Tanya Chernov

Well folks, I did it again. I fell off my bike and crashed in a tumble of limb and flesh, and suspect that perhaps it might be time for my biking privileges to be taken away from me.

Last Friday afternoon, I decided to take Mona for a nice, long ride so that she would be tired enough by evening time to leave me alone for several hours. We set out and had a lovely ride, following the tail end of the Burke Gilman trail where it crosses under the Magnolia Bridge and comes to an end at the Sound’s edge. Mona has been such a good girl on these rides that I often leave her off-leash so that she can run alongside me and so that I can use both of my hands for steering and waving to fellow bicyclists. But on Friday Mona seemed extra interested in hunting squirrels so I kept her on the leash and held the leash with my left hand, as I usually do. For those of you who don’t know much about dog behavior, try to think of squirrels as some kind of canine crack—doggies go apeshit for squirrels even though there are consequences for such acts, thereby exemplifying the very definition of addiction.

But that day, it was not the squirrels who would have their victory over us—it was an opossum.  You might remember that it was a possum who defeated me on the bike several weeks ago, when I ran straight into a utility pole. Damn these seemingly non-nocturnal marsupials!

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I love to write about my dad here because it is one of the ways that I keep his memory alive and focused in my everyday life. But it occurred to me last weekend that I have been remiss in my writing about my father because until now, I’ve been doing so without writing about his best friend, Alan.

Dad and Alan were like two mismatched peas in one pod. My dad was short and stocky; Alan was tall and thin. One Jewish, the other Norwegian. One bald, with dark wisps of curls; the other with a thick head of blonde hair. They loved to ski together, to eat spicy food together, ride motorcycles together, and raise their children adjacent to one another. And above all, they loved to compete in the art of racing to be the most frugal man of all time (You’ll have to wait to read A Real Emotional Girl to find out exactly how far they took this competition, but for now just take my word that it was spectacular, and also really embarrassing).

I thought about Alan a lot when my family was in town for my un-wedding weekend. My father should have been there. And Alan should have been there, too. As close as they were in life, so, too were they linked in death. They had each planned on the other being a surrogate husband and father to their families in the event of their premature death, but when those plans disintegrated, they decided to each write the other’s eulogies instead. My father fought his cancer for more than four years and Alan only three months. They died only six weeks apart.

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Yes—that’s right. I had an incident in the fireplace over the weekend. I’m unharmed, as is my house. However, it was nearly otherwise. And all in the name of symbolism. Here’s why:

You all know of the many notches in the “my-life-is-a-comedy-of-errors-belt” thus far, and there are likely to be a lot more in my future. While most of these events, such as the wine bottle scene and the running into a pole on my bike incident are mostly humorous, this particular event was equal parts comical and terrifying.

In an effort to continue purging my current life of all the things that remind me of my past one, my friend, Jenna, and I decided that it would be symbolic and satisfying to burn the few pictures left of my ex-life. Jenna and I kept forgetting to do this every time she came over and so on Saturday, while getting ready to head down to Olympia, I decided to go ahead and do the burning myself.

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Friends: we have another ghost situation. I believe it to be friendly from what I can tell, it still means business.

My good friend, Dana, was over at my house the other day when something a little odd happened. She asked me for a glass of water and when I reached up to the glass cabinet in my kitchen, I opened the doors and said to her, “Whoa. That’s weird.”

My little bunch of bananas had somehow traveled from the wire fruit rack on my counter up to the cabinet directly above it, and was sitting coyly on the edge of the shelf. I had not put the bananas there, and I live alone. I’m pretty sure Mona didn’t do it, since she lacks opposable thumbs and all, and I am certain that no one else was in my house during the time in which the bananas made their way into the cabinet. I don’t sleep walk, do not drink to the point of blacking out while I’m home alone, and therefore came up with only one logical explanation for this strange occurrence: I have a poltergeist in house—a poltergeist who has a thing for produce.

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Here’s the funny thing about grief: it’s a ninja.

Grief likes to enter the room when all is dark and quiet and unassuming. The grief ninja can take many shapes and forms, can bend and contort to fit into the small crevasses of my psyche. Grief ninja will crouch and hide and wait patiently while sweating in all its black garb until it has the perfect moment to lunge: when all other guards are down. Sometimes the ninja strikes with subtlety and grace, and sometimes it comes for me with hoards of shiny weaponry. It makes no difference. All of it hurts.

I’ve known this for years, and yet the ninja catches me by surprise with great frequency. Just when I think I am completely consumed and distracted by other emotions, the grief ninja finds an entry point and squeezes in to join the party. This happened to me last night, actually.

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I’m approaching a giant hurdle this week; Saturday, January 23rd marks a date that would have meant something crazy in another reality, and in this reality will instead initiate a new phase in my life. As I keep heading down this new path, I intend to continue being independent, strong, creative at all possible times, and completely unwilling to settle. In some ways I am eager to have this weekend behind me so that I can truly move forward, but I am also excited to relish the moment and savor every friend and family member who will be standing at my side as Saturday comes and goes.

I was thinking about the upcoming weekend while I walked with Mona through Discovery Park here in Magnolia this morning. The sun was heating my dark hair, my feet, the back and arms of my fleece jacket. The surface of the water below the cliffs we walked across was dark and spotted with white caps, stormy and turbulent but hypnotizing to watch. It was so beautiful in a very Seattle-esque way that I simply had to take a picture and send it to someone I love. Early-morning seaside scenery like that just needs to be shared, right?

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The last three nights, I’ve managed to build and sustain amazing fires. And not just little two-log fires but five-hour, sweating in my t-shirt, set-off-the-smoke-alarm-even-though-the-flue-is-open kind of fires. It’s been easy and cozy and delicious, and in fact all I needed were those small pieces of kindling and some dried-out wood to get my Wisconsin groove back.

And to milk my previously established extended metaphor for all it’s worth, I was also able to simultaneously finish the laborious revisions on my first novel while getting a few pages started for my second. Small pieces, indeed.

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The last time I had an idea for a novel, I had to haul my ass out of bed to write it all down and was aggravated by the missed sleep this sudden surge of creativity caused. Well, I’ve done it again—my creative mind has grabbed hold of my attention, but in a whole new and inconvenient way.

I am deeply interested in and committed to the novel I’ve only just started writing in the last few months, and am certain that it is the perfect premise for my first full-length fiction endeavor. However, a whole new idea for yet another novel popped into my brain over the weekend. This is both good and not good.

Dylan and I went cross-country skiing on Saturday, and left the dogs to snuggle together in the car. Dylan is an incredibly skilled skier in several styles, and I consider myself a pretty adept skier as well. Still, the conditions at Snoqualmie Summit this past weekend were treacherous for us both. Heading down the very first track off the ski lift, we entered a haze of thick, wet, fog so dense we could barely see each other. Dylan turned around and shouted back to me, “Jeez—looks kind of ominous.” And just like that, the idea was born. My protagonist took shape in my mind, and a whole world unlike anything I’ve seen before painted itself around him.

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 There’s been a wood-burning ban in most of the surrounding counties in the greater Seattle area lately, due to the unusually dry winter season. I finally have a fireplace in my new apartment, but I haven’t even been able to use it. Until last night. The fire-ban lifted in my part of town, perhaps just for a few days, so I simply had to take advantage.

During this dry spell in the weather, I’ve had a bit of a dry spell of my own. I’ve been trying to tackle this monstrous revision hurdle the last few days. I’m having the same problem I had with the first book, even though this is a completely different genre and story: how to tell the back-story without resorting to straight-up, boring old exposition. Kelly came up with a brilliant maneuver to accomplish said challenge (as she always does), but I found the maneuver very tricky to actually pull off. Though I know it almost never happens this way, I kept sitting down hoping and expecting to get all those revisions done in one hefty swoop. But every time I sat down to get the whole thing done in one session, I kept failing to type a single word and would walk away from the computer assuming that I’d get it done later. Somehow.

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I had myself a nice and quiet New Year’s Eve this time around. This was largely due to my desire for a symbolic introduction into the New Year, and in small part, to the giant hangover I had from going out the night before. I woke up New Year’s Eve day still slightly drunk from the one glass of white wine, two glasses of red, one tall Stella Artois beer, and two…ugh…lemondrop shots I’d had the night before. I opened my eyes to find crackers on the nightstand table, make-up shmeared all over my face, naked from the waist up, above the covers, with my boots still on. My sweet dog was lying on the floor in the living room, as far away from me as she could get. I found that I’d drunk-dialed a few people and had somehow obtained a tennis ball-sized bruise on my right calf of mysterious origins. Awesome.

In all seriousness, I had made some New Year’s Eve plans with friends, but when 10 pm rolled around and I still hadn’t washed the previous night’s hangover-filth off of myself, I figured it would be better just to stay put, cook something yummy, snuggle with my dog, and zone out to some good Discovery Health Channel shows. After watching a program about ghosts and psychics, I suddenly had an urge I haven’t felt enough lately: I felt like writing a poem.

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