friends on nights and weekends, although we remain the backstops if the world pushes him in a dangerous or bad or just sad direction. We can only do our best.
My ex stopped the conversation at one point – we were talking about scenarios if she or I were to suddenly die, made slightly more complicated by my not living in Seattle – and said “we should really remember we’ve done a lot right here, and we’re continuing to do good things, so really what I’m talking about on what happens if I die is about continuing to do the good things we’ve been doing, not do anything different.”
I have been doing good things, for myself and for my son. This weekend was no different; we played a lot of Legos, went on lots of outdoor adventures, hit the driving range on Sunday morning, and in the afternoon his friend came over to play games in my tiny apartment. They were largely self-absorbed but I made them a plate of veggies and potato chips for snacks and we played a long game of Sorry towards the end. When his friend first arrived, he asked “where is the bedroom” because the space was in daytime mode – toys out, comfy chair for me in the corner, my son’s bed put away under mine and my bed looking more like a couch than a bed. My son explained that the one room was all there was in a perfectly matter of fact way – no shame that it was so small compared to his friend’s McMansion sized house down the street – and by the end, playing Sorry, his friend said “your dad has a really cool apartment” and asked if he could come over the next time my son stayed with me for another play date. I said sure, we’d talk to his parents about it.
My apartment here feels like both mine and my son’s at once. The overall look is simple and fatherly, with dark book shelves and artwork and my framed 1839 map of Maine in what is overall a sunny but generic west-facing studio. The lighting is simple – a few lamps is all – and the furniture just as simple. My son’s presence is made known by his artwork on the walls, the refrigerator magnets, the paper trains and Richard Scarry books interlaced with my hardcovers and old guy trinkets on the shelves. When his bed is put away, his Lego bedspread is folded up on my bed, his teddy bears and a broccoli stuffy toy (Ben Broccoli is his name) curled up around it. It is our home.
Seattle, of course, is not my home, but this weekend – the city bathing in spring sunshine, bikes and skateboards out in force, brave cafe owners putting out tables and chairs on outdoor porches despite it being still a bit raw and chilly – I was wondering why that had come to be. I moved to Seattle with my ex-wife in late 2004, and it felt great to move here back then. The bank I worked for was the kind of company you fell in love with, which made its demise all that much harder, but the city itself is still beautiful, nestled between sea and mountains, especially now that the long winter dark is feeling a thing of the past for another year.
I lost my comfort for Seattle much as I lost the thread of my marriage, I think. I came to Seattle for a purpose, much as I think I might have gotten married the first time around for a purpose too, if I’m honest with myself. Seattle was all about a bank and set of people; when the bank failed and the people scattered, there wasn’t anything left. I got married for a journey – to have a family, to travel and grow with someone and with that family – but the family didn’t come, not for 13 years anyway, and the travel and the growth seemed to fade as my ex-wife just wanted peace, just wanted the serenity of a home and a neighborhood and a few friends. Had I married for just the person – nothing less, which is far more complex and difficult than I realized at that age – it would have been right, but the “purposes” for which I got married salted the soil. And had I come to Seattle just because – maybe for the way the light hits Elliot Bay at sunset, or because a friend said maybe it’ll work – I probably could have found myself here, comfortably. Indeed, that was what my ex-wife did – she came because of me, but she ended up in grad school, settled down, and actually in a world that is now her own, all her own.
This isn’t the right city for me. Of course, there are hard memories for me here – the end of one of the best chapters in my career, the intense effort required to get back on track as a parent, doing so without really being understood in that by the girlfriend and knowing it was hurting her to be there. I saw Seattle through her eyes for a while and it was helpful to have a different perspective, but the experience itself was raw and it hurt both her and me to live through it. She left, even though I still had work to do and had to stay behind for one last summer. Which I did, and in so doing had another set of painful memories but also laid the groundwork for this weekend and all the future times I get to spend here as well.
This weekend, being with my son, really being with him – inhabiting the same space with him – but then seeing him also when I wasn’t with him, when he was with his friend playing on the floor or at skateboarding with his classmates, made me realize that Seattle will be his world, and he wants me in it even though he doesn’t need me in all of it. He falls in love easily, just like me – and he’s learning to deal with loss, as his first love moved back to China once her father’s work at the university wrapped up, and his second love prepares to move to south Seattle as her family chases cheaper housing. He’s in love with his friend who came to play on Sunday, a little boy who tried to lose at Sorry because he wanted my son to win instead. It’s beautiful to watch and realize I’m in love with him, too, and he’s open and willing to love all of these people at once.
I fell out of love with Seattle, and that won’t come back. It’s a different city now, of course – no more quirky Pacific Northwest bank on steroids, nearly half again as many more people as lived here when I first came in 2004 but all here for tech and Amazon and organic produce, not airplanes and grunge rock and coffee as they were before. The traffic is worse, and the old locally endearing Pacific Northwest passive-aggressive bullshit has been replaced by a grating smugness, the “we’re the information overlords of the new age” garbage that comes with Amazon and the like that used to be just a Silicon Valley thing but now has fully invaded northwards up the coast. The long winter darkness ended up spooking me, longing for sunny cold winter days in Alberta or Maine the same way California’s endless sunshine had me vaguely nervous and longing for summer time rain when I lived in Palo Alto after university. Seattle never really accepted me anyway, which I knew as soon as the bank failed. I was an outsider for the bank, a hired gun, and when it ended I was superfluous to requirements for the city. The city – or its bank – wanted me for a purpose, not simply because I was me.
I didn’t feel that way in Alberta, and I don’t feel that way in Maine (although my inability to find a permanent job there is beginning to make me wonder). I felt accepted, and loved, just for myself. I’ve felt that way in London, too, although lack of residency rights adds a bit of legal frisson to that relationship.
I wish I knew how to find a Maine or an Alberta from scratch – I wish I knew what to do to my heart so that a place will accept me for what I am, that people will accept me for what I am. It’s not easy; even when you’re doing it at your best, sometimes you just encounter a place that’s not ready for you, or needs something different. I do know you can’t force it, though, and you also have to accept the place for what it is, not resent it because of what it doesn’t have or wish it could be different. You have to accept first – there’s no way to be passive about – you have to actively open your heart to a place, a person, a dog, an experience, to make it possible for them to accept you back.
I’m much closer to accepting Seattle now. It has a lot of faults, but it is more the process in which I’ve changed that makes me not love it, not the faults themselves. I can accept it, though, because I see how much my son is happy here, how accepted he is by his friends and his school. I see that my ex-wife is building something for herself here which is good, and seeing his mom do that makes my son feel safe, and proud, and confident. He’s proud of the space he’s built with me here, just as I am proud of it too. A part of me wishes more people could have been involved, but even this space came together because of friends who helped me move in, who painted pictures for the walls, who made a paper mache chicken for the top of the bookshelf. I don’t love Seattle, but I love the space I have here, and it could be nowhere else – and so I accept this city for what it is, even as I fly back to Maine tonight.
And on that score: there’s a snowstorm on its way to Portland tonight – another foot (or 30 centimetres) of wet, heavy spring snow. As I’ve been writing this, I notice my flight from Newark to Portland tomorrow morning has already been cancelled. Oh well. I’ll bring an extra book and settle into the airport lounge. I’ll write some more. You have to accept what comes when you travel.
St. Petersburg, Florida has the feel of Seattle back then. Even found a quirky company. Come visit.