Dopp Juice Archive

First of all, thank you for all the kind notes of support you’ve been sending me over the last month. I’m so grateful for your comfort, inspiration, and encouragement.

I just got back to San Francisco after that three-week emotional roller-coaster. In a nutshell: I got to NH just in time (thanks to you). I held my grandmother as she died. I picked out her casket. I spoke at her funeral. I held the hands of two young cousins as they walked through everything they feared about death. I wrote. I worked. I spent two weeks living with my grandfather, helping him sort through details, clothing, trinkets, sympathy cards, visions for the future, and messy smatterings of sadness. I missed two Queer Open Mics. I left my car parked illegally. I forgot to pay my rent. I attended my cousin’s wedding. I fixed issues on four family computers. I found people. I held space for grief. I invented a new card game. I flew to Colorado and hiked beside the Continental Divide.  I threw a snowball in August.

And the lesson I’m taking home from all this is actually about dancing in China six years ago. It may seem completely unrelated, but it’s not.  Here’s what happened:

The “Dancing in China” Story

In 2002, I spent four months living in China. More than half of that trip was unplanned — I attended a 5-week study abroad program, and then just didn’t get on my plane home. Instead I set up shop in Qingdao, connected with other ex-pats, taught English under the table, and rented an apartment illegally. I spent many nights at a local bar called the Jazz Bar, which was the central hub for foreigners (and Chinese people who wanted to meet foreigners).

The bar was large and had great floor space. A local band named Angel Hair Tobacco played covers of American rock songs three times a week. It was a neighborhood pub set up for drinking, chatting, and playing darts. No one there danced.

My friends and I spent most nights playing cards, where the winner of each game always dared the loser to do something small and silly. After one particular card game, where I came out as the loser, the winner dared me to get up and dance to the next song at the front of bar.  This was a hugely bold dare and my pals laughed at the idea, figuring I would refuse to break the no-dancing taboo.

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I’m doing two things right now that feel a little… strange.  One is that I’m spending days on end by the bedside of my dying grandmother, holding her hand and carefully watching her body shut down.  The other is that I’m writing about it in real-time.  On the Internet.

My grandmother, Sarah “Sally” Dopp (they gave me her name but not her nickname) is going to die soon. The fact that she hasn’t yet is shocking. She’s come really close. Twice.

The first was Friday afternoon, when my mother called me to say they had stopped her chemo and dialysis treatments, and that she was dying. The doctors didn’t think she’d last a few hours, let alone the whole night.  They were in New Hampshire, I was in San Francisco, and the only bookable flights I could find were red-eyes that would get me there at 6am.  I panicked, packed anyway, and shot a message out to twitter:

sarahdopp: Grandma’s dying. I need a flight from SFO or OAK to BOS or MHT *right now*. Cant find anything that lands before 6am tomorrow. Can you? Help

I was flooded with messages. More sites to check, tips on how to approach and talk to airlines at the last minute, offers of frequent flier miles, specific research on possible flights, offers to help raise funds to pay for the expensive last minute ticket, ideas for other airports I could fly into, echoes to broader networks of people, and messages of love and support. A few people even started calling airlines on my behalf, asking which flights were already booked and what my other options were.

A dear friend got to my apartment as soon as she could and drove me to the airport. I spent the ride checking messages and calling people, trying to narrow down what airline would be the most likely solution. For each possible flight someone had found for me, I only had a window of 15-30 minutes to buy the ticket and board the plane.  I ran. I got a direct flight. It landed me in Boston at 10:25pm.

I would not have gotten there on Friday without your help.

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Have you seen this man?

He stole my new Nokia N95 — the one the nice word-of-mouth marketing people sent me for free to play with and chatter about. I was gonna poke it and prod it and take pictures with it and compare it to the Treo and the iPhone and try to break it.

But now I can’t, because a crazy road raging maniac with mad scientist hair* stole it from me.

Fortunately, he’s willing to discuss the matter with me openly on the Internet.

So I give you a new blog: iwantmyN95back.blogspot.com

*The guy who stole my phone’s name is Mark Resch. Coincidentally, he also works in my office. So he’s walking around with the phone in front of me, and not letting me touch it. It’s not very nice.