Mel Magazine's Woman of the Year: Crazy Aunt Purl

It's a few days before New Year's 2007, and I am at home, miserable, with a dreadful, snotty headcold. It happens. It's the first one I have gotten since moving to California (six months into living in Indiana, and I had already had three), and so I figure I am lucky.

I am in bed, using a colleague's laptop, a box of tissues close at hand. I am contemplating a cup of tea. Beside me, my lovably stupid cat Austen is dozing. In the hallway, our one heater is hissing away, making the apartment lovely and warm. Outside, it is remarkably chilly (56 degrees!); don't ever let anyone tell you that California weather is all warm and sunny, all the time. We have seasons here. Kind of.

The holidays are almost over, thank god. I managed to escape with surprisingly few tears, and only a little introspection...just enough for me to be reasonable, not depressed. That, in and of itself, is a bloody Christmas miracle. So, not much sulking, or mooning about, or reading melancholy poetry. Just a few busy, sunny days, and then it's over.

But now I am thinking a little. I am thinking about people, and our relationships with each other, and how we interact. I think we all want to make a difference in someone's life. We all want to somehow justify our sometimes stupid, consuming, wasteful existences on this overcrowded planet, and matter to someone, alter someone's life to the point that they are irrevocably changed (and for the better) for having encountered us. It's noble and idealistic, and we don't like to admit it, but there you go. It's there. Try to deny it. Bet you can't.

I haven't had the chance to alter someone's existence with my own yet, but I have had the luck, the privilege, the honor of someone altering my life, As in, someone altered the course of my existence, gave me the courage to look inside myself and dig out willpower and pluck, and resourcefulness that I didn't even know I possessed. And the really, really whacky thing is that this person who has altered me so deeply is a woman that I have never even met. She is an Internets personality, an (in)famous blogger, with a fanbase of probably thousands. I bet she has altered more than just my life.

Anyway. Her name is Laurie, but most of us know her as Crazy Aunt Purl. She's a plucky, sassy Southern thing, with lots of good cheer and high spirits and the ability to laugh at herself. She's humble and creative and here's the thing, the real kicker: she's got her normal hang-ups and issues and fears, but she is one of the most courageous people that I know, because at the end of the day bravery is not the absence of fear, but rather doing what you have to do despite the fear. She started blogging when her shithead husband left her unexpectedly to recover his creativity and grow a goatee, and proceeded to screw her over and invoke all sorts of bad luck.

Crazy Aunt Purl entered my life one cold, grey, miserable Saturday morning back in February, when I was lying on my futon and being miserable and mopey and dysfunctional. It was not a good time for me, people. I am not really proud of myself, but hey, we all fall every now and then. And if we are lucky, someone comes along and helps us back onto our feet.

My sister Sarah was the one who did that. She would call me every weekend, and prattle on about this and that, tell me about her jobs, and her various crafty projects, and would try not to set me off on one of my crying jags, which I am sure were getting very tiresome to the people around me. Sarah was a saint, pure and simple. And then, on that Saturday morning, she mentioned Crazy Aunt Purl to me. "She writes a weblog," Sarah told me. "She's this really funny woman. She talks a lot about knitting, but she's been going through something, and I think you would relate. She's really funny, and honest, and she has a lot of insights. You should give her a read."
I promised I would, and then re-focused on my miserable plight, and promptly started crying again. Why do something fun on a Saturday when you can wallow in self-pity instead? Wallow wallow.

Well, as it turned out, I did pop by Crazy Aunt Purl's blog that evening, after I picked a horrible fight with my ex and ruined the day for both of us. I was feeling very tender and bruised, and it felt like I was just barely holding onto my last shred of sanity, the one little bit of survival instinct that kept me functional enough to go to work and classes and apply for jobs. I knew if I let go of that one little scrap of sanity, it would be all over. The booby-hatch for Mel.

Anyway, I went to her blog. In her first entry, the most recent, that I read, she was talking about how some random feller at her neighborhood Trader Joe's had hit on her, talked to her, took her by surprise. She didn't know how to handle it: "I have no idea how to handle myself now. Single is hard after married. I want to be good at it, but I'm awkward and scared. Like I'm just one step behind everyone else. Stuck in time or molasses."

Her honesty struck me right away. I scrolled down, read more of her entries. A little bit further on: "You fail and pick up the pieces. You love with abandon, honest love. You're hurt, but you're not bitter. Bitter implies a life without truth, and you live out loud. It's harder and yet easier than you ever imagined. You keep on keeping on."

I stayed up until two Sunday morning, reading through her archives. Maybe under normal circumstances (like, say, now) that would make me a stalker. I don't think so. Her blog is like the best kind of novel--you finish it, and then you pick it back up and start reading it all over again, right from the beginning. There's amazing characters, profound truths, a real eye for detail. It makes you laugh and cry and think, and it inspires you.

I went to bed (okay, futon) that night, still sad and cold and sore. But there was now a still, quiet core in me, some little patch of my soul where more sanity, solid and not easily shaken, was creeping back in, reclaiming my life and existence for myself, taking it away from the sad events of the past month. The victim in me began to wither away that night. After all, here was a woman, an actual real-life person, who had been through so much more than I. She had been married for almost a decade, and the man she thought she knew and loved screwed her over very very badly indeed. But she was recovering, handling herself with grace and good humor and no small amount of dignity, tempered with honest humility. If she could do it, then by god, so could I. There was hope. A light at the end of the tunnel.

So, my life has expanded this past year to take in the stories of Laurie and her cast of whacky characters: her totalitarian cat Soba, her loyal friend Jen, her understanding parents, her somewhat Kentucky-fied neighbors, Crackhead Bob and Drunken Julie. And who can forget her enigmatic gardener, Francisco, and the various other nut-jobs that she encounters in her daily life. It's just a matter of time until she starts blogging about some demented fans that just have to meet her in real life, and maybe it's not a sign of crazy. (Do they have restraining orders in California?) And let's not ignore Mr. X, the initial impetus and inspiration for Laurie's spiritual journey of Living Out Loud. I guess, in a way, even he has altered my existence. Thank you, Mr. X. You suck, and your goatee probably has earwigs in it, or at least a little bit of grey, but you have had your uses.

And a few days after I had read through all of Crazy Aunt Purl's blog, I was holding my head up a little higher. I wasn't hunched over, shuffling from place to place with a shell-shocked expression on my face. There was determination now, and a little bit of sass. I noticed how Crazy Aunt Purl lived in Southern California--what a wretched, yet mythical place it seemed!!--and she appeared to be quite happy and human. She seemed genuine and lived a creative life there...so maybe if she could live and thrive in a place like that, so could I. I had noticed a lot of job postings in California; maybe I was foolish for not applying for them. Maybe I should give it a shot...

And that was how I got to be here, both physically and spiritually. It is because of Laurie, Crazy Aunt Purl, that I regained my sanity, my will, my sense of hope. It was because of her that I had the courage to take a job in California, a state I had never visited before this year, and packed up the covered wagon and moved West and got a couple of kitties and made a life for myself far different from what I had envisioned a year prior. It's okay. It's not what I had planned--in its own way, it's a lot better. You keep on keeping on, and sometimes life sucks, and sometimes it's great. But either way, it's life.

Crazy Aunt Purl, the woman of the year. She has changed my life.