alexis in the city

people always comment on how weird it is that i’m married - because i’m so commitment-phobic. it’s true. i hate deciding to wear a hat, because i hate the thought that once i put it on, my hair will be messed up, and i’ll be committed to wearing that hat all day. it’s also true that i’m a little crazy. but my fear of commitment spans beyond my choice of head-wear.

one of my greatest fears is that i’ll get comfortable somewhere - in a job, a city, a lifestyle - and wake up one day, 20 years later, not having done all the things i wanted to do. so i have a HARD time commiting to a job, or a place i’m living, even if i REALLY love everything about my life circumstances. this is the case now. we’ve been here for almost a year and i’m already thinking about where i want to go next - not because i’m not happy here (i AM!!), but because i want there to be a “next.” i don’t plan on staying here forever. as far as my job goes, i’m six months in and it’s the first job where i haven’t actively been seeking out something else within the first few months.

i blame this, largely, on my military upbringing. i’ve never lived anywhere longer than three years, and that’s on the high end. the average was more like two years. i can’t imagine what it’s like to have grown up in the same place with the same friends and the same schools. sometimes, i start looking around (to move, switch jobs, careers, whatever) because i think there’s something better out there. but usually, it’s just because i know there’s something *else* out there. this can be good, because i’m always pushing myself to find that next step and to continue to grow. it can also be bad. i don’t want to live a life where i’m never content, not fully able to enjoy what i’ve been given. somehow, i have to find a balance between the two.

the combination of being a military brat and a commitment-phobe has meant something else, too. i don’t really have roots, i definitely don’t have a place i call home, and i only have a few “childhood” friends - and even they are technically from highschool and not “childhood.” surprisingly, this doesn’t bother me. i used to freak out at the thought that there would come a day when i’ll have to decide where i want to live FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. then i realized, my parents are in their 50’s and they still haven’t “settled down” - there’s nothing that says i have to. and right now i’m not planning to. of course there might be that perfect circumstance where something clicks and i change my mind. but the way i look at it now, there’s no way i can see and do everything i want, live everywhere i want, accomplish everything i want, if one day i have to “settle down.”

so when people comment on the irony that i have such a problem with commitment and yet am married, i tell them i used up all my commitment-making ability on that one decision, and now i’m out. probably for the rest of my life.

my parents are moving - where, i can’t say (military rules), but suffice it to say, they’re not going to be super-close by. don’t get me wrong, i’m SO excited for them and for this next step in our family’s life, since eventhough i’m on my own, i’m still affected by my family, of course. but the impending change got me thinking about my family’s dynamic.

as i’ve gotten older, i think i’ve become more attached to my family. when i graduated highschool i was more than ready to cut the apron strings, and happily went out-of-state to college. it only took one summer spent at home before i made college my new home, and was happily living in that vicinity year-round (minus holidays, of course). military life has made our family relationship extremely strong, but also further forged our independent personalities. i really never thought i’d care about spending lots of time with my parents. being together at holidays has always been important to us, since german and swedish tradition is still heavily incorprated into our lives. i knew we’d always be a close family, but that we wouldn’t be close, geographically, and that didn’t really bother me. until a couple years ago.

now, i don’t want to live next door to my parents, or even necesarily in the same town, or even state, although there would be something to be said for being able to go visit over the weekend. or see a ballet with my mom. or take my sister to the quirky places in my city i know she’d love. i just like having the ability to see them often. every few months would be nice, though not really do-able, but i definately want to be around them more than once a year.

this is something ryan always has given me a hard time for. i talk to my family at least once a week, i see them on a semi-regular basis, yet, i’d love to see them more. he doesn’t really “get” that. his family has a much different dynamic, and he relates to them differently for a lot of reasons - a big one, i think, is that he went away and lived in italy for three years right out of highschool. but something ryan articulated for me last night, after thinking about this move and what it means for me, is that my family is my sanctuary. besides ryan, they’re the only people i feel really GET me. i can be my true self around them because they know all my weird quirks and inside jokes. we have the same sense of humor and we share all those things you “get from your parents” - good and bad. in general, they are the only people i completely count on.

ryan says he’s noticed that people who grow up and still live in the same place, close to family, have a harder time growing as a person because they’re still in their comfort zone, and you know what they say about growing and comfort zones. i say that’s probably true. i think, even if you LOVE where you grew up and really want to stay there, it couldn’t hurt to set a year or two or three aside and go somewhere completely different. just to try something new. but that’s just me - i have a thing for change.

so back to my family … i’ve been away from them for a while now, i’ve definitely done some growing, and i couldn’t really live near them even if i wanted to - since they still move every year or two. i think it’s all that, that’s led to my current sentiments about them. i am obsessed with change, but maybe i can be that way because i have a family that is rock steady.

i’m warning you, this is sad. really, really sad.

anybody who knows me (and by “know” i mean maybe passed me once or twice) knows that i ADORE dogs. i have a desire to raise some little puppies the way some people i know have a desire to have kids. that said, it makes the story i have to tell, that much more traumatic. i’ve never really told it before because it’s so upsetting to me, yet it also brings back so many good, happy memories, i thought getting it all off my chest would possibly be a good thing.

when ryan and i were first married, we got the cutest, bestest (well, more on that later) little brindle baby that we named baxter.

we got him from a guy ryan worked with: his dog had surprisingly become pregnant after apparently mating with a roaming sicilian dog. i think in part because of the brindle, when he was born he looked like the dad was maybe part boxer. so we nicknamed him baxter, the bastard boxer.

as he grew up, he became taller (although only about knee height) and really skinny. i think he was part italian greyhound - but a little bit bulkier. he loved to run and was SO fast, just like a greyhound. he had those little pointy ears that greyhounds have, but his flopped over when he wasn’t alert.

we lived out in a sicilian villagio on the beach - the homes there were most people’s summer homes, so during the rest of the year, there weren’t very many people around. i think early on, baxter missed out on crucial socialization. we’d have friends over from time to time, and he was ok, but never very well behaved. he barked and whined, and sometimes got pretty snappy with kids. which doesn’t really bother me, but, well, is usually frowned upon by their parents.

now i know, sometimes - a lot of the time - a child’s bad behavior can be blamed on the parents, to an extent. even if the “child” happens to be your dog. i’m sure that’s true in part for us. part of my love for dogs includes an intense spoiling of them. we crate trained baxter and kept him in his own space when we weren’t home, he learned basic commands, he was housebroken (and in a ninja-like way). but as time went on, i began letting him up on the bed, on the couch, under my covers, and i coddled him. i know i did. i held him ALL THE TIME (see above picture). my dog growing up, bailey, would never let me pick her up, she kind of became a little bitch about it.

so i vowed to raise baxter so he would always let me pick him up. and he did.

when baxter was only about ten months, we moved back to the states. he had to be in his crate on the plane for a very long time. that was SO hard for me, and in some ways, although he was fine when we landed, i think it was kind of traumatizing to him. hell, a flight like that is traumatizing to me. we lived with ryan’s parents for a couple months until we closed on our house, then moved in. maybe living in a state of flux for several months further upset him.

i think his temperment also had something to do with the fact that we don’t know who his dad was. if he was a wild italian dog, he was probably mean and scrappy - just like bax turned out. and for an italian, who “breeds” their dogs to bark, guard their homes, and devour anyone who comes close (all things baxter was good at), then a dog like baxter is just what they need.

however, america has laws against dogs like that. laws that made having the bax a slight problem. we lived in a four plex, where neighbors (and sometimes their children) were always close-by. i understand a dog’s initial need to protect himself and his pack - to bark and lunge and the like. but baxter never calmed down from that, he’d never realize someone was ok, that WE were ok with them. we began to live in fear that baxter would bark at/ nip/bite the wrong person and we’d be brought down in this crazy law suit.

so we got a personal dog trainer. she worked with us and with him for many weeks. it was hard to see much improvement - although in all honesty it’s hard for me to be that patient.

we tried to take him to doggy day care so he could get socialized. but after bringing him in there for weeks, JUST to get him comfortable with the front office staff, when we felt he was finally well-enough adjusted to be introduced to the dogs, he didn’t pass the temperment test.

fotunately, he never bit a stranger or a kid - he usually only did that when someone got inside our house (the only person he was ever ok with was the trainer) - which was only our friends. some of them got nipped, never anything super-serious, and they were our friends, so they didn’t sue. still, there was the fear.

then we began to talk about moving to san francisco. it would be hard to live there with ANY dog, let alone baxter. we began looking at our options. i don’t think it’s right to euthanise a dog just because you don’t want it any more, but sometimes i feel like that’s what we did. except i DID want him, i wanted him with all my heart, and i miss him so much.

it wasn’t that simple. i lived a tortured state of not knowing what to do for probably six months. we looked into every option possible - boot camps, rescue missions, but nothing worked out. even the humane society couldn’t take him, because he was aggressive. in some ways i think leaving him there might have been worse - for him and for me. in the end, ryan had to take him to be put down.

it makes me even sadder because i rarely even talk about him, or keep pictures of him at my desk - like i used to - because i really don’t want to answer questions about what happened. i don’t want people to judge me for what i did. deep down i’m afraid that i didn’t do EVERYTHING i could have to help him be a better dog. i think, what if i wasn’t patient enough to enforce what the trainer told us, what if i didn’t discipline him like i should have, what if i didn’t look hard enough for someone to take him. i don’t know if i did the right thing, and that might plague me forever.

i can barely write this without crying now, almost a year later. but then i think that, baxter’s up in heaven and it’ll be like 30 seconds to him before we come up there and join him. or maybe it’ll be 60 years - but he’ll be so busy running as fast as he can and chasing rabbits that he won’t even notice. i know i gave him the best life i could while i could, and he probably has it pretty good right now. probably, this is harder on me than it was on him - i gave him a lot of credit, but i doubt he really understood what was going on. i guess that’s what makes death so hard - in a lot of cases, death can actually improve someone’s life (not to sound morbid) but those left behind have a much heavier task.

i think this credit card company is just laughing in the consumer’s face. and rightly so. the irony of the whole ad campaign dawned on ryan and i as we saw the commercial one night (while watching something online, of course). still, it took me several times of hearing it before i got it. the company’s name is chase, and at first brush you think the card’s name is something akin to visa platinum. chase freedom. on the surface i guess that’s right. but then the tagline is, “your choice, your chase.”

it’s so geniusly ironic to me that a credit card company is tellling you, in essence, to “chase freedom.” how fitting! how many people will spend their time doing just that, because of credit cards. never really being free from that balance. losing more and more of their freedom with every dollar they charge. how many americans lay awake at night wondering how they’re going to pay that next bill. how many people just resign themselves to living an unfulfilled life, wallowing in debt.

i’ve never had a credit card, and grew up a little differently, so i’ve never dealt with this, and ryan and i are living out a plan to make sure we hopefully never have to. but as i’ve gotten older i’ve realized *i’m* more of the exception in this situation. this IS the reality for most people. so it’s your choice. what will YOU chase?

…we have no great war, no great depression…

brad pitt says that in fight club. At the time it was true – I guess it’s sort of true now, thinking of our generation overall. But now we have the great blunder. I’m not sure what else to call the situation in iraq. I’m not even sure how I feel about it. Everything is so mixed. things go round and round in my head concerning this and I don’t really have everything hashed out. That’s not what I want to write about. What’s constantly on my mind, weighing on my conscious is the soldiers fighting over there – the ones that don’t come back … and the ones that come back only a fraction of what they were; physically, mentally, emotionally.

I think our nation has done a good job, whatever the public opinion might be, of still letting our soldiers know we support them. No matter how we personally feel about the conflict there. Still, I feel like I have a little bit different burden for these people –or maybe I don’t, and I’m just glorifying my emotions. Either way, their lives and sacrifice move me so much.

When we were dating, ryan dragged me to see We Were Soldiers – even though he knows I HATE war movies (this was the first and last time he did this). I cried through about half the movie (and I am not a movie crier) and by the end I was sobbing. We had to sit there long after the credits rolled and the lights came back on, so I could get everything under control. I couldn’t believe the way things had ended for so many of these people who gave themselves to defend our country. The line at the end of the movie haunts me to this day: something to the effect of, “these soldiers didn’t return to welcome home parties or parades. For many of them, the closest family they had were the people they fought with.”

How sad (on the nation’s part) and how profound. For whatever reason, I am unusually touched by soldier stories. Maybe it’s growing up in a military family and bleeding red, white and blue. Maybe it’s thinking about the fact that when people started to ship off for this war, the ones going were my age. Now they’re years younger. Maybe I somehow identify with them. Maybe it’s having married (at the time) a military man. Maybe it’s being able to remember exactly where I was when the world trade centers collapsed (something I’m sure will stay with all of us forever), wondering where this was all going and seeing scary thoughts run through my head: what if they send ryan. What if they send my dad (they did). What if I become, like, a candy striper or red cross nurse. . Maybe it’s a little bit of everything.

So probably because of all that, when I went to visit my parents in DC for Christmas, I asked my dad to have his aides set up a visit to walter reed army medical center. As a (extremely) patriotic family, and my dad in the position he’s in, it seemed like the least we could do (since we are some of the few who have access to something like that). Since dad’s people did all the work, I really didn’t think of it after I made the suggestion.

And I didn’t know what to expect. I think in my mind’s eye I saw us in a Shirley Temple-esque situation. In a dorm-style room, with dozens of men, us going from bed to bed, maybe passing out Christmas cards or cookies. (as things developed we were told we couldn’t bring cards – not everyone celebrates Christmas – or cookies – some soldiers were on strict diets.)

When we got there, we basically had a handler – someone from the hospital who had a pre-approved list of people who were ok with us coming to see them (gotta love the military). She briefed us on who we were going to see, and prepared us for the fact that some of the situations could be disturbing. Then I realized what I’d signed us up for, and I wasn’t sure how I would handle seeing a soldier who had a bandaged head because part of his skull had been blown off. Or someone with partial memory loss and no legs. he was only 19 or 20.

We ended up seeing about 3 or 4 people. I think what may have startled them at first was my dad. I’d thought about that at the last minute – I told my mom I didn’t want them to feel intimidated because of him. She brought up a good point though, saying it was probably a good thing for them – and a complement – to see someone in his place make a point of thanking them and spending time with them.

The first person we saw was doing fairly well, his family was there – his little son was laying on the bed with him. he’d lost several of his fingers in an explosion. He was pretty quiet. But the second guy we saw was a surprising burst of positivity. He’d taken his first steps in three months that morning. He’d had a sniper shoot him through his hip, so while his bones were healing he’d been lying down the whole time. When he finally got to the point where he could stand up, he was having to re-train himself to walk. He’d been in the ready reserves, working in the civilian world as some sort of contractor (I think). His wife was there – she was a pilot for delta. They were both extremely personable and positive.

The last guy we saw was the young guy with memory loss and missing both his legs. it was like he HAD the memory, he couldn’t bring it to the surface. He’d tell us about his time in iraq, and get hung up on the exact city they were in. his mom was there and she was also really positive, and patient. Helping him say what he wanted, without getting frustrated and saying it for him.

I know we only saw three people, and that’s barely a fraction of even the people who were in walter reed. But it brought the whole thing even nearer to my heart, gave it a face. I did make it though visiting with each person, and held myself together – thanks in part to my mom’s gift for ultimate diplomacy and chit-chat ability. I did tear up when we got on the elevator. Knowing if our generation had a great war, this was it. Even if it’s not a great war, it’s a great tragedy. In spite of how blessed we are as Americans and no matter who’s side of the debate you’re on, it’s hard to overlook the complete loss of life – and also the partial losses.

Just like I’ll always remember waking up in my loft bed and hearing a phone ring in my crammed room in sigma third long, the furthest dorm on biola’s campus, the morning of 9/11, I pledge to always remember a father without his fingers. A reservist shot by a sniper and learning how to walk. And a teenager without his legs, re-training his memory so he could tell me the name of his girlfriend.