Today you are nine years old. In person years, you now qualify for AARP, twenty-five cent coffees at McDonalds, and 10% off Tuesdays at Ross Dress for Less.

At least, we think you are nine years old; you came to the shelter in October of 2004 and your intake form said you were three and half, so when we adopted you I picked a birthday for you. I have always thought you were older though, but maybe that is just because you are such an old, wise soul.

I started volunteering at the shelter where I met you as an atonement. Getting two dogs with my ex was my idea, and I was wracked with guilt that I couldn’t take them when we divorced. After months of volunteering eight hours a week, one day I came into the shelter for my shift, and there you were, needing rescue.

It is difficult to put words to what you have done for me. As I often say to you and to anyone who will listen, there is no love like dog love. You made Scott into a dog person. You brought me out of existential despair (many times) just by curling up next to me at night. You came to work with me every day for two years even though it was exhausting for you and the loud noises from the sign shop next door were terrifying. The vendors I worked with knew you by your bark over the phone. And speaking of the phone, it’s trivial, but you are a remarkably accurate form of caller ID. I trust that when the phone rings and I don’t hear you hooting, there is no need for me to answer. A hoot from you means that some one important is calling, whether it is my mom, another family member, or even a doctor’s office calling back with results. You always know.

You’ve been with me through three moves across two states and the District of Columbia, a couple of jobs, and some pretty bad haircuts. I don’t know what your life was like before we met. From what you’ve told me the only things I know are that there were a lot of loud noises, outside was scary, and men were not to be trusted. It has been such a joy to see you come out of your little dog shell over the past five years.

Sweetheart, Miss Jamie Lou, I hope you like your new collar and the treats and the bones, and all the extra lovin’ today. You are the dog love of my life. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to rescue you, but I think you know as well as I do that you rescued me, too.

Love,
Lauren

Max and Jamie on the beach, September 2006.

Naptime, January 2005.

Sleepy wiener, March 2010.

*I’m a crazy dog person. I write letters to my dogs.

Felicia was frail physically, but overall one of the healthier residents, more inclined to hang out with the staff than with the her fellow “inmates,” as my grandfather would call them. I liked her a lot. I went home that night and told my future ex-husband that I loved him, and decided that I needed to tell Felicia that I liked her, as soon as possible. On Thursday and Friday I saw her once or twice in passing, but I was busy and didn’t have time to sit and talk. Over the weekend I made a promise to myself to tell Felicia that I liked her, no matter what was happening, on Monday.

On Monday morning, a resident assistant told me that Felicia died on Sunday. She’d had either a heart attack or stroke, and collapsed. There was a lot of blood.

I can’t remember what I thought when I heard that Felicia died, but I do remember thinking I should write to her son and tell him about the conversation I had with his mother. I thought about writing to him for weeks, months, even years afterward. I still remember his name and his wife’s name, and where they lived.

This is one of those memories, one of those tangled up memories that often gets caught in the thoughts of life day by day, like an old packet of salt that turns up every time I reach into the junk drawer, no matter what I’m looking for. Here, it’s turned up when I was trying to organize my ideas about how meditating, craving, aversion, and craigslist personals are all related.

Really, none of these ideas I have, or my ability to articulate them, are more important than love. LOVE. I’ll say it directly to as many people as I can -LOVE! YOU!- and when I’m not shouting it from the rooftops (because all those people I love also need to sleep) I can say it in what I do. Each word that I write and the actions that I take are explorations of the world I love, every pontification a love poem to the world and my experience in it.

May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be loving, kind, and compassionate.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings be loving, kind, and compassionate.

Instead, I am going to write about myself and my shoes and my feet.

My feet have been a vanity for me for a long, long time. Even when I was at my least girly, I loved wearing sandals and having neatly painted toenails, and open-toed shoes in the office were a violation of professional dress that I committed with willful joy. I have nice feet, and as long as I take care of them, they look good, even when the rest of me does not.

It’s not just my feet, though. Feet in general are awesome. Anyone who has been to my classes a few times has probably heard me riff on feet during shoulderstand. It is good to look up to your feet sometimes. They do so much for you, root you to the earth, take you everywhere you need to go, even while stuffed into uncomfortable shoes. Look at them, get to know them, love them, so sayeth Lauren, the champion of the foot.

First blog shoe pic (I think). 5/18/09.

Over the past year, as this blog moved from being a journal that just happened to be public to something consciously created for public consumption, I started paying closer attention to patterns in my posts, and realized that I write about shoes and feet (and fiction and frolic and food) an awful lot, and thus the tagline was born. I also started minding other widely read blogs, and learned to take advantage of the platform not just as a verbal medium, but as a visual medium, too. So, instead of just writing about shoes a lot, there were pictures of shoes with my feet in them, which didn’t bother me a bit, because, hey, my feet look good.

This was the beginning of developing an online persona, which really, truly, is just me, in blog form. I don’t know if I became the blog or the blog became me, but a year later, here I am, in all of my shoeyness.

Along the way a funny thing happened to my vanity. The more I looked at my feet and the more readers I brought on who also looked at my feet, the more I started to notice the flaws. Where once I would snap a picture or two of a pair of sandals, crop it and post, I now take quite a few, because I see every little asymmetry, every ridge in the nail polish, the way that the third and fourth toes on my right foot press down at a funny angle when I stand, causing a divot at the knuckle (Are toe joints knuckles? Toe knuckles?), how if I lean a certain way to get the picture my little toes start to turn sideways, I notice all of it. A couple of weeks ago I caught myself liking my feet less and for the first time ever, wishing that this thing or the other about them were different.

I’m over it, but it was a wake up call about vanity. The criticism really comes to life around the things are actually the most beautiful and the most unique, the most me. I am this way about my hair, my nose, my writing… it took me twenty years to figure out that that the thing in my writing that I found weird and awkward was really the “voice” that always got high praise.

I know this isn’t just me. I invite my readers who are rolling into middle age with me to take a quick scan of the features -physical or otherwise- that stoke the most self-criticism and treat them with some kindness. They have carried you through the world this far. Treat yourself with some kindness, please. Love you. I do.

All that said, for those of you who read this far, a peripherally shoe-related loose end: back in January when I won the smut contest, I promised I would post a picture of myself in the little schoolgirl skirt I won. It is not that I have been holding out, I just forgot, and picking up last Misbehaving Tuesday’s saddle shoes today reminded me. So, here it is, right in time for post #500:

This love, a roughly knitted blanket
tangles between my bare feet
as I lay awake and
unravel like a lopsided stitch.

(Rumi wuz here.)

[Edited to add: since I was just asked, I guess I should clarify that I wrote this. Rumi was just there to help out.]

As I was walking back to the light rail stop after teaching, I realized just how much I miss living in a city that is pedestrian friendly and/or appointed with good public transportation. I lived within walking distance of great stuff in college in Boston and at Penn State, and then in DC, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Minneapolis was the best for walking – the whole downtown is connected by catwalks, eight miles of them, in fact. The cool thing about cities with major weather is that they know they have major weather, and plan accordingly. From our apartment, I had only to walk a few hundred feet before getting to a building that connected with the catwalks, and then I could get anywhere downtown. (For anyone wondering, downtown Minneapolis does feature a statue of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her beret in the air*, but the house used in the exterior shots on the show is in St. Paul.) Boston has it together as far as public transportation goes, which is a very good thing. One weekend when my parents drove up for a visit, they got lost in the city, and stopped to ask directions from a man who looked into their car and told them, “You can’t get there from here.”

This reminds me of the great accent exchange. I am convinced that Boston and Pittsburgh have some kind of R exchange going. All of the Rs that are left out of words in the greater Boston metro area are randomly inserted into the middle of words in Pittsburgh. One might start driving a ca in Back Bay, and finish their trip by warshing it in Squirrel Hill. I wonder where all of Baltimore’s mid-word Ts have gone.

So, walking, light rail: As I walked from Midtown back to the light rail, down streets I’ve driven hundreds of times, I noticed the stuff that only gets noticed while walking. When I lived in DC I knew every single store, restaurant, and office on 18th and 19th between Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan because I walked them twice a day. I miss that kind of detailed knowing of a place.

This reminds me of my favorite story about my friend Joel. One night just a month or two into my friend Joel’s relationship with his wife, Lauren, they were having dinner at a rooftop cafe on 18th street.

The aforementioned friend Joel and me at the senior prom.

Joel was sitting across from Lauren facing the street, when he saw me walk by on my way home from work. Always socially exuberant, he leaped up from his chair, started waving his arms and yelling, “Lauren! Lauren!” Lauren -his date- was terrified, but had calmed down a bit by the time I made it upstairs to say hello. It was a fun summer; Joel and I spent a lot of time together as it was the first (and only) time we lived in the same city since high school, and he was throroughly smitten by Lauren, the other Lauren, not me. Consequently, many of our conversation started with him making a statement like, “Last night I was [blank] with Lauren, the other Lauren, not you…” which was helpful, but I am pretty sure that in spite of how much I drank that summer I would have known if I was blanking with my friend Joel.

I have been kind of scattered today. Is it obvious?

Anyway, light rail, right. I love public transportation. I love walking. And I love that once the weather is milder I can even walk to the light rail station near my house and make a nice morning of it. I also love that there is a spot on the sidewalk on Preston Street where some one has spray painted “I LOVE YOU” in bright orange, and I really should have taken a picture of it today so I could post it. Oh well, Monday I’ll get it. Until then, still, love is all around.

*My mom delayed going to the hospital while she was in labor with me because she wanted to see the end of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Lest anyone claim I am impatient, I gave her plenty of time.

Sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes we have a winter that is so freaking cold for Baltimore that my usual dreaded temperature range -the forties- feels downright balmy. Sometimes, on a winter morning the whole neighborhood smells like nutmeg from the McCormick plant, even though the winds usually aren’t right for that until summer. And then I have an idle afternoon and I get out for a walk, and at just the right moment I decide that I want to lean against a tree, and the tree has been in a sunbeam for a while and the bark is warm to my touch, and as I pause the sun is strong enough to heat the back of my neck like it’s the apex of a summer afternoon, and then I decide to send some reiki out across the world and whether it reaches its target or not, my hands stay warm enough from it for the rest of the walk that I don’t need to put them back in my pockets. Sometimes in the middle of January, I get an hour of July in the palms of my hands.

Sometimes, I get lucky.

Also, sometimes I get an eBook about getting lucky from Sommer Marsden for free. Lucky, lucky me!

2009: Year of the Foot
First chakra issues abounded. There were money issues of increasing obnoxiousness all year, and expensive problems in the house. Tribe was out of whack, too: Scott’s father moved into a nursing home, and his brother divorced, and our relationship had lots of uncomfortable lows and terrific highs, instead of its usual even keel. My father didn’t speak to me for five months, and working with my mother became increasingly stressful.

On the positive first chakra side, this was the year that Baltimore really felt like home. It has always felt like home to me, but this year I felt the roots; now it is a place where I often run into people I know, and I don’t mind it a bit. The studios feel like more of a community to me now that I am teaching there. I see familiar faces almost every day. Physically, I rediscovered the joy of yin, femininity, and toenail polish, and the enduring thrall and empowerment of a fabulous pair of heels.

That said, the year in review:

Accomplishments

• became a yoga teacher
• wrote consistently for the first time since college
• wrote poetry for the first time since college
• finished at least four short stories
• applied, and got into graduate school
• blogged consistently about things no one cares about
• did not move or change jobs!
• took classes 2-4 for a web design certificate
• became the PR director for the Maryland Writers’ Association
• got stronger and more fit

Highlights

• iPhone
• read the entire Harry Potter series
• watched every episode of Buffy (thanks, Tanya!)
• CSA
• got a tattoo
• attended TEDxMidatlantic
• stopped drinking alcohol
• met my new baby cousin
• acquired some really fabulous shoes, like these and these and these and these and these, and these (which aren’t really shoes, but so what, they’re awesome).
• had lots and lots of moments absolutely mindblowing, heartbreaking euphoria

Lowlights

• that weird stress / mystery stomach thing that lasted for five months
• my hair looks weird in all of the pictures from the teacher training
• Scott’s father’s illness
• really lousy birthday

And for 2010…

Here is what is going to happen, in the abstract:

• love and be loved passionately
• give generously and receive abundance
• carry with me the mindblowing, heartbreaking euphoria and excitement about life from the past year, only more, more, more
• become smarter and sharper as I hone my craft
• see more of the good will in the world
• have a body that is increasingly healthy and strong
• joy love joy

And here is what is on deck for 2010, in the concrete:

• finish the 200 and 500 hour trainings (still need to write the paper for the 200)
• finish the web design certificate
• complete at least two graduate classes
• financial self-sufficience, by fulfilling means
• learn a crazy new physical skill – trapeze, acro-yoga, something like that
• travel solo at least once
• get to a beach
• wear sandals whenever possible

Yes! So, hi 2010. I’m ready for what’s next. More, more, more.

2. I keep getting these reminders to ask for what I want, so I have been doing some asking lately, lots actually, about money, career, and all sorts of other stuff. Even Rumi says so:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

When I was looking for work after we moved back to Maryland in 2005, I remember my criteria: doesn’t compromise my ethics, and doesn’t require pantyhose. Behold, two years at Pangea, a vegan store where the dress code was, “Don’t wear a t-shirt that says ‘fuck you’ or anything if you’re out dealing with customers.” That was what Phil and Shari told me during my interview. They also asked me why I wanted to work there, but not in the normal job interview way. It was more, “What the hell is wrong with you that you want to work here?” Sigh. The universe really outdid itself on that one. If it weren’t so damn far away, I would still be working there, listening to Christmastime in Hell.

This time: lucrative, fulfilling, allows me to keep up with my other interests, and permits me to dress like a freak if I so choose.

3. Oh my god, Christmas. I am over it. As a kid I thought it would be neat to celebrate Christmas because it was such a big deal, and the presents were so much better. My friends would take home these big hauls of clothes and goodies and electronics, all the while envying my eight nights of presents, as if it were eight nights the scale of Christmas. The reality was that for me and most of my ilk, there was a big gift on the first night (like a sweater) and then seven nights of key chains and gelt. Then, on Christmas, when all my friends were getting new wardrobes and boom boxes, I was sitting around in sweatpants eating chinese food and watching rented movies with my parents.

I’ve been through at least a solid ten or eleven years of Christmas now, and with each year I miss Jewish Christmas more and more. Christmas feels weird to me. It is not my holiday, it doesn’t have any significance for me, and lately it seems like a big, expensive, consumerist pain in the butt. Depressing, too, this year, with everything going on in Scott’s family. We will be spending part of Christmas day visiting Scott’s father in the nursing home, which is depressing for us, but geometrically, exponentially, infinitely more depressing for Scott’s father, who is sixty-seven and can’t ever go home again. Actually, it is not depressing. It is horrifying.

So, I keep doing this, because it is important to Scott’s family, and I am a good person, and it is the right thing to do, and I am a supportive partner, and it is just one day out of the year for crying out loud, and I couldn’t live with myself otherwise, and it is my choice, and once everyone gets together we DO have a good time. And, I get sweaters. Still, part of me really wants to be at home celebrating my way, eating lo mein and watching one Woody Allen movie after another. (I would pick: Love and Death, Sleeper, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, Deconstructing Harry, and Annie Hall.)

Also, I may have just spent an hour and a half watching clips of Woody Allen movies.

*One of those cybex things. Five years of consistent gym going and I had no idea what those were called until I looked it up just a moment ago.