write me well

Tag: family

  • Baseball caps but also, kindness

    Half a post a month is not my finest average. Don’t take it personally, 2025. I’ve had worse statistics, and this is most certainly a case of it’s not you, it’s me. In fact, if it makes you feel any better, there’s a notebook sitting somewhere in my house that has, at most, been visited three times this year. (Future Kathy: stop trying to make stone paper notebooks happen. The advertisements are slick but the paper is not. You will always hate writing in them.) 

    Even though it is impossible from a mathematical perspective for there to be fewer days of December before Christmas from one year to the next, this year the impossible feels possible. We’re as many days into the month as we are away from Christmas, and most of me feels like it’s still September.  

    This is for several reasons: aside from the atmospheric river we had this week, it has been a very mild fall/winter, so more than a few of our neighborhood trees still boast a thick mix of orange and red leaves. I’m also spending more time outside in our neighborhood, so it feels like a bigger deal than it probably is. Then we got our Christmas tree pretty early (in November!), but it’s a potted tree that we belatedly realized was dead dry, and we ended up needing to undecorate it and leave it outside in the rain for a few days. It’s been back inside since Tuesday, I think? But I haven’t really felt the Christmas spirit inspire me to redress it, so it is still naked, just two feet of very off-putting pokey needles, sitting by its lonesome in the window.  

    I guess that’s not exactly several things, but it’s enough. That and the universe being all universe-y have conspired to make it feel like Christmas is anything but a week from this Thursday.  

    Ignoring the fact that technically, it is not the season of winter, I have to say that winter as it feels right now is the most ridiculous thing. This is my third winter in the PNW, and my (pauses to count) ninth (NINTH!) one on this latitude, if you count all of the time I spent in the UK. When we moved here, I didn’t think that the short days would be all that much of an issue because I’d done it before, for years at a time, and been just fine. 

    What I did not reckon with was the longitude. In this particular part of the world: 1. The sun is not a £50 flight away. 2. Even if it was, you don’t get enough paid time off to buy the flight, take the flight, and go enjoy it. In short, it makes handling the dark days and the lack of sun a helluva lot more challenging.  

    The goal this winter is to be nicer to myself about being annoyed by that. It’s okay to do less and achieve less when all your body wants to do is…nothing. The progress gained over the past eight months of running is not undone by the fact that I’m only squeezing in two-ish runs a week right now. Because really: two-ish runs? In this lighting?? That is something to be celebrated! (Plus, brief flex, those runs are now up to a cool four miles each. Still feeling very Who Is She but I love it.)  

    In other silly and shouldn’t matter news but feels, well, very big? Is that for the first time in almost twenty years, I am growing out my hair. This is primarily an exercise to see just how white my gray hair will get, and it is going the best it has ever gone. I have made it through the most painful phases, the ones that do not bear describing, but I’m now stuck in the endless un-pony-tail-able bob phase that requires no fewer than eight bobby pins to be on hand at any given time (unless a hat is present). Because my hair is curly, it feels like all it has done for the past two months is grow outward and upward – every direction but the one desired. I have discovered in myself a love of baseball caps that I never thought possible (we’re all about the impossible in this post, I guess) and it makes me feel absurdly glam, the source of which I’m choosing to trace back to Princess Diana.  

    So really, I have achieved lots of things this year. Two very specific things that have plagued me as impossible for many years, and a handful of other things. What I’m trying to tell myself in this glummy winter vibe is that resolutions in the plural are rather insane things. It is absolutely okay, and to be expected, to really only achieve a thing or two. I have many years ahead of me in which to achieve more things. Who’s to say I don’t continue this habit, and each year tackle 1-2 new resolutions? Multiply that out across a lifetime and that is SO MANY THINGS! We should all be nicer to ourselves. We should not take it personally when we don’t make everything happen on the timeline we envisioned, en masse and concurrently and as if just getting through to Friday is not, some weeks, a big-ass achievement. 

    Bringing this full circle, much of this is coming from my sensitivity to the fact that I have not, indeed, written very much at all this year. I truly thought I’d found a project earlier in the spring but it has since died a death, and no other writing projects have come to take its place. And if I am being honest, I really wanted that to be one of my Achievements this year. Whereas growing out my hair or starting to run are exciting new things that I can add to my identity roster, writing has been so long a front-row feature of that list that it’s becoming really hard to not take my lack of writing personally.  

    But there is so much time to fix that. It’ll come back around. It’s not you, writing, it’s me. I’ll figure it out. I’m being kinder to myself and celebrating the small wins, like right now: when I dropped by the library to return a few books, and instead of walking right back out, I sat down at a computer, tabled my purse and my plans to grocery shop, and for the first time since university spent time writing at a library, writing this post.  

  • Moody Moods

    Almost exactly a year ago, I rediscovered The Moody Blues. I randomly remembered their rather delightful song Lovely To See You, decided to use it for a tiny reel I made for the journey downtown to get my last tattoo, then promptly forgot about them again.

    Something in the late summer of this year brought them back from my periphery, and unsatisfied with the various Best of The Moody Blues collections I could find online, I created a nearly two-hour-long playlist titled The Moody Blues Per My Childhood. It has been my constant soundtrack these past several months and, the way often only music (and particularly, music with uniquely nostalgic ties) can, it has brought me a disproportionate amount of joy.

    As with many things in my life, this stems from an obsession of my mom’s (shout out to Karen King). The Moody Blues were a deeply seeded staple of my early childhood, linked inexorably with memories of the condo featured in our home movies and my mom’s Laura Ashley dresses and Princess Diana haircut. When I asked her how she got into the band in the early 90’s, which was hardly their heyday, she said it was through my Aunt Joan (shout out to Aunt Joan).

    So on my next call to my aunt, I asked her what caused the sudden love for Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Graeme Edge, and Ray Thomas. She shared that at the time of the onset, she was living in Vancouver and studying for a masters. She was also, as it happens, incurably homesick. Home for my aunt wasn’t California – having left for Denver before I was born, she was missing the Rocky Mountain State. So when, in 1992, The Moody Blues issued a recording of their live performance at Red Rocks, it was for her like a postcard from home. A fantastic live album in its own right, it cemented The Moody Blues as one of her, and eventually my mom’s, favorites.

    (Prior to this, she hilariously shared with me, her only knowledge of them had been Nights in White Satin, which she hated, because for a group of friends she spent time with in her early 20’s, it was the song the boys in the group would play on repeat whenever they had a girl in their room. A musical sock on the door, if you will, played ad nauseum. I die.)

    If nothing else, I am a total sucker for nostalgia, the weepy whims of missing something, the feeling of needing a person or, better yet, a place or a time. Finding out that my own family’s ties to this underrated progressive rock band were rooted in exactly that – UGH, the full circle swell of joy it brought me! They are my favorite brand of feelings: the emotional equivalent of the French word souvenir – meaning memory – being adopted into the English language. Give it to me ALL. DAY.

    This all felt very appropriate for September, which was a month of family things. After an unintentional two-year hiatus from Sacramento, I spent the last week of September staying with my family and having the best time. Sushi, vintage shopping, and laughter with my sister and her girlfriend, ice cream sundaes with one niece, an afternoon of coloring and make-believe with the other, visiting the renaissance faire for the first time in a decade with my other sister, and many mornings of tea and chats with my mom. A perfect moment for The Moody Blues Per My Childhood, if I do say so myself.

    Prior to September, the entire summer had been spent fully entrenched in car things: Aaron started teaching me how to drive a stick shift, I went to more car shows than I can count, I planned scenic drives for my work. Cars on cars on cars. Then there was my trip home, and now, it’s fall! Lovely, leafy, tea-filled fall. Yesterday was a crisp autumn day and we had shepherd’s pie for dinner. This morning was cozy and spent on the sofa before heading off for coffee and errands. I have every plan to bake homemade ginger nut biscuits this afternoon, and tomorrow – currently looking to be all blue skies and chilly sunshine – we’re going to head out to Snoqualmie Falls. In a world that is feeling increasingly insane, it’s the little things. And sometimes, those things are listening to a silly little playlist while the leaves turn.  

  • “November!”

    About a week ahead of my birthday this year, I had a sudden, urgent need to hear my dad’s voice.  

    The twenty-seventh of last July marked five years since I’ve heard it in real time – technically, five years and ten days, because our last phone call was a little under two weeks before he died. I talked to my dad fairly regularly, took pictures with him less so, and to my eternal regret, took even fewer videos of him. So few, in fact, that I have none. Not one video with or of my dad from the last fifteen years.  

    Most people have a slew of home movies to consult in moments like these, but in that moment this past February, I had no such luck. Not only did I live about a thousand miles away from the pile of our family’s home movies, but the home movies themselves had for several years presented their own challenge. Sometime in the early 2000’s, my sister had the forethought to transfer the aging VHS tapes they were recorded on to DVDs. She spent meticulous weeks one summer watching every single home movie, since you had to play them to transfer them, pressing all the right buttons to get them safely burned onto this significantly more resilient format. Birthdays, backyard play sessions, a random recording of my dad’s then-commute home through Newport Beach…she watched and recorded them all.  

    Thinking the home movies were now safe in their fancy new format, none of us really clocked what happened to the original VHS tapes. The last time I can remember seeing them, they were in neat rows inside of one of those faux wood, stackable, slide-open tape holders that everyone had in the nineties. During the disbursement of my family’s shared possessions in 2011 when we lost our house (shout out to the economic crisis of 2008), who knows where they went. Their unknown location was no big deal right up until the next time we tried to watch the DVDs, and every single one of them failed to work.  

    Our first thought was that the movies had been recorded incorrectly. My sister took one of the discs to a specialist, who told her, very matter of fact and with absolutely no awareness that he was crushing our collective family history, that none of the DVDs would work in any DVD player outside of the one that had created them, and there was nothing we could do about it. Since we couldn’t even figure out where the originals had ended up, I will let you guess whether we had any remote idea of where that DVD player had ended up either. (We did not.)  

    Despite all the DVDs being deemed to be in a useless vegetative state, when I moved to Washington last year, my sister gave me the disc containing my first birthday, and I promised I would do my best to find a way to make it work. Life happened, and I promptly forgot about it until that moment last February when, more than anything, I wanted to hear my dad’s voice again. 

    So, with the sense of urgency of someone that knows there is only one way to make something happen, and you are that way, I decided to get my first birthday DVD out of its prolonged coma.  

    I did a fair bit of Google searching for a data retrieval specialist to assist. I found a few, but none that sounded remotely confident that they’d be able to solve my issue. The last one I spoke to admitted he could try, thought it was unlikely it would work, and would then feel bad charging me for the failed attempt. Because the experts didn’t seem to have any faith in their own ability to solve my problem, I thought I would try and solve it myself.  

    The first and foremost mystery to solve was exactly what was wrong with the DVD, and therein was my biggest challenge. If you simply Google “my DVD won’t play”, that problem is simply too vague, and you’ll get nowhere fast. Most forums will assume your disc has physical damage, but I was absolutely sure that wasn’t the case here because they were all pristine. Others would suggest that your disc actually never had any data recorded on it in the first place, but I knew that wasn’t true either: you could see the varying degrees to which data had been physically stored on each disc by flipping them over and taking a careful look at where the iridescent digital surface started and stopped.  

    In my many, many searches, the most promising website I found was Pacific Video Repair, an amazing company conveniently located in Washington state, that specialized in data recovery from damaged VHS tapes. On their FAQ page, a somewhat vague answer about problematic DVD files made it sound like they might be familiar with my conundrum. Hopeful for the first time in months, I sent them an email asking if they’d be able to help me even though what I needed was outside the regular scope of their work.  

    Pacific Video Repair got back to me within 24 hours and the answer, unfortunately, was a hard no. But they did say in their response that they were, in fact, very familiar with the issue I was describing, and that it sounded like what had happened was that the video files had not been successfully finalized when they were originally recorded on the disc, leaving them only playable on the DVD player they were recorded on.  

    Now that is a level of specificity a girl can Google! 

    With this added descriptor to my problem, it was not long before I found this incredibly random six-year-old video on YouTube, made by someone who doesn’t even seem to specialize in this kind of content, with over 1,600 likes and 340 comments from highly emotional people JUST LIKE ME, desperately looking for a way to rescue their old DVDs. And those comments, my friends, were euphoric and filled with profuse thanks – because the method described in this guy’s sixteen-minute video fucking worked.  

    It took two excruciating days for me to find this out for myself, because I had to locate a working computer with both a DVD drive and access to the internet, and holy shit is that harder to do in 2024 than I would’ve thought. But I ordered a new power cord for the Sony Vaio my parents had bought me back in college, spent over an hour getting it turned on and updated to 2024 standards, and then followed TheMaxAcceleration’s step-by-step directions.  

    Like the hundreds of commentors on that video, within twenty minutes, I was absolutely bawling, my nearly-thirty-five-year-old self watching my one-year-old self seated in the middle of our old condo, both of us listening to my dad chat aimlessly with my grandpa and great uncle. Hearing my dad call me “sweetie pie”, something he had not done for years and I had long forgotten he ever did, was worth every minute of the struggle.  

    When my sister visited in July she brought the rest of the DVDs to be rescued, and although life happened again and it’s taken me ages to do so, I’ve now successfully recovered all but three of them. While what I had been most excited about at the onset of this adventure was to unlock the home videos I remembered most – ones with my sisters and I being in turns obnoxious and adorable towards one another, or ones with my extended family ceremoniously gathered in folding chairs as one of us opens presents on a birthday – my favorite, by far, is one of my parents before any of us were born.  

    My mom is heavily pregnant with my oldest sister, and my dad, in anticipation of her arrival, has just purchased the video camera that would come to film every one of our home movies. The entire video is just clips of the two of them hanging out with their cat in their messy 1985 apartment. They are so relaxed, so happy, and so silly. My dad sounds just like I remember, and my mom’s voice is equally unchanged. In a moment of quiet she suggests making a cheeseburger casserole for dinner, to which my dad says “that sounds like a great idea”, and then it cuts to my mom holding the camera, filming first my dad and then herself in the mirrored sliding door of a nearby closet. Shortly after that, it cuts again, the camera now back in my dad’s hands, and for no more than five seconds, there’s my mom, age thirty, hanging out on the sofa, smiling up at my dad. Another cut and a shot of her walking through the hallway towards the kitchen; another and she’s picked up a freshly baked layer of cake and taking a whiff, then holding up a jar of frosting and saying “frosting”, pointing at the calendar and saying “November!”…because I guess with the novelty of a brand-new video camera, what else is there to say?  

    My oldest sister’s birthday was yesterday, which means that footage was being filmed just over thirty-nine years ago today. I don’t really have anything more profound to share than all of that; to put to paper this new memory of unlocking old memories, only to find ones that don’t even really belong to me, but matter that much more because of it.  

  • Hash Browns

    One of my longest held beliefs is that nothing says I Have Today Day Off like going out for breakfast. Whether we’re talking breakfast burritos, pancakes, omelets, or hash browns. Country potatoes, biscuits and gravy, bacon and eggs, or French toast. I truly think there is no way to thoroughly and joyfully announce to the world that the day ahead is yours and yours alone than hitting up a greasy breakfast joint. It is the taste of freedom.

    Today I had the day off, and so when I suddenly became absurdly hungry while wondering what to do with myself for the rest of the morning – like, unbearably hungry – I took it as a sign. It was coming on 10:30am and my body knew that I could not waste this opportunity of a Day Off by not treating myself to a diner-style plate of breakfast food. Nothing else would do, so off I went.

    Maybe it’s because I had no choice for a large part of my adulthood, but another long-held belief of mine is that going out to eat by yourself is an experience that everyone should enjoy from time to time. I lost count well over a decade ago how many meals I’ve gone out for on my own, and being alone at those meals is something I’ve never regretted or resented. But for some reason, today, I had this completely unbidden wish I wasn’t alone. After ordering my biscuits and gravy with a side of hash browns, drinking my coffee in my own little diner booth, I suddenly pictured my dad sat across from me, and imagined that this breakfast was a long-awaited catchup after not seeing each other for just over five years.

    This does happen from time to time, as I’m sure it does with anyone who has lost a loved one. I’ll just be bopping along and then I will be absolutely zapped with the sensation that my dad is nearby. The first time was while working at the Anthropologie in Spitalfields – to this day I have to remind myself that the vivid image I have of my dad seated on a bench outside the store, one arm stretched over its back, watching passer-by and waiting for me to finish work, is not real.

    I can think of at least three not-so-random reasons that this happened today. One, just over a week ago marked the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death, and it was the first since he died that came and went without me even realizing. Two, this morning, like so many mornings, I happened to look at my phone at 11:11am and thought of him. And three, I have a distinct memory of going out to breakfast at IHOP with my dad sometime during 2012, seated in a booth very similar to the one I found myself in this morning. I remember writing a Tumblr post about it, because as I added salt to my hash browns that morning and caught up with my dad – who in 2012 was really having a tough time – I thought that no matter how difficult and shitty things had become, I wouldn’t trade him for any other dad.

    So, I spent my breakfast wondering at all the things I would say to my dad if we were, in fact, having breakfast together for the first time in five years for some unknown reason that was interesting and mysterious rather than sad. There would be SO much to tell him.

    Nope, I don’t live in London anymore. Moved back in 2021 in the midst of a pandemic that you were very lucky to miss experiencing first-hand. I left retail! Yes, I know you were always proud of me no matter what I did, but I like to think you’d be extra proud of me for finally achieving that goal. I’ve moved about five more times, moving is still the worst. And I got married! Yes, to that boy you hated when we were in high school, but I promise he has become a very responsible adult that has more in common with Grandpa King than you ever would have guessed was possible, and it makes me so happy that you knew him. I wish I could’ve been more supportive of you when you needed it, but man that’s easier to see in retrospect than it was in the moment. I love you and I miss you very much, but I’m also glad you didn’t have to endure the insanity that has been (and continues to be) the world since you left it in mid-2019. Thank you for buying a ridiculously fancy video camera in 1985 and recording so many random childhood moments, but also – would it have killed you to get out from behind the camera more often! It’s okay though, hearing your voice is still the best. (Even if what you’re saying is an exasperated “See, now that’s the problem!”)

    What a breakfast that would’ve been. Don’t get me wrong: my biscuits and gravy and (extra crispy) hashbrowns were delicious, and I devoured them in less than fifteen minutes. I still have the rest of the day off and the humidity has calmed down, so it is a glorious and breezy seventy-five degrees. Life could be a whole lot worse right now and my grief has mostly receded and turned into a nostalgia that is more warm than sad. But getting to share this morning with my dad? That would’ve been a pretty great way to spend a day that was mine and mine alone, and I think I’m just going to pretend I got to do it anyway. (You ordered the chicken fried steak – the “Big Chicken” version. Neither of us knew what it meant but it seemed like the right thing to do.)

  • So Much Blue

    Things I love: sunshine, tacos, the ocean, and great driving.

    Things we experienced on our four day vacation across the California coast: all of the above.

    This trip was originally planned so that we could visit Aaron’s family for Father’s Day, which we did and had a fantastic time doing. But after we booked the flights and reserved that Sunday for family, we decided that we were deserving of a bit of a treat vacation on either end of it. So one by one, we booked extra plans to really make it an escape: one night beachside in Cambria, two nights in Aptos within walking distance of the Cement Boat (or, at least, what’s left of it), and a bright red mustang to get us both of those places in between visiting friends and family in a very fun way.

    May was a pretty garbage weather month here in Washington, so we were very much in need of sunshine. California, ever faithful, delivered. Aside from an atrocious hour spent in airport security last Saturday morning, we had four near-perfect days of road-tripping, hangouts, and laughter. We ate tacos and burritos and chips and salsa, we played mini-golf on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, we watched surfers catching overhead waves off of West Cliff. We saw elephant seals and moo cows and horses, all living their best lives, and countless rolling golden hillsides up and down the coast. After our night in Cambria, which I had never visited before, I left with a much fuller appreciation of why Aaron is so eager to return there – if I had spent my last year of college getting to do a daily run along Moonstone Beach, I too would measure every other place I lived against that almost unreachable standard.

    What always strikes me about time spent in the sun is how blue it is. Sunshine, in my mind, is a bright and blazing yellow. When I try to illustrate it with words I reach for butter colors, bursts of citrusy lemon, maybe something akin to mustard if we’re talking sunshine in the fall. But in photographs, and in life, I really feel like sunshine turns out to be very blue. Sunshine is a cloudless azure sky, a rolling turqouise wave, cold clear splashes in a cobalt snowmelt river. And after the soggiest of Mays, we spent four days savoring an almost intoxicating amount of it, whether exploring Morro Bay at sunset, killing time and grabbing iced coffee in Morgan Hill, or driving up Highway 1 near Ragged Point with the windows down.

    We are making a concerted effort to be better at things like taking vacation because, in a truly American turn, it is not something we excel at prioritizing. But a mere four days spent on the road together, surrounded by so much blue, was a wonderful reminder that even simple escapes can go a long way.