Colorado and Shameless Self-Promotion

I am struggling to write something that is not trite and/or cliché-ridden, if that’s not redundant, about the shooting last week in Aurora, Colorado. It is a struggle I am losing, but maybe after things calm down and some details are sorted out, I can come up with something appropriate. In the meantime, I will do one of the things I (and many others, I’m sure) do best: I will connect myself to it in a superficial way, as a means of trying to understand and/or shift the conversation so it is about me. J So here goes:

I was born in Denver, Colorado; my mama delivered me at Swedish Medical Center where some of the shooting victims were taken for treatment. My folks lived for about a year in Englewood, but moved just a couple of months after I was born. I never went back until six years ago, with Matt. We stayed for a couple of days with someone who had previously attended our church in Washington DC, but then moved out there so his daughter could attend a certain school that was suited to her learning issues. We toured around the city, visited Rocky Mountain National Park, and found and photographed the house my family had lived in 30+ years before:

 Our house/duplex/apartment, on Bannock Street
(first photo is from the back; I have a similar photo of my Mom, about 8 months pregnant with me, sitting out on the sidewalk).

 One of my favorite memories from that leg of the trip is a concert we attended at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, with David Grey and Aimee Mann. I shared a video of “This Year’s Love” on facebook this week, and told everyone that White Ladder was playing when Matt asked me to marry him. When we actually got married, our gifts to the wedding party were copies of a CD with some of our favorite songs as a couple, and both artists were featured. At the concert, we ended up sitting next to another couple from the DC area, and exchanged perfectly pleasant chitchat. The woman was pretty pregnant, can’t remember how close she was to her due date but the reason I mention it is, of course we didn’t know this would happen when we were sitting with her, but on a later stop on the trip (San Francisco), Simon was conceived. So the whole trip will always be special to us, and remembering that I talked to a nice pregnant lady, right before I got pregnant, was a small but smile-inducing extra.

(The March 2005 date on these photos is completely wrong - we were there in August of 2006)

Red Rocks Amphitheater

(site of the concert)

                                                      

Rocky Mountain National Park

                                         

Me at "Swedish," my place of birth, 31 years later.

                                              
                                                 Art Museum? Or Library? Can't remember ...

 A sad postscript: a couple of days before Matt was ordained in June, we were supposed to attend a dinner at a church nearby the Annual Conference; we’d gone to the same one four years ago, when he was commissioned as a probationary minister. I drove all the way to the church, almost 1.5 hours from home, but ended up basically turning right around and driving back. This was mostly because my miscarriage had been a couple of weeks before, and the prospect of making small talk with a bunch of strangers was more than I could take. I went in with Matt and right away he saw some people he knew and (naturally) wanted to sit with them. I persuaded him to sit elsewhere and we found a table of our own, and I explained why I felt so overwhelmed. He understood, but felt obligated to attend the dinner even if I didn’t; totally understandable. So about 2 seconds after I’d decided I might me able to do it, some chica came over and said hi to Matt, and pretty much stuck her arm in my face, reaching across me to shake his hand. Not that I would ever be that crazy about that happening, but this night it sent me over the edge. I got Matt to walk me out to the car. What does this have to do with the rest, you may be asking? I had listened to White Ladder on the way to the church, and thinking about the proposal and the pregnant lady at the concert and me getting pregnant with Simon right after that? Way too much for me to handle. Matt made me promise to not listen to the CD on the way home.

This may also be one reason I’m having difficulty putting my sadness over the Colorado shootings into words; I’ve written and felt and cried so much over the past two months that my capacity to worry about other people’s suffering is somewhat blunted at present. I am doing okay, finally getting some sleep and not automatically bursting into tears at every thought about it, but it’ll still be my main issue for awhile.

I didn’t share this in the “Pajamas” entry but I think I can now: the first ultrasound we had, in the emergency room, showed that two eggs had been fertilized and implanted, and formed yolk sacs, but then one of them never really developed at all, and the other developed only a little and then stopped. At my follow-up visit with the doc, I verified this understanding (what I said was, this is what I’ve been thinking so before I spend the rest of my life thinking it, let me make sure it’s accurate) and he simply nodded his head and confirmed, “it was a twin pregnancy.” Loss of twins, plus our due date of Christmas Eve – I don’t know that either of these makes the situation exponentially worse, because I’d probably about as sad if it were “just” one baby, and the due date were November 19^th or something. But it certainly doesn’t make it any less sad.