Let the rain kiss you / Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops / Let the rain sing you a lullaby / The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk / The rain makes running pools in the gutter / The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain. ~ Langston Hughes
It is an utterly beautiful day to be working at home, one of those that makes me grateful to be a freelancer, grateful to be sitting at my desk in the window, watching the drenching rains, seeing the wind blowing the drops across standing puddles, seeing the lights turn on in apartments across the street as the skies darken. I met a favorite client this morning at my corner Starbucks and proceeded to dump my giant cappuccino all over the table, on our papers, and in my lap. She was kind and gracious as she grabbed napkins and helped me clean up, assuring me with a gentle lie that this happens to her all the time. I came home during one of the brief breaks in the rain, peeled off my coffee-drenched jeans, and pulled on flannel pajamas. Made a big mug of green tea and lightly toasted a sesame bagel. Pulled out my chair, opened my laptop, and took a deep breath. Selected the perfect music: Berliner Messe, by Arvo Pärt, performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra.
After weeks of not sleeping, I took a pill last night that made me sleep deeply, all night long. It’s not something I can do regularly — the drug is not addictive, but it has dreadful side-effects like weight gain and the potential for tardive dyskinesia — but getting one good night of sleep is enough, for now. Happy Friday, y’all. I hope it’s as peaceful and lovely where you are as it is at my desk.
Here’s a different piece by Arvo Pärt, also perfect for a rainy day:
pursuing the practice of writing
I’ve begun doing writing exercises, and thought I might collect them here. I’ll tag them all “prompt” so I can organize them together. Each prompt is very specific and places a word count limit; this one required me to write a first-person story of 600 words, limiting my use of the first-person pronoun to three instances. Try it — it’s very difficult!! The stories I write may or may not be true of me; my efforts will be directed toward fiction. When I read this prompt, I had the immediate idea of writing about a woman glancing at a mirror before meeting a semi-stranger, someone she knew to some degree of intimacy, and the whole idea fell into place very quickly. So here goes, prompt number one:
* * *
Glancing in the mirror I see my messy hair but there is no time to worry about it – we are meeting at 1pm and there are just a few minutes to spare. He was often snappy over email and seems like an irritable guy, so being on time feels important today. Luckily there is a parking spot by the door, and he’s waiting at the bar with a slight smile; I’m 5 minutes early, and hope we’ll get off to a good start after all.
“You’re late – I’ve been waiting 10 minutes,” he says as we stand face-to-face. We both lean in and give each other a slight hug of uncertain familiarity; we’ve been chatting on email for the last three weeks, since we first connected on the dating website, but this is our first meeting so it’s odd. Familiarity with a stranger, with the instant recognition of differences between our conjured images and the real person — the flesh and bone contrast to the smoke and mirrors of virtual connection. As we take our table and the waitress hands us menus, he leans forward and says, “Can I make fun of you for living here?” He stares for a minute and then turns his attention to the menu. Long minutes pass in silence, and the waitress finally takes our orders – we share the appetizers and each order a light salad and a glass of Pinot Gris.
“My daughter lives in Riverdale with her mother,” he says, “and that at least makes sense – it’s a suburb of the city. But here, why would anyone live here?” His expression is intense and focused, and he doesn’t seem to realize how rude his comments are, because his eyes hold mine with curiosity and interest, but he doesn’t smile. “Well, when the job in Taylor fell apart, this opportunity to make a change to the field of marketing seemed too good to pass up, and the company is based here in Mahwah. It didn’t make sense to live in New York City and commute up here every day. Anyway, it’s not a bad place to live, and the city is nearby.” After a pause, he responds, “Still, it seems like a stupid place to live.”
The appetizers arrive, and our conversation slows as we pick at the food, trying to find our way into a comfortable conversation. He is a writer and asks good questions, and the conversation soon shifts into darker places, older stories, wounds and scars. He listens to my stories with tears in his eyes, and his voice cracks with emotion when he responds. He lingers and is hesitant to shift too quickly into his own stories, but eventually he does. Our salads arrive and we don’t even pick up our forks; the waitress interrupts to ask if we need anything, and we don’t answer her, or even pause the conversation. The restaurant empties; waiters are placing small candles on the tables. We talk, clutching hands across the table, and our untouched salad plates are removed. He tells a wrenching story of addiction, of the absolute loss of himself, of throwing his syringe kit into a sewer because he’d never go back for it, and then going back for it. His eyes are haunted, his voice shifts to a whisper – not from shame and privacy, but from the remembered horror. We know each other in a very particular way, now, and fall in love.
He pays the bill and we walk to our cars, reluctant to leave each other. He touches my skin and we kiss, for a long time.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’m not sleeping at all these days; I wake up 30-45 minutes after I go to sleep and that’s it, I’m awake all night long. So I’m exhausted and starting to feel especially awful. Plus I have a lot of work, more than I can humanly do, so I’m stressed about that. I’m kind of not doing that well right now, but I think it’ll pass and it’ll certainly improve if I can ever get some sleep. Because of all this, I’m not posting much right now — no good brain power, nothing much to say. But this:
In the subway yesterday, a woman was standing on the train with a dog in a little carrier, between her feet. Everyone around her was grinning at the dog, and chatting with the woman. Another woman caught my eye, and she wasn’t exactly grinning, though she was looking at the dog. There was something else in her expression, something kind of razor-like. I don’t know how else to describe it, that’ll have to do. She was Vietnamese, so I wondered if she was having different thoughts about that dog.
And sitting next to me was this hulky scowling man. Huge muscles, the kind I don’t like, angry looking expression on his craggy face, menace radiating off him. He stared at people, first him, then her, then me, then that one. Long squid stares, unblinking mean expressions. Creepy. And then a man got on the train with a small boy and a toddler in a stroller. The angry man next to me completely lit up — he started grinning and talking goo-goo talk to the little toddler. He leaned forward and was yakking away, tapping the toddler’s little forearm as he goo-gooed. He asked the dad how old the baby was, and he just couldn’t stop grinning. It was the most incredible transformation I’d ever seen. He was just silly about that baby. People so often, as Whitman told us, contain multitudes.
Dinner with a friend tonight, hallelujah!
don’t go dissin a Texan. That ain’t a smart move.
someone came to my blog with this dumb search!!
In case you can’t see that for whatever reason, the search that led an Android user to my site this morning was “never marry a texas women.” First, dumb searcher, I’ll go ahead and do what I never do, and that’s to deliver a verbal smackdown for your grammar. Women is plural, so you don’t use the article “a.” Dumb person. But then I already knew you weren’t too bright because you’re trying to find information about never marrying a Texas woman. We Texas women are fine, I have to say, and include this list:
- Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long, the ‘mother’ of Texas
- Emily West Morgan, the famous “Yellow Rose of Texas” who helped win the Texas Revolution
- Oveta Culp Hobby, Colonel Women’s Army Corps, first secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare
- Barbara Jordan, the magnificent
- Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the Supreme Court
- Ann Richards, Governor of Texas and all-round DAME OF THE FIRST ORDER can I get a hell yeah
- Cecile Richards, Ann’s daughter and President of Planned Parenthood and a dame in her own right
- Melinda Gates, philanthropist deluxe
- Ima Hogg (such an unfortunate name, must’ve given her character!), philanthropist deluxe
- Lady Bird, of course, planter of many a tree, bush, and shrub
- Lots of models, including Jerry Hall, Angie Harmon, and Kelly Emberg (and 15 Miss America winners, one of whom became Miss Universe, suck that Googler!)
- Debbie Allen, dancer/actress; Kathy Baker, actress; Barbara Barrie, actress; Joan Blondell, actress; Carol Burnett for god’s sake; Joan Crawford oh yes she was; don’t forget Farrah Fawcett; Jennifer Love Hewitt, actress; Mary Martin, and Margo Martindale, actresses; Ann Miller, what a hoofer; good god the actresses go on and on and on
- and don’t get me started on musicians: Erykah Badu, Marcia Ball, Miss Vikki Carr, Nanci Griffith, JANIS F-in JOPLIN, Beyonce, it just goes on and on
- Mary Kay Herself, queen of the pink Cadillac and businesswoman extraordinaire; writers Sarah Bird, Sandra Cisneros, Patricia Highsmith, Katherine Anne Porter, and Naomi Shihab Nye; journalist Linda Ellerbee, and God luv’er Molly Ivins, co-DAME with Ann Richards; Liz Smith, columnist and broad
- Care about science and medicine? We’ve got Angela Belcher, MIT professor and MacArthur Fellow; Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, designed the first production plant for penicillin; and Karen Uhlenbeck, mathematician and National Medal of Science (women in traditionally male fields, notice!)
Of course we have some infamous women too, include Bonnie (as with Clyde), Belle Starr, and Andrea Yates. (head hanging). We can’t win them all.
Here’s a page of famous women in Texas history, here’s a summary of who we are (dammit!) as Texas women, but I leave you with the quintessential Texas Woman, Ms. Ann Richards. I’ve posted this video before, but it’s a good one. “Make that basket, bird legs!” Dang, I miss that woman. She was one of a kind. So whoever you were, searching for “never marry a Texas women,” perhaps you’re doing us a big favor. Nyah.
filling the void with LIFE!
My experiment in going off-line is fascinating; instead of feeling like a hardship, it seems to be taking on a life of its own, bleeding out into the rest of my life, unwilling to stay corralled on Saturdays. For the second or third Saturday in a row — can’t remember now — I did not go on the internet yesterday except for pointed and specific reasons. I opened an email from Marnie, who sent me images of her most recent page spreads, and I responded. That’s just fine, I’m not against using it for specific reasons like that. The difference is that I go on, get/do the thing, and get off. I don’t just check facebook first. I get off.
I spent yesterday, snowy cold yesterday, sitting in my sunny window writing. Writing requires research, so I used the internet for that specific purpose: what was the population of Sinton, TX in 1946? How many banks were there downtown, and how were they arranged? What do sorghum fields look like, exactly? Also, I made deviled eggs for my husband, I watched a movie with him, I knitted. The day was leisurely, long, and satisfying. My mind feels more focused, even though my sleep is currently so screwed up I’m exhausted. (Last night was typical: asleep at midnight, up at 1, trying to go back to sleep until 2, up in the living room until 3:30, back to bed trying to get to sleep until 5:30, up at 6:30.) Exhausted scatterbrainyness aside, my mind is less cluttered.
And so I extend this experiment another day — an internet-free weekend. It didn’t really take that long to break the craving, the checking-Google-reader craving, the running-through-facebook craving. Meh. Everyone’s still there, doing what they do. The makers are making and blogging about it. The foodies are cooking or eating and blogging about it. The critics are critiquing, the writers are writing, the funny are being funny. They’ll still be doing it tomorrow, I’m sure. For today, I have things of my own to do. I think I’ll make a big French press pot of coffee and get back to my desk in the sunny window. There’s little snow left on the ground, but it’s a bright sunny day, reflecting off the snow remnants. Happy Sunday y’all, whatever you plan to do today.
I hope that you’ll remember / even when you’re feeling blue / that it’s you I like / It’s you yourself / It’s you I like.
I learned how to be a human being by watching Fred Rogers, and that’s no exaggeration. Seriously. It’s not hyperbolic, it’s not overblown, it’s the honest truth. When I was a young mother — just 23 years old, unformed, nearly terminally wounded, and staggering because my father had committed suicide four months before my first child was born — I had no idea what to do with my colicky screaming baby. I just didn’t know what to do. I operated with a list of don’ts, born of my teeth-grinding will to be different from my parents: don’t smack, don’t throw, don’t punch, don’t pinch, don’t drop, don’t burn, don’t molest, don’t shake, don’t scream. And you know, those are pretty good rules! But they don’t tell you what to do. I didn’t know what “loving parent” looked like….. at all. I didn’t know what patience looked like, what comfort looked like, what tenderness looked like. I didn’t know how it felt to receive those things, and I didn’t know how to give them.
What I had was determination and a very strong will, and that’s pretty good. You can go a long way with that. But one day, Katie had been screaming for hours, I was exhausted by having so little sleep, and we’d had to leave the library because she was screaming and I couldn’t quiet her. I was furious, and bursting, and I scared myself. She was in a frontpack, held close to my chest, and I put my hands around her and shook with the effort to contain my frustration. I didn’t hurt her at all, but hours later my own arm muscles ached from holding in all those ‘nots.’ And I was scared. How much longer could I do this, relying just on muscle and will? She was just a baby, just weeks old, and I was already at this stage?! I was more than scared, I was absolutely terrified.
So we got home from the library and I put her in her crib and collapsed on the couch, exhausted and drained and blank with fear. Mindlessly, I turned on the television, which was always tuned to PBS, for Sesame Street. It was an old tv, and the image came up slowly, starting from a point in the center of the screen. My eyes watched the image emerge, and it was a gentle man whose face filled the center of the screen, and he was looking directly into the camera and speaking with careful intent, directly to me. Directly to me, Lori, shaking on the couch. He said, “I like you just the way you are.”
I was not stupid, I didn’t really think he was mysteriously speaking just to me, but I’ve got to tell you — I’d never heard those words together in one sentence. I gaped. My attention was drawn to him so much that I no longer heard Katie crying in her crib. It just became Mister Rogers and me, and he sang
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair–
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now, (no, not me right now, Mr Rogers — I’m so angry and scared!)
The way down deep inside you– (deep inside me? you know there is something else inside me?)
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys–
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like–
Every part of you,
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself,
It’s you, it’s you I like.
I was crying before he finished the second line. I certainly didn’t feel likable that day — not that I ever felt likable — but I listened to him. Before that episode was over, I got a very good idea: I’d act like him. I’d talk like him. I could watch him, and pay attention to what he said and how he said it, and just do that. Katie was an infant, she wouldn’t know I was acting, and my hope was that one day it wouldn’t be an act. One day, if I acted like him long enough, maybe I’d just know how to do it.
Years later, I wrote him a letter telling him what he meant to me, what he did for me and for the lives of my children, how his message and his life truly transformed my own, and how grateful I was for him. I told him a bit about my background and what I struggled with, and I told him how I tried to act like him. He wrote me a beautiful letter in return, thanking me and telling me how much I must mean to the people in my life. He told me he was proud of me (this makes me cry). I have the letter, it’s one of my most cherished things. A few years later, he was on Nightline (or Dateline, one of those Thursday night programs) and I didn’t see it, but friends of mine called me and said that he talked about a letter he received from a young mother…and the details were mine. There may well be dozens of people who wrote him, with the same details, but I like to think he was talking about me.
I’m not at all shy to tell people that Mister Rogers is my hero, that I am who I am directly because of him, that he helped me become a human being. I tolerate no smack being talked about him. EVER. I went to a talk once, by one of his producers, who said that the majority of his audience is actually elderly shut-ins. And think about it: it was often him, looking directly into the camera, speaking lovingly to the viewer. Who doesn’t need that. When he died, everyone who’d ever known me called to tell me, and to comfort me. I cried a lot, and can still feel the ache of him not being around.
Marnie just posted this on my facebook wall, and if you watch it, I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t bring a tear to your eye at a minimum. Everything about him was just so wonderful. If I can ever be half the kind human being he was, I’ll be deeply satisfied.
“Cracked Open in Dunkin’ Donuts” — a Lori story
Brevity in the face of way too much work, y’all (not complaining….exactly….) — but I read this Tom Stoppard piece this afternoon (from Arcadia) and it stopped me cold with its beauty:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Isn’t that just lovely, and true?
i do love my city. it's heartbreakingly beautiful.
And today I had one of those experiences that are not at all uncommon for me. It’s bitterly cold, and I was about 20 minutes early for an appointment. There was no Starbucks in the neighborhood (what???! No Starbucks in the neighborhood???), but there was a Dunkin Donuts, so I stopped in and bought a small coffee so I could justify sitting at their little table in the window. I was very cold, and the coffee smelled so good, and I sat in the sunlight, smelling the coffee, and looking out the window at the very bright light bouncing off the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. I saw the people curled into commas, hunched inside their thick coats against the cold, walking so fast down the sidewalk. And then it hit me, how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the constructed world is, how beautiful the natural world is, how touching it is that we all walk past each other with our struggles and joys, how beautiful winter is, against the other seasons, and I started crying. I felt cracked open by the world, as I often do. I thought “Cracked open in Dunkin Donuts” and that sounded like some kind of nutty short story. And I laughed.
wish you were coming with me! it’s a grand old time at poetry group. seriously.
Even though it’s cold and rainy, and I have to walk 9 block and might be wet by the time I get there — raincoat and umbrella notwithstanding — I’m so excited because tonight’s poetry group. YAY! The others in group write original poetry, so I’m the lone holdout who doesn’t write but who thoroughly loves poetry, with a deep and abiding passion. I thought you might like the poems I’m taking to tonight’s meeting; there won’t be time for both, so I’ll probably choose the Milosz:
Artificer (fyi, pronounced ar-TI-fi-cer, meaning someone who makes things)
by Czeslaw Milosz
Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky
and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.
Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,
but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.
He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children’s cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.
He wonders at his brother’s skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,
flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.
Wilno, 1931
* * * * *
Bogland
By Seamus Heaney
for T. P. Flanagan
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening–
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encrouching horizon,
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.
happiness / how’d you get to be happiness / how’d you get to find love, real love / love, love, love.
#1 — It’s been a dry winter so far, and an unseasonably warm one, so I’m not complaining when I say bitterly that it’s cold. (Ha, a Tom Swiftie for ya!) But it is cold; we have the oven going and the oven door open, and two of the stove burners going, trying to get warm. We’re both wearing lots of layers, and layers of socks, and blankets are at the ready. Good thing there’s a knitta in the house.
#2 — So yeah. I had to frog Marnie’s sweater. But the good news is that those two little goofs I’d made in the cables, at the bottom, no longer exist! I am so familiar with the sweater now, it’s going smoothly and error-free. I’ve just finished the first pattern repeat, so I’m getting there. Slowly. I thought about knitting something else — a little amuse-bouche, an aperitif, a taste-bud-changer thing — to cleanse my palate of the frogging tragedy, but then I decided the only way to deal with my sorrow was to cast on and get going.
#3 — Do you know about Read It Later? It’s an app that works in browsers and on every platform, I think. Basically, it sits in my browser toolbar as a little bookmarklet, so when I hit something long that warrants more time and attention than I have at the moment, I click to “read it later.” Then, on my Droid, there’s the little Read It Later icon, filled with all those fascinating pieces I wanted to read. Since the few sites I reliably look at in my Google Reader (when I’m in a rush) collect long-form pieces, I tend to have a little collection. They’re the perfect size for short subway trips, standing in lines, doctor’s waiting rooms, etc., so finding this Read It Later deal has been a boon.
#4 — I had a little facebook messenger chat with Will (my son) this morning. We arranged to meet mid-afternoon Thursday for a late lunch; Thursday night I’m going to the opera with my friends to see Faust, and it occurred to me that he might want to go (since he said something like “jealous!” when I told him). So I went ahead and invited him, and he said, “I could, but Faust is so 2011, and I’ve made a pact with myself to keep looking forward.” He just cracks me up like no one else can. Then he posted this Goldfrapp song on my facebook wall: SO ME. I feel like this so often.
#5 — isn’t the 21st century cool? Just look back at this post — reading things from the internet on my phone and having virtual chats with my son who lives a few blocks away, who then publicly shares a video of a song that reminds him of me. That’s all pretty wild, if you remember to notice.
#6 — good news (very good news) behind the scenes chez Thrums. I’m very happy and filled with exuberant hope, which is a nice kind of hope to have. The other kind, the grim little feathery one you clutch when things are dark, that’s a good one to have too. Of course. But I’ve got the sunny exuberant one, and I’m enjoying it.
step away from the computer, it’s good for you (after you read this, of course) 
visit rightbrainterrain.com to learn about this symbol
I often laugh at myself over the concept of fear — oh, the things I will be afraid of. Heights, I don’t laugh at myself for that one, it has evolutionary origins and is designed to keep me alive, even if I overextend it. But reading Moby Dick? REALLY? I was “afraid” to read Moby Dick, which is just silly. And I was “afraid” of spending a day in my normal life without going online. Of course I’ve spent days in my adult life without going online: there was the day I spent on Machu Picchu; the days I spent floating through the Mekong Delta; the days in Enkhuisen, The Netherlands; a day on a small island off the coast of Croatia. The obvious deal there is that I couldn’t get online, and I was on vacation.
So yesterday was my second normal day spent without going online. My original plans had been to ban the Internet and knitting. I decided to allow knitting, but only after I’d done a bunch of other stuff, only in the evening after dinner.
The goal of this exercise wasn’t to wield a Draconian whip — “Thou must NOT!” — but rather to help me move away from compulsive rut-dwelling and out into the other things I really long to do. So particular exceptions were allowed, to focus on the spirit of the exercise. I needed to share some good news with friends and family, so I opened Outlook, wrote that email, and logged off.
This progress report has two parts: the feelings of it, and what I did. I was worried that I’d feel like a junkie in need of a fix, only able to think about getting online. Consumed by wondering who was saying what on facebook. Consumed with certainty that great stuff was flying through my Google Reader. Curious whether my statcounter would reveal another visit from my assumed stalker. But that’s not what I felt, at all. Those kinds of thoughts would intrude now and then, especially when I was doing something quiet, like reading; it felt like an ADD brain, trying to make me jump from this thing! to that thing! what about the other! But it was easy enough to quiet by returning my attention to what I was doing. One thing the experience helped me see is that my constant multitasking is not my friend. It’s good to be able to do it when you need to, but I do too much of it, and nearly all the time. I’ll knit and watch a movie and read a book on my Kindle and answer emails and texts on my phone, all at the same time. No wonder I feel like I’m drowning in noise. So if nothing else, yesterday’s digital break helped me learn that lesson that I can implement every single day. The bottom line: It wasn’t a horrible feeling, willfully staying offline all day.
The ‘what did I do’ answer is satisfying. I had an unexpected early breakfast with a friend while my husband slept, then a nice conversation on the phone with Marnie (we talk every Saturday, a highlight of my week). My husband got some news that absorbed us for a couple of hours. I read — cover to cover — the current edition of The New York Review of Books. Made a cup of masala chai, pulled back my hair, put on my fleece jacket and wrapped my legs in a handknit blanket (it’s very cold here this weekend), sat at the table with the huge magazine spread out in front of me, and read every word (including a personal ad at the back from a woman who’s looking to date a man 75-80 who is ambulatory. Maybe she should set her sights a little higher?)
I did a writing exercise from my favorite prompt book, The 3am Epiphany. I worked on it for about an hour and a half and am pleased with it; I started making notes for the next chapter of the book I’m writing, trying to work out something I’m not sure about yet.
At this point my husband was making our dinner — chili — and it smelled so good, and made our apartment so warm and cozy, so I felt like watching a movie and knitting. After I recommended The Guard (a wonderful movie, y’all! watch it!), Marnie recommended The Trip, a Steve Coogan movie about two guys on a road trip through beautiful northern England, eating at foodie restaurants (it’s available streaming on Netflix). So I settled in with Steve Coogan and Marnie’s sweater (which — by the way — I had to frog completely, and start all over. Don’t ask, it’s too painful. OK: I had the side seam off on one side, by a lot.), and a cup of green tea. It’s a hilarious movie, and worth watching if only for their competing Michael Caine impressions.
I definitely got more done yesterday — and did a wider variety of things — than I usually do, when I’m plugged into my computer all day. I’m going to keep doing this, taking Saturday internet breaks, and sprinkle in smaller breaks throughout the week. Just like reading Moby Dick, it’s not really as hard as I’d imagined it to be. If you feel similarly scatterbrained and info-overloaded, it’s worth a try! [edit: i just found this BBC article on the ways in which "Internet addiction" rewires your brain....this is a topic I could rant on, the too-easy naming of things as "addiction," but it's an interesting and pertinent read!]
Stay warm y’all -
L
lucky me, having such wonderful women in my life
I have these two amazing friends, women whose presence in my life adds so much I can’t begin to describe it accurately. They’re very different (from each other and from me) in some ways, but more importantly, we share a lot in common. We love words and books and poetry. We love talking about things that matter. We love sharing our lives with each other. We are eager to help each other when opportunities arise. We admire each other. We find each other beautiful. In different ways, both have been lifesavers for me, and in one way, I was a lifesaver for one of them, once. We had dinner together last night, and this morning one of my friends said something in an email that got me thinking. To give you the context, I’ll tell you a little bit about them, and I’ll use pseudonyms for them because they didn’t necessarily sign up for this public deal. They actually have exotic and beautiful names, but I’m picking simple names here:
Jane is a prolific and beautiful writer — a writer of novels and poems, and decades of journalism. She’s exceptionally smart and insightful. She’s my mentor in saying what you want to say (whether she knows it or not), because she does that. As a southern woman, I nearly choke to death on “nice,” and live with a clenched jaw from not saying what I want to say, so I admire Jane tremendously for this part of who she is. She’s curious, and her training as a reporter means she’s going to ask you questions, and keep asking questions, until she understands. She’s deeply emotional, and easily touched, and grapples with the deep issues of life in a way that resonates with me. Whenever I see her, we talk talk talk and run out of time before we run out of things to say. I love her.
Mary worked in publishing until she had a major stroke at 41. She’s also exceptionally smart and insightful. For a time, it seemed that the stroke caused her to lose everything — fluid speech, the ability to do her job, much of her sense of self — but another thing about her is that she persists in such a wonderful way. It’s like there’s a beautiful light inside her that simply will not go out, no matter what. When she was in the hospital after her stroke, there were so many people who loved her who wanted to visit that we had to create a spreadsheet with sign-ups, in 15-minute slots. Mary is very deep, and we have spent so many hours together talking about our struggles, our histories, our ongoing concerns. She’s also deeply emotional and easily touched. Now she’s getting involved in so many areas of stroke advocacy, and last night she was telling us about this thing she’s spearheading, that place she’s volunteering, this effort she is joining, the other thing she’s eager to work on. I love her.
So me being me, I was thoroughly enjoying talking with them last night while also feeling like the odd woman out, like I was just eavesdropping on the lives of two fabulous women who are Doing Big Things while I sit on my couch editing work others have written, not even doing my own. This morning, in her email to Jane and me, Mary said she felt like she had been “eavesdropping on such a high-level intellectual/literary/writerly/fertile discussion.” Which immediately cracked me up, because she was right there in the thick of it as a participant! For all I know, Jane was doing something similar with Mary and me. I wonder what that’s about. Our conversation was a full and fast river of all three of our voices — no one dominated, no one was excluded at all, the only judgment at the table was encouragement and expressing appreciation. So it wasn’t coming from outside, it must be a reflection of our own senses of uncertainty about ourselves.
Still, when I left them last night, I felt on top of the world, as I always do after I spend time with friends. I suspect this is unique (at least in degree) to female friendships. Whenever I leave a female friend, I feel encouraged, and valued, ready to do whatever I want to do. Worries have been tended to and help given if possible; wishes and dreams have been fanned by their belief in me; and my heart is light because it’s been held up in friendship. It’s a pretty great thing.
[since Saturday Jan 14th is a digital sabbatical day for me, this post was written on Friday Jan 13th and scheduled to publish on Saturday]
oh-so-very much to do. oh-so-too little time.
Why is life so great, so rich, so filled with opportunities, and we can only partake in them serially? Time is limited, there’s not nearly enough of it, and while I overly-multi-task (to my own detriment; when I’m reading and knitting and watching a movie, what the hell am I doing?), there are some opportunities that must be taken singly. Living in Manhattan presents many more opportunities than time (and money) allow, and it can be overwhelming. Just reading the weekly issue of The New Yorker and scanning through the things going on that week is overwhelming! Hell, there’s enough going on in my own small neighborhood each week to keep me busy, and when I bring in the rest — the museums, the galleries, the parts of town that are just fun to walk through, not to mention goings-on in the surrounding boroughs — I curse my need to sleep. And work.
Aside from my recurring pleasures of poetry group, book club, and dinners with friends, these are just some of the things booked in my calendar in the coming few weeks:
Faust, at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center:
Aida, also at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center:
Richard III at BAM, with Kevin Spacey as the hunchbacked wicked king (will he be as delicious as Ian McKellan was?):
The Cloud Gate 2 Dance Theater of Taiwan:
Marcia Ball and Beausoleil (the video is just Marcia Ball; Beausoleil is a cajun zydeco band, amazing):
See what I mean? SO MANY WONDERFUL EXPERIENCES! I’m sticking close to home on certain days of the week to help my husband through something difficult, but there is still so much. I do wish there were more of me, or I could shift myself through parallel paths in some way I can’t even conceive. Because this doesn’t begin to touch the list of books I want to be reading, the list of movies I want to be seeing, the time I need for a book I am writing, the beautiful outdoors I want to be photographing. Life is so precious, and so short, and we’re here to eat it up with a spoon, to get it all over our faces, to let it drip down our chins, to gorge ourselves on it, whatever it is. That’s why we’re here. That, and to be kind to others. To help each other when one of us is down, because our own turn at down will come soon enough.
Friday thoughts on this strange and windy day.
ti-i-i-i-me is on my side [yes it is]
I’ve lately recognized my growing obsession with time — not time on my watch or the alarm, and not time passing in my life. I’m not really smart enough in a physics way to understand time as Einstein talked about it, with curving bulging planes in space (see? that’s probably so wrong). Instead, I’m growing obsessed with the idea of time, with the capitalized Time as a force, as an element, as the thing that makes everything possible. I’m afraid this sounds weird, but my problem is a lack of specific vocabulary rather than an idea of what I mean.
Time creates and defines this moment, and it lets us understand what’s happening in this moment by allowing us to compare it against our understandings of previous moments and our imagining of future moments. Time is happening but our brains fool us and trick us into seeing what’s happening as a continuous single thing; if our brains didn’t do that, every time we blinked we’d experience the discontinuity. I’m not sure about how I’m articulating that — it’s one of the things I understand conceptually but don’t know how to say it. But I am obsessed with trying to figure out how to say it. I’ve had a couple of momentary flash experiences of being able to see time, in some way (not to sound all weird), where I saw the movement streams of people on the street. I’m sure those experiences were informed by Hollywood special effects; it’s so hard to have direct and unique experience in this media-saturated world that aren’t filtered through images we’ve already seen. But those two experiences of mine made me think about the possibility that it’s always visible and there, like the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, we just don’t have the perceptual apparatus to witness it. Or maybe we’d be so overwhelmed, and our brains evolved to save us that overwhelm and instead present clean, simple stories.
I love art that deals directly with time, like Andy Goldsworthy’s gorgeous pieces, captured on film:
His work always makes me cry, and feel so grateful to be in this beautiful world, capable of experiencing time and wonder.
I love dance that deals directly with time, like the Cloud Gate Theater of Taiwan, who performed Songs of the Wanderer. Marnie and I saw a performance of this piece, and the power of that monk, standing downstage left, with a steady stream of rice pouring on his head throughout the 90-minute piece, left us both in tears:
In early February I’m going to see a performance by Cloud Gate 2, and I know it’ll knock my socks off. If you get a chance to see them, take it!
And I love books that deal directly with time. I know I’ve been recommending this site a lot lately, but this post from Brain Pickings organized 7 must-read books on time, and I want the few I haven’t already read. If you’ve read any of the books on that list, I’d love to hear your thoughts about them!
she’s mean and nasty, a real hateful person. yuck.
I have a stalker, since last July. She’s a very nasty person, and I’ve found a way to block her from being able to access my blog. She’s so crazy and obsessed, she had a friend of hers stalk me too. Luckily there’s a plug-in that allows me to ban her IP address, and whenever I track down another of her minions I ban them, too. This may sound paranoid of me, but I’m telling you: she is nasty.
There is someone in the Bronx who googles “Lori [last name] blog” to arrive at my blog every day or so. I’m about to ban that IP address, so if you see this, you there in the Bronx, get in touch with me (thrums.ny {at} gmail.com) and let me know that you’re a nice person and unaffiliated with my nasty stalker, and we’re good. Otherwise, I just have to ban you and I really don’t want to do that unless I have to. I’m going to leave this post at the top for a couple of days to be sure the Bronx visitor has a chance to see it. Sorry for the unpleasant interruption of All Things Thrums (or do you prefer the House of Thrums — equally and overly pretentious, it makes me laugh a little more).
sharing the reading love, plus a dash of yarn
Meta-reading, reading about reading, obviously. This will support my recent posts about feeling overloaded by incoming information: I subscribe to 598 websites and blogs, which I have organized in Google Reader into 14 topics, including art, knitting, personal, fashion and fitness, food, creativity, design, entertainment, NYC, and reading.
Over the years, my subscribing habits have reflected ongoing passions. A few years ago, when I was a very-involved food blogger, I rabidly consumed other food blogs; now, if I don’t have much time, I just mark everything as read in the food blog folder and don’t bother. Now, if I don’t have much time, I limit my reading to the personal blogs, followed by the knitting blogs, followed by the reading blogs. Actually, it depends on my mood, the specific order, but I generally try to make time to at least scan through those categories.
Today I thought I’d share the reading sites with you, in case you find something of interest. In some cases the site offers criticism, in other cases it provides longform reading. At any rate, these are sites I really love for one reason or another, and share them gladly:
A.V. Club — this site is run by the people behind The Onion, but there’s nothing fake or jokey about it. I particularly love the tv and film criticism (here’s a post about the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad), which is always thoughtful, even if I don’t always [necessarily] agree.
Big Think — this site focuses on a range of topics including arts and culture, belief, ethics, history, identity, life and death, and a bunch of others. It’s not my favorite site in the list, but there are gems now and then, like this interview with Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist who talks about the mysteries of her own brain, and making it as a lady scientist (my words, not hers!).
Brain Pickings — I mentioned this site at the end of last year as my favorite (new to me) website. The posts are always interesting, and the blogger seems to have an endless supply of ideas and topics to explore. I’m very eager to read this post recommending 9 books on reading and writing. In addition to great information, I love the site design, which is fresh and clean.
Gangrey — the site’s subtitle is “prolonging the slow death of newspapers,” which makes me smile. Each post presents a newspaper article the blogger appreciates for one reason or another; s/he provides the link and a small bit of context, so it’s really a curated set of links but I often really enjoy the pieces and might not have found them, otherwise. For instance, this piece titled Salt is “a tale of Texas justice and mysterious salt poisoning.” Well, I want to read that one!
McNalley Jackson Bookmongers — this is a book shop’s tumblr, so the posts are very brief….often just a literary quote, or a link to a post from another site, but I enjoy it often enough to keep it in my list.
Melville House — the Moby Lives site, if you know it by that name. I can’t wait to check out the books on the Man Asia Prize shortlist. The site offers literary criticism, insider-publishing posts, interviews with authors, everything you might expect from a smart publisher.
Pageviews — the books blog on the NY Daily News website. The Daily News isn’t a hotbed of intellectual rigor, but this blog is consistently thoughtful and takes on interesting books and writers.
This Recording — very new to me, so I don’t know much about the site except that I tend to love it. You can just follow the posts on books if you like, but the posts on tv and film have been quite good, so I just follow the whole site.
The New York Review of Ideas – a digital magazine of NYU’s graduate ‘Journalism of Ideas’ class of 2011. Another new-to-me site, but I’ve enjoyed it so far.
To Be Shelved – with the subtitle “judging books by their covers since 2010″, this blog is written by a woman who really loves books, and who works in news design. I bookmarked this post she wrote last November about John Updike, and just haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
Longreads — along with Brain Pickings, my favorite site in this collection. With word counts greater than 1,500 words, these are the articles you want to read when you have a bit of time. It’s another curated collection of writing found around the web, and I count on this site to collect stuff I want to read. They never let me down.
Obit Magazine — bear with me on this one. It’s about death, yeah, so it’s really about life, of course. There are book reviews and a blog, and I consistently enjoy the pieces that grab my attention.
If I’m in a rush, I just focus my attention on Brain Pickings and Longreads and let the rest go, but they’re all worth a look!
***
Just a couple more things to share and then I’ve got to get busy; this Gandhi manuscript isn’t going to edit itself!
it snowed our last night in Atlantic City, making the sad, worn-out place seem even sadder and worner-outer.
the lobby of Caesar's -- a little something for everyone! Fake Roman ruins, a Chinese New Year tree of lanterns, and a giant snowflake hanging just off to the left. They're taking no chances.
for Veera Välimäki's new shawl, Color Affection, I just received these three skeins from The Plucky Knitter (MC Fingering -- top to bottom: elegant elephant, Sammy Samerson, and flannel). Too much knitting, too little time, man!
And on that note, I say ta-ta! (for now, of course)
have you ever been to atlantic city? i’ll show you what you’re missing:
Internet Sabbatical
Well, perhaps I didn’t give it a real try, because I spent most of the day working on a couple of manuscripts I needed to finish before our mini-trip. I woke up and started editing, and worked straight through until 5pm, without stop. When I finished that, I had a bunch of chores to do, in preparation for leaving: laundry, shopping, baking [brownies and cookies for my husband], house cleaning, etc. Even if we’re just gone for a couple of days, I know how wonderful it is to come home to a spotless place, so I always leave clean sheets on the bed, the bathroom shining, the kitchen cleaned, the trash taken out, the floors swept. So I had all that to get done, which meant I was so busy all day it didn’t really feel like a digital sabbatical. Did I go online? Once, to send the completed manuscripts to my two authors. I didn’t do anything else, didn’t “just check facebook,” didn’t “just take a run through my Google reader,” didn’t “glance at Ravelry.” Nothing. But I didn’t feel tempted, either. I’m going to do it again next Saturday. We drove yesterday and got to Atlantic City, and in the way these things go, expensive hotels charge a lot for the internet and cheaper ones give it away for free; even though our room is not expensive, the hotel is so the charge is outrageous for the Internet, which means I didn’t go online all day yesterday, either. So two days offline. It feels good, it feels less noisy in my head. I’m curious.
Sham
So, Atlantic City. It’s a very strange place, and sad — probably a little sadder-seeming than usual since it’s winter, and so many places are closed. The summery places — saltwater taffy shops, ice cream parlors, miniature golf — they’re all closed and what’s left are half-empty casinos, psychics, and malls. Each hotel is a large complex comprising casinos, showrooms, shopping malls, and restaurants, and they all merge together. Just behind the boardwalk are rundown-looking tattoo parlors, check cashing stores, pawnshops, and shuttered businesses.
When I was first married, when I was 21, my then-husband was working for CBS News doing election research. We traveled to 20 states, and in the states he worked, he had to gather data at every county seat. One of our states was Nevada, and we got stuck in Las Vegas for more than a week because their records were so poor (surprise!). It was my first time encountering gambling, and I learned that I should not do it. I spent my little bit of cash and found myself glitter-eyed staring at my wedding ring, wondering what I could get for it. I walked away having learned something about myself. So I came to Atlantic City knowing that I didn’t want to gamble, but I don’t even want to. Now I look at the casinos and see them as oh so sad. Sad people sitting in front of tables or machines, giving their money away, and being blitzed by flashing lights and ringing bells, to keep them doing it. Or to disguise what’s really going on. They feed their money, they keep reaching into pockets and bags and handing over more and more. For the most part they’re older and I don’t know if that’s a difference between Atlantic City and Las Vegas, or if it has to do with this time of year. Or something else. Anyway, I haven’t been tempted.
We went into one place which was set up with an old west theme. Inside there were fake oak trees with tables underneath, and saloons and taverns along the outer edge, complete with swinging doors. All kinds of ‘buildings.’ And then, if you happen to look up, you see the ceiling tiles painted black, and you see so clearly the constructedness of it, and you realize it’s a giant warehouse that could be stripped of the old west theme and turned into anything else. It’s such a strange place. People love to be fooled.
We ate dinner last night at a hamburger place, and it felt as sad as the rest. It had a 50s theme, and the other customers seemed tired and worn down. It was someone’s birthday, so the lights dimmed and a waiter shouted that it’s always a special day, but today is most special because it’s Annie’s birthday, let’s sing! The entire restaurant joined the song, which very quickly drifted into a minor key and stayed there. I swear it was the most forlorn version of that song I’ve ever heard, and it fit the vibe. Minor and sad.
Because we’re here Sunday and Monday nights, the room rates are quite low; ~$70/night as opposed to $300+ for Friday and Saturday. We’re on the 41st floor with an ocean view, and the view really is beautiful. I love the ocean. We’re so used to New York, though, that last night the utter quietness was disturbing. There was absolutely no sound, at all. Bizarre! So we’re here tonight and tomorrow we’ll head home, back to the other world.
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- guess where we’re staying?
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- our view, from the 41st floor. it’s really a gorgeous view of the ocean.
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- the boardwalk — made of boards.
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- there’s also a beautiful beach here
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- late afternoon on the beach, my favorite time
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- i love a place with seagulls
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- blah blah blah Atlantic City blah blah blah industrial achievements. This is on the convention center, where the Miss America pageants are held
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- where else but here can you walk from old rome to the old west. weird weird place.
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- full moon and electric lights over the boardwalk
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- a full, brilliant moon over Atlantic City
thinking about my upcoming digital sabbatical
As I promised myself, this coming Saturday I’m taking a combination internet/knitting break, and I’m anxious about it. I’m allowing myself to use my computer to write, but not to go online. We’ll see how well I do with this; in the last few days, there have been several great articles (two in the NYTimes, including this lovely piece by Pico Iyer) about people taking digital sabbaticals. There’s something to it. I feel increasingly overloaded by all the information flying in, by my distracted and fractured nonstop word and image consumption — more blogs to read, more long articles to read, more insights to consume, more inspiration to absorb, more fiction to admire, more poetry to read, more thoughts to consider (oh! Must read Fareed Zakaria’s piece on the world.…). I feel wobbly, like I need to stop and make some priorities, and do some quality curating. I need to make time to process, to incorporate. I think this post about going on an information diet might be helpful, but I haven’t yet had time to read it thoughtfully — oh, the irony. Time!! I want more time, need more time. I have too many interests, and simply can’t understand people who say they’re bored.
Last year I grew in a very specific way: I became more self-possessed. That’s a very neat word, especially for someone who has always been other-possessed, past-possessed, history-possessed. Self-possessed means I take my own counsel, I have integrity and take my time, consider myself, pick and choose with the confidence of my true self. But I’m allowing myself to be overwhelmed, and it’s definitely time to stop, to take stock, to turn away from the easy seduction of immediate gratification and instead move thoughtfully and mindfully ahead. Easy to say, hard to do. I hope Saturday’s experiment gives me a start.
On Sunday my husband and I are driving to Atlantic City for a couple of days, to get out of town and keep ourselves busy and distracted while we wait for some news. We’re going ironically, and we’re Atlantic City’s worst nightmare: we don’t drink, we don’t gamble, we intend to lie around the pool or walk on the boardwalk or chill in our room, and we plan to eat.
It’d be much more interesting to go when Nucky was there, and Chalky, but alas. That’s a tv show. We’ll have a good time together making fun of the whole thing, the gamblers, the Snookies, the plastic glam and fake glitz. I’ll be taking my laptop, and since it’ll be after Saturday, I’ll be reporting live. From Atlantic City.
“I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.” ~Robert Louis Stevenson
“I’m really good at forgetting.” ~my daughter Marnie, age 5
Curses — foiled again by my age-related failing memory. I just received four skeins of The Plucky Knitter Primo MCN (fingering) in a gorgeous red shade she calls Barn Door, and I can’t remember what sweater I was going to make with it.
1540 yards of fingering weight -- for the perfect sweater if only I could remember
I know it wasn’t a pattern I’d made before, and I think it was a cardigan. I think I actually wrote it down on a little notepad file but didn’t save it. Curses! Foiled again! Dadgummit! If you have a favorite cardigan knit with fingering, please let me know!
It’s c.o.l.d here this morning; it’s risen to 14 degrees and heading up to 29. Perhaps its because of my flu, but I just cannot get warm. I’m wearing a long-sleeved thin undershirt, a turtleneck, a cardigan, and a fleece jacket on top of it all, and I have a scarf around my neck and thick socks on my feet. I’m covered with a hand-knit blanket, and another blanket, and I’m still cold. I had a big bowl of very hot oatmeal and cups of steaming tea, and I’m still cold. I think the flu must be ramping up the chill.
On that shivery note, back under the covers for me. Don’t forget to suggest sweater patterns if you have a fave! Stay well y’all.
A WiP post…
Well y’all, I’m sick. Small potatoes — a touch of flu or something, just the kind of thing that feels gross and icky and whiney, but nothing more. I’m wound up in blankets and flannel pajamas, with my fleece jacket and a heater blowing on me, and going in and out of naps. It’s bitter cold here; today’s high is only 26, so it feels like winter, especially as I watch the wind whistling down my street, blowing the bare trees around.
This weekend I did a lot of knitting, as I mentioned, and just shared the pictures with Marnie so I thought I’d put them here, too. This is the Ambergris sweater designed by Ann Weaver, which she [obviously] based on Moby Dick:
here's the front -- see how the design elements extend down into the ribbing?
close-up view of the flukes and ropes -- i really love both those elements
the side seam, a kind of whalebone inset
It’s great fun to knit, but it requires attention because there’s a lot going on at once — several charts, shaping, and the addition of a side chart in one small section (not shown here). I made a large Excel spreadsheet — oh how I love Excel spreadsheets — plotting out each row on the whole body. It makes it much simpler and so far I haven’t needed to frog anything….good, because the yarn is sticky and has long alpaca fibers here and there, which would make frogging a slow process. I’m really enjoying working on it, and love to imagine Marnie wearing it. The pleasures of knitting something special for someone you love, when they’ve had a part in the project so you know they’ll enjoy it.
*cough* *shiver* Back under the covers for me. Happy knitting, y’all.
a beautiful horizon and the passage of time….
I don’t know why I love time lapse photography so very much, but I do; I love seeing time, and I love remembering that we’re really just tiny bits of life on a large planet, whirling around in a larger galaxy, in a larger-still universe. Instead of making me feel small, it makes me feel large, and infinite.
Behind me, 2011 — in front of me, 2012! And happiness on either side.
This post has one foot in last night and one in this morning, straddling the 2011/2012 divide. Which is, of course, silly, because I’m writing it in 2012, but the conceit struck me so I’m sticking with it. Happy new year, y’all!
Last night we went to the Concert for Peace at St John the Divine. The primary reason I wanted to go was that Judy Collins was on the program, and I’ve loved her beautiful voice since I first encountered it back in 1978. She’s had quite a difficult life, losing her son to drug addiction and suicide, and anyone whose child commits suicide awes me with their strength and courage to go on. When we walked the block and a half to the cathedral, I was struck anew by how dazzling it is that I live so close to such a place; imagine if I lived a block away from Notre Dame de Paris, or the stunning cathedral at Chartres. If I lived so close, and could walk over there on a whim….but I do live so close to a similarly-magnificent place, even if it doesn’t have the same kind of history.
the always-gorgeous St John the Divine
It was beautifully decorated, and packed with people. The concert started at 7 and we left our apartment at 6:30 for the 5-minute walk; by the time we arrived, the only empty seats were in the very back rows. I took the shot above relatively close to the front, in the paid section — $60/ticket. We were there for the free seats, and from where we sat in the very back, we couldn’t see anything at all but there were giant speakers placed in our back section so we’d be able to hear. And THEN this woman standing in the aisle next to us asked if we’d like to take two extra ticketed seats she had, because her friends didn’t show up. Why yes please, we’d love to do that. So we sat in the 5th row from the performers. Unbelievable. Unfortunately, our seats were in the middle of the row, so if we wanted to leave we really couldn’t — and I’d have wanted to leave. Ah well.
Judy Collins and Jessye Norman, a couple of feet from me. Judy was performing, Jessye was just there like the rest of us lucky schlubs, to listen.
After opening remarks by the Dean of the Cathedral, Harry Smith spoke briefly, and then introduced Judy Collins. She talked for a bit, sang a bit of a song she’d written after attending Duke Ellington’s funeral there at the cathedral, and then launched into an a capella version of Both Sides Now. She sounded absolutely amazing, but she started wandering around with the lyrics; in the second stanza, she was just pulling lines randomly from different stanzas and I saw this fleeting expression on her face where she realized she was off, but she plowed forward anyway. That stanza didn’t make sense and it didn’t rhyme, but it didn’t matter. She sang the rest perfectly, and I cried, a lot. Her sweet quavery voice, lifting and breaking so high, reaching the notes….the lyrics themselves….it was just lovely.
there she stood, singing clear-voiced and beautifully
We came home and had a beautiful meal my husband made, tandoori chicken, and chicken with green curry. Broccoli in curry and ginger. Rice. It was mouthwatering, mouth-stinging, and oh-so-good. Just before midnight we walked down to Riverside Drive, which is always surprisingly empty at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and stood in the middle of the street and kissed each other. Here’s to a new and improved year, with hope for something especially good to happen to my husband.
If you’re from the south, I know you’re eating something with blackeyed peas today, for good luck. I made sure that the first thing I put in my mouth this morning was sweet, so sweet things would come out of my mouth this year. And I’ve paid attention to what I’ve been doing today, because whatever you do on New Year’s Day is what you’ll do a lot of in the coming year. So I cooked and knitted:
two blueberry cobblers ready to pop into the oven, for my husband -- Pioneer Woman's blackberry cobbler recipe, quite luscious and simple!
eaten with tortilla chips, Texas Caviar so good it'll make you slap your mama
getting going! got marnie's measurements, so i'm knitting away; 8 more rows to the waist shaping!
button bands and icord edging done -- one sleeve underway!
I imagine we’ll take a walk on this beautiful sunny day — it’s 51 degrees, very unwinter-like! I hope the first day of your new year is as happy and lovely as mine, filled with great food and enjoyable activities, and someone to love. What else do you need.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot / And never brought to mind? / Should auld acquaintance be forgot / And auld lang syne!
….thing I read this year was Nick Flynn’s stunning memoir of his father (and therefore himself) Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I can’t stop thinking about it, or the upcoming movie.
….family thing that happened this year was the reunion between my son and our entire family, back in February. Thank you Katie, for your hardheadedness.
….website I found is Brain Pickings, which I happily recommend to you!
….place I traveled this year — oh, what a terribly hard decision, given my travels to Turkey, Vietnam, Borneo, Malaysia, Chicago, and Austin — but if I want to choose the most forever-memorable, it’d have to be the Mekong River Delta.
….hard thing that happened this year was saying a final difficult goodbye to my dad.
***
There was a lot of knitting this year — mostly sweaters, which surprises the hell out of me! The best of my 2011 FOs, given how much I wear it, is my Wintry Mix, but Ozma’s Delight is close behind. Most people liked my Ozma’s Delight.
my ravelry page for this year's FO's, organized by favorites.
I also returned to sewing this year (well, I did make Marnie’s wedding dress last year…), making two dresses/tops for myself:
summery aqua -- the other one is purple. I need to wear them a bit more!
On my birthday November 6, I did a nice recap of my just-passed year, so I’ll link to it here to remind myself of all the stuff that happened — mostly good, but when it was bad it was bad, man. In fact, the hard parts were so hard that despite the fact that quantitatively there was so much more good, I kick 2011 in the pants on its way out the door. Sayonara, 2011! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
But I want to close on a note of gratitude instead of the sourness of the bad, because the truth is I have more than my fair share of things to be grateful about. All my children, all 6 of them, are healthy and happy and living good lives. They struggle as we all do, but they achieve and succeed and they’re such good human beings. I’m in very good health and spent another year freelancing, which is much better for me. My husband and I traveled a lot, which is one of the things we do best together. I get to see the world more than I ever dreamed I would, which never fails to amaze me. I have wonderful friends here in New York, and sprinkled around the country and the world, and all of you enrich my life in very real ways. I have intellectual outlets that feed me — my book club and poetry group, for instance — and I live in Manhattan, where there are so many exciting and wonderful things to do, every single day. I have more than enough to eat. WAY more than enough to eat. I am happy.
So happy new year’s eve, y’all. Be safe, and here’s to 2012.
“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.” ~Katherine Mansfield
Do you know what that acronym stands for, PWT? It’s poor white trash — a really derogatory name to call anyone, but in the way these things work, you can say it about yourself. When you hear the word, especially if you’re from the south, a specific image comes to mind involving trailer parks, and ratty-looking kids with fat slovenly parents wearing sloppy sweat pants and drinking beer. Driving a beat-up old car to Kmart is part of that scene, too, as are grocery carts at the cheap store filled with processed food and lots of fat. You can take the girl out of the PWT, but you can never really get the PWT out of the girl, so I’ll say it now: I am PWT. At least, I grew up that way, and while I don’t live a PWT life, it’s one of the ghosts inside me.
I have a friend here in NYC who is also PWT, but I guarantee you that you’d never know it if you just met him. He’s very smart, extremely chic, he dresses so well (designer duds in black and white almost exclusively), has an extensive knowledge of wine, is an excellent cook and foodie, and lived in Rome for a long time (with nonspecific plans to move back, since he feels like Rome is his true home). He’s also screamingly funny. And he’s PWT. We used to work together, and when we were in Oxford, England, for a brain science summit meeting, there was some conversation over drinks about Huskies, from Montgomery Wards (Monkey Wards, we called it), and we were off to the races, bonded forever. It was our little secret space, where we could go to revel in some of the old stuff that was so shameful then, but that’s so specific and unique, now — especially here in Manhattan.
He made that job bearable for me, every single day, and is the only person I know in this city who knows what it’s like to be me, in this city. I had dinner with him last night at a semi-fancy restaurant, and we laughed hysterically, talked about work, talked about what’s going on in our lives, and talked about some possibilities for him that would be so very very good for him. I know I love him, because they’re a dream come true for him and terrible for me, but I want them to come true because of what they’d mean to him. I suppose there are plenty of people who have siblings they just adore in an uncomplicated way, but I don’t, so he’s my little brother who I simply love and adore, without the complicated history that true shared childhoods can bring. But we have the best of a shared childhood — a shared understanding of very specific details, of very specific memories, and of the ways things are done.
He organized one (or maybe more, I can’t remember now) of the going away parties for me, at a pub in midtown. The photos are grainy and dark, but I can’t look at them without feeling so much for him. He cracked me up by collecting some of the more humiliating pictures from my past, blowing them up and having them mounted on poster board, and arranging them around the party space. That guy. He’s the one in the black shirt, the one whose face you’ll never see in a photo.
grrrrr. One of those days.
When I was a young mother, I did everything. I made all our clothes, I made everything we ate from scratch, I was the Brownie Troop Leader, I had my giant floor loom and a giant-er Navajo loom and my big spinning wheel in the living room, I played guitar and sang in the elementary school, I was a Maker Deluxe. In this vein, I planted a vegetable garden, a couple times, because it just fit with what I was doing in my life, for my family. Oh, I loved gardening. Except I really, really didn’t. I didn’t like the feeling of dirt under my fingernails. I didn’t like having to deal with bugs and weeds. I didn’t like one thing about it. So my first vegetable garden produced what it produced in its first blush but without the necessary care, it didn’t really last. The following year, oh, I love gardening! I planted another one. And I really hated gardening.
It took me a long time to figure out that what I love is the idea of gardening. I really love that idea. The idea of preparing the ground, planting and watching and watering, seeing the plants, the flowerings, the vegetables begin and then grow. Pulling that food out of the ground and putting it on my table. Love every bit of that idea. I just really don’t like to garden. I wish I did, but I don’t. I felt so much better when I realized this distinction, because it helped me understand this conflict and it relieved me from ever having to attempt to garden again.
Last night I had another insight, though perhaps it is more temporary. Another thing I like better as an idea is Manhattan — definitely the incredible crowds of people in Manhattan. From a distance, the crowds of people pouring through the subway stations, the hordes of people on the sidewalks, they make this city vivid and so alive. From a distance, it’s easy to see that all these people are Manhattan, really. That we all live together, in each others’ faces, in public, and we mostly do it very well. We create whatever private space we need around ourselves as we are crammed together in small spaces. From a distance — the George Washington Bridge, say — all these people on this island are exciting. All these people dashing about, creating the busyness that characterizes this city. I really like all these people from a distance.
But under any kind of stress, as I was last night, my feelings change pretty dramatically. I hate all these people! Good god, I just want to get from here to there. Nothing’s easy. The subways are often screwed up for any slight reason, and if it’s raining hard, or long, everything is just that much more difficult, including subway commutes. Since the subway is underground, obviously, and we’re on a small island, a whole lot of rain at once can bring the subways to a crawl. Once, the trains just had to stop, and we all had to leave. What this means is that (a) it’s raining very hard, (b) hundreds of people are streaming out of the subway at once, into pouring rain, so (c) getting a cab is impossible. No subway, no cab, no luck.
everything's less fun in the rain, here
Last night I went downtown, to the NYU area, for a knitting meet-up. I love and adore all my friends and various groups, but I’m the only person I know here who makes things, and now and then someone says something that makes me feel like I’m seen as weird, because of it. People will ask if I’m making something because it’s cheaper (um, no), and they’ll look at me quizzically. At a minimum, they don’t seem to get the impulse to make things. They do other things, but they don’t make things. When I was a young mother, most of my friends made things, because they were my friends from the weaver’s and spinner’s guild. So I’ve been longing for real-live in person friends here in New York who make things. This one meet-up takes place pretty far from my apartment, requiring two different trains and then a long walk, but it meets on a night that works for my schedule and I’d wanted to go several times before but then had to cancel. Last week I RSVPed for the meet-up and was determined to actually go.
And then, yesterday afternoon, it started pouring rain. Not just raining, but pouring rain. And it was windy. I thought about not going, but I decided to just suck it up and head out. The bulk of the trip is underground, and the long walk in the rain would be fine. I wore my raincoat, took my umbrella, and headed out.
Times Square -- one of the major subway stations on the west side of town
It was nothing less than miserable. By the time I got to my subway stop, which is one block from my apartment, my jeans were soaked to the knee, and my feet were soggy. The wind kept whipping my umbrella inside out. Going down the steps into the subway required tip-toeing through the lakes of rain, and the trains were very crowded. Transferring trains at Times Square nearly done the old girl in; I think everyone gets cranky when they’re trying to get around in this kind of rain, and the rain causes train delays so the crowds are worse than usual. And this time of year the city is filled with tourists, who are taking it all in and don’t know the rules of the road, so they poke along, they stop in the middle of where people are walking, they stand at the top of the stairs, blocking them, they struggle to figure out the Metro Card system, it’s not their fault but they muck up the works even more. We’re just trying to get home, it’s cold, we’re wet, it’s crowded. I finally made it to the second train, only to find out that due to debris on the track, the train I needed wasn’t running. I don’t know that subway line (or part of town) very well, so coming up with an alternative way to get there was mysterious to me, and I nearly turned around and went back home. At this point I was realizing that I don’t like people, I don’t like Manhattan, I don’t like any of it. That maybe this is one of those “gee, I like the idea of it” deals.
But I got there, and after the long walk, I entered the bar dripping wet. My hair was hanging, wet, because the wind kept inverting my umbrella. My pants were dripping, my toes were pruning, my raincoat was dripping. I found the group in the back, introduced myself, and sat down. And not one person spoke to me. They looked at me while I was introducing myself, then they turned their attention back to their knitting, and to each other, and went back to their conversations. I ordered a drink and sat there, smiling, trying to figure out what to do. I thought I’d just go back home. I felt terrible.
Finally two other women arrived and sat by me, and the proximity led them to speak to me. I ended up having a nice time with them, and may go back (but not in January, unfortunately, because the two meetings fall the same nights as my poetry group and my book club meetings). A couple hours later, the group started to disband and I headed home. The rain had slacked off, the crowds were a little less intense, and I was freezing cold because my feet and jeans had been soggy for all that time (and still were!). I got home and crashed, went straight to sleep; I’m so shy and introverted, and it’s exhausting putting myself into a new social setting with strangers.
I’m going to hold off on making a final announcement to myself about how I feel about Manhattan, and Manhattanites. Maybe I like more than just the idea of them, but I need dry feet and pants to feel it.
sharing some of the tabs I can’t seem to close in the hopes you like them too!
This week between Christmas and the new year is odd, isn’t it — a kind of vacuum, free space, free parking, festive, but also kind of ‘what?’ I’d love to be taking this time off but I have too much work and need to stay hunkered down. In my early morning knitting time, instead of reading the book I should be reading for book club, I’ve been reading these pieces, which I want to share with you:
- a brief essay by a man who believes that Walt Whitman saved his life. Whitman saves mine now and then, and this essay resonated with me.
- this uber-collection of the best long reads on the internet this year, curated by a whole bunch of smart and interesting people
- I’m fascinated by and intensely drawn to David Foster Wallace and read nearly everything by and about him I can find. This piece is loosely about the marginalia found in his collection of self-help books.
- This beautiful piece is another about David Foster Wallace, his new book, and his legacy.
- I read this over and over: 30 things to stop doing to yourself. Some are brilliant, especially (for me) #s 12 and 24.
- This gorgeous illustrated view of what happens in a second is pure delight.
- I’m kind of a sucker for lists of people’s favorite books; if someone lists one of my favorites (especially an oddball favorite of mine, or especially if they say something specific and wonderful about it), then I trust the other books on their list. This piece pulls together the faves of a dozen or so writers and editors, and includes often-funny commentary about why the books are their favorites. One writer said Another Bullshit Night in Suck City will “knock you on your ass” — and yes, dear reader, it will; another said this about Nabokov’s Pale Fire: ”You know what? Fuck Lolita. I take that back, don’t fuck Lolita, she’s too young, plus I loved that book. I loved this one more, though. The poem makes me disintegrate with feelings.”
Whatever you’re doing this week, I hope you’re winding down the year in style. Yesterday I had lunch with a friend from poetry group; tonight I’m going to a knitting group; tomorrow is lunch with the daughter who just returned from Israel; Thursday evening is dinner with friends; in between is lots of work, some knitting (ready to do the sleeves on my Audrey sweater, which is gorgeous!), some eating, and some movie-watching. Happy strange week, y’all!
ghosts of Christmas past
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas weekend, if you celebrate. Mine was very nice — as nice as it could possibly be, without having my kids with me. [But did you hear the awful, awful news from Connecticut, about a house that burned down early Christmas morning, and the owner survived but her three young daughters, all under 10, and her parents were all killed? God...could anything be worse, that poor, poor woman.]
This seems like a non sequitur, but I promise it isn’t. Have you ever read A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry? (I feel compelled to tell you I read it before Oprah picked it for her book club….) It’s a beautiful, horrible, sad, tragic story of people trying to survive during The Emergency, in India. It’s so tragic, there were times I had to put it down because I simply couldn’t keep bearing it. Passages I had to read out of the sides of my eyes because I couldn’t tolerate them head-on. One of the characters, Ishvar, just endures more misery than should be possible, but he always says “life is long.” Although the longer his life goes on, the more misery he endures, that’s not what he seems to mean. It’s that life is long, whatever is happening now isn’t necessarily what will always be happening. There is room in the future for other things — better things, perhaps. Whatever is happening now isn’t the only thing that ever will happen.
Plenty of people suffer during the holidays, and feel excruciating pain and loneliness. Christmas Eve is more painful a time to be alone than Christmas, for me, but maybe that’s because of my Christmas Eve in 1970. Late that afternoon, when I was 12, my mother gathered me and my sister and brother and told us she was divorcing our dad. She walked us into their bedroom, where he sat, on his knees on the floor, and told us to tell him goodbye. He pulled us into his arms, sobbing, and told us how much he loved us. We told him goodbye, and walked out the door. Mother drove us to a motel — The Downtowner — where she had already secured adjoining rooms, and where my soon-to-be step-father was waiting for her. She and he were in one room, and my sister and brother and I sat on the ends of the beds in the next room, staring at the tv. We watched A Charlie Brown Christmas…..our eyes took it in, but I doubt any of us were really watching it. Could there be sadder Christmas music than that soundtrack? I don’t know of it, if there is.
So that’s my sad little holiday tale o’ woe…..we all have them, of one kind or another. I’ve come such a long way, and life has indeed been long. I’ve had joyful Christmas Eves, sad ones, lonely ones, endless ones, happy ones, hilarious ones, new baby ones, warm ones and cold ones, and next year’s celebration will be of another form, I’m sure. Life is long. If your holidays were lonely, I’m so sorry; it’s a particular pain, feeling lonely when the whole world seems to be connected and warm and joyful and spending time with loved ones. You aren’t the only one, and those of us who had a lovely time this year aren’t guaranteed those types of celebrations in the years to come. It’s life, and life is long, and you get to experience nearly everything if you live long enough.
oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day — i have a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way [today, anyway!]
Merry Christmas, if you celebrate! I had an absolutely lovely day, beginning with gifts and a sumptuous breakfast, then a videochat with all but one of my kids, who is on her way home from Israel today. So me plus 5 on the videochat, so very wonderful. I’ve spent the rest of the day knitting and watching movies, and I baked a batch of snickerdoodles and two loaves of cranberry-orange nutbread. It’s been a happy, good-smelling, good-eating, good-moments day. Here is a variety of images from the day:
TEXANS: SIT DOWN. Pecans for $18/pound. I KNOW. That's insane. They're supposed to be free, on the ground in your backyard. I never dreamed I'd pay $18/lb, but I did today, for the cranberry-orange nutbread. And it was good.
beautiful yarn from Katie, my knitter daughter. 50% alpaca, 50% wool. Aran weight, three skeins. What to make?
The tree outside my window; how are those two branches still green, on an otherwise barren tree?
along with other gifts, my husband surprised me with a bowl filled with my favorite fruits -- strawberries, cherries, red grapes, and clementines. LOVE (him and the fruit).
the shetland lace bib on my audrey sweater -- hauling butt now!
So that was my lovely day. I have a new external hard drive to fix up, several new prints courtesy of Marnie to get framed, a bunch of great food to eat, and all while wearing my new waiting-for-Santa flannel pajama pants from Katie. I have another post I’ll write tomorrow about traveling a long way from one Christmas Eve to another, but that’ll wait. Tonight’s dinner is shrimp crusted with buttery garlicky breadcrumbs and a giant gorgeous salad. Me happy, and me hope you happy too.
xo
Lori
i’m dreaming of a white Christmas….
a mid-chat screen grab
We couldn’t all be in the same place this year, though we’re twosies: my daughters and their husbands are together in Austin, and my son and I are here in Manhattan. We have big plans to all be together in Austin in 2013, but this is the 21st century and different ways of doing things are possible. So we had a Christmas Eve chat, all together, and we’ll do it again in the morning, after all the presents are opened.
That expression is SO ME, I’ve learned. I frown more than I ever realized, but I usually do it while I’m grinning. Try that! The frown is about listening so hard, but I’m usually pretty happy, and when I’m looking at and talking to all my kids at once? PURE-DEE JOY, y’all.
Watching White Christmas, smelling the delicious pork ropa vieja my husband’s making for our dinner (along with mashed potatoes and green beans), and planning to dash over to St John the Divine at 10pm to listen to a little music and smell the incense. Happy happy Christmas Eve, y’all.
this video was posted by the embarrassed big sister of the singer. the baby jesus slept through everything.
I think that’s the lyric — anyway, this little singer gave me a big smile and I hope she does you, too. Give this a chance; once all the little singers assemble and the song gets underway, you’ll see what I mean.
Merry Christmas Eve, y’all!
the poets speak and I just set them up:
[reprinted with my permission, from last year's solstice!] This post is published exactly at the solstice – 12:30am NY time, December 22. The shortest day, the longest night, ripe for metaphor. With our modern minds, we cast back and try to imagine what it was like for our ancestors who hadn’t yet come to understand celestial machinations, we imagine that they thought the world was ending (as we imagine they thought darkness ate the sun during an eclipse) — but those are our modern imaginings, only.
We’ve all seen our own planet from a vantage point beyond it…. startling, if you remember to think about that and how new and weird it is. We understand celestial mechanics, things going around things, planet tilts and seasons, orbit patterns. We are so sophisticated, we’re beyond fear that the night will never end. Right?
Anselm Kiefer, Gescheiterte Hoffnung (C.D. Friedrich), 2010, Charcoal on photographic paper. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York. Text on the work is translated as follows: "Wreck of Hope."
[a cranky note from the winter of my feeble little mind: why does it seem like winter doesn't really begin, and the world really gets bleak, after the solstice! i'm ready for it to start lightening up, man.]
BUT: in honor of the world turning, light returning, and all that amazing jazz, I have a handful of beautiful winter / solstice poems here, after the jump.
CLICK to continue reading the longest night *always* ends (so far!)... Continue reading »
think I can pull it off?
I think the fact that this idea is so frightening suggests that I really really ought to do it — and not just do it, but commit to it for a specific period of time. I’m so scared I want to give myself a tiny little time frame, like once, but I’m going to try to aim for a little more than that.
For the month of January, 2012, on Saturdays I will not open my laptop at all, and I won’t knit.
I KNOW!! Isn’t that a terrifying idea? And honestly, I don’t know which part is scarier, the computer or the knitting. Can I really do it? Why should I? Would you attempt such a crazy stunt? I may need to think this through a little more; I may want to write (and in fact I do want to write), so should I instead say that I will not be online for that month of Saturdays? But if my computer is open and on my lap, how could I not just do one little email check, just take one little glance at facebook? Am I a woman, or a mouse?! [in fact, i am a mouse. a woman mouse.]
What would I do, instead? Well, actually, there’s quite a long list:
- take a walk
- do yoga
- write by hand
- read (read, read, read!)
- watch a movie
- go to a museum
- paint
- sew
- housework
- go to Central Park
- go out for coffee or brunch
- cook / bake
- meditate
And that’s just what comes to mind right off the top of my head, things I always want to do but end up not doing because instead I knit and poke around online the whole day. I think I’ll be a little bit of a weenie and just challenge myself to one Saturday, for starters. But let me take a kinder stance to myself: rather than seeing it as my being a weenie, I’ll decide to give myself the best possible chance to succeed! Yeah! Saturday, January 7, I will not open my laptop, and I won’t knit. I make this promise to myself, to encourage myself to explore more of what interests me.
Do you think I’m nuts?
happy birthday to my dad.
Today my father would’ve turned 75 years old; he died when he was 45, so old[er] age and him don’t go easily together in my mind. I was 23 when he died, so he was almost twice my age, which seemed old to me, then.
I didn’t know him, really; plenty of people don’t know their parents as human beings, as people other than ‘parent.’ I didn’t grow up with him; I didn’t live with him after I was 10, we didn’t see each other at all after I was 14, and I had just met him again when I was 23. I had a few months to get to know him then, but knowing him was not possible, no matter how much I may have wanted it, because he was drunk every waking moment.
When he was a tiny little tow-headed boy, he loved to play behind the couch, quietly, with his little cars. His mother told me that story once; he kept to himself and was quiet as a mouse because his father was a rampaging, furious, out-of-his-mind alcoholic who beat the shit out of him and everyone else in the house. Just as my father would grow up to do, and to be. He was sickly as a child, with what they then called Bright’s Disease – inflammation of his kidneys. The bad thing about this was that it meant he couldn’t eat beans, which were the staple of their diet because they were so terribly poor. When he was a teenager, he and his friends would run through the corn fields, imagining themselves robbing the Sinton, Texas banks on horseback. He longed to escape.
the man on the far right is my step-grandfather, who was a sweet man. my dad on the far left, his mother holding me
And he did escape, but it was from the frying pan and into the fire; he married my mother, who was still a high school student (though not for long…she dropped out and ran off with him). And presto, 9 months later, I was part of the scene. They were too young and too troubled, and too ill-prepared for the real life they found, and the rest of his life was terrible – magnified, I imagine, by how terrible he made the lives of his kids.
the newlyweds, plus me. they'd been married a year -- they both look kind of stunned and dazed. She's 18.
He fancied himself a Tragic Figure – initial caps, important –and he was. He was not much more than the next tragic embodiment of rage in a long line of such men, and he couldn’t escape the generations behind him. But he loved books, and reading, and he was smart. He worked as a draftsman at an architectural firm, where he was valued, even when he was too reliably drunk to keep his job. He had a child’s style of romantic notions; he loved his dogs so much, and bought an old Chevy pickup truck just to drive them around, because he thought they loved riding in the back of an old beat-up truck.
that's me, draped in his hands. he was just barely 22
Although I suffered greatly at his hands, I loved him so much, and thought he was beautiful and elegant, and I was his. He called me Scout after we watched To Kill a Mockingbird (and he probably considered himself as Atticus, which is a mighty funny stretch); he also called me Pete and Dawn Ann. Ours was a nicknaming family, obviously. I don’t remember what I called him when I was a child – daddy, probably – but usually I referred to him as Frank….though not to his face. So now I stumble when I think of him, not knowing what to call him in my thoughts.
he was 25, she was 21 -- that's me on his lap. don't they look older than they were?
I’m not writing to talk about his death, but since he is dead, his life is complete now, start to finish, so it’s part of the story. He didn’t live long, only 45 years, and he didn’t fulfill what he might’ve, and he didn’t leave any kind of positive legacy behind (well, my life does continue, and it has great value). He kind of fulfilled the circumstances of his birth, to a young mean woman who hated him and hated that he’d been born, to a young mean man who hated him as much as he hated himself, to a life of poverty and cotton gins and liquor and misery. His birthday is usually a haunted day for me, but this year it’s not; this year, I just think of who he was, what his life was like, and I wonder who he’d be if he were alive. When I try to think about that part, I get stuck because I have to imagine a very different person than he was. My poor dad.
near the end of his life -- probably 2 months before he killed himself. he's in the dark blue shirt.
No one was ever glad he was born, and it’s kind of complicated to be grateful that he was born, but I am. I’m sorry his life was so sad and hard, and I’m sorry he made mine so sad and hard, but I’m so glad to be here, and I couldn’t be, without him. So on my dad’s birthday, I wish a happy birthday. I wish a happier birthday than he ever had. And I reaffirm my joy and gratitude at being in this world, filled with everything.
” Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.” Beckett, “Krapp’s Last Tape
There’s a brilliant resource in Rochester, NY, called Writers & Books — in a gorgeous old building, they offer writing classes, reading seminars, and readings. I took a class there on Beckett, led by a philosophy professor; we read and discussed many plays and stories, but the one that struck me hardest was “Krapp’s Last Tape.” I tend to get frustrated and bored with Beckett — he’s best taken in small bites, not in concentrated chunks because it starts feeling like this one’s hopelessness in a black landscape; ah, this one’s hopelessness in a white landscape; oh wait, this one’s hopelessness in a gray landscape; wow! this one’s hopelessness with a lobster. Hopeless, I get it. Next.
But Krapp, Krapp was different. Krapp was about a man, a real life, about looking back on a real life, and trying to understand it all. If you’re unfamiliar with this short play, Krapp is a 69-year old man who has made a tape recording each year on his birthday, kind of summarizing his year (an early blogger?); on this 69th birthday, before making the new recording he listens to one he made 30 years earlier. Part of the older tape is him pontificating on things he’s learned — kind of separating himself from his life with a big-vocabulary verbal distancing. But part of it is spent recalling a moment with a woman, in a boat. Now listening to it 30 years later, Krapp embraces the tape player as if it’s a person — that woman, perhaps. [here's the play, if you want to read it -- it's short.]
One striking thing is Krapp’s ongoing contempt for himself; on the 30-year-old tape, he’d listened to an earlier tape and expressed great contempt for himself, then. And at 69, he expresses contempt for the 39-year-old who was expressing contempt for his earlier life. Contempt is such a cowardly emotion, and contempt for contempt is staggering. Contempt for life, for one’s life, is the biggest waste of all.
This passage, the piece Krapp listens to again and again, and the piece that ends the play, is beautiful and heartbreaking. They were in a small boat:
I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments–(pause)–after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
The “Let me in” line is deeply moving; let me in. Please, let me in. Do we let people in, do we have the courage to ask to be let in? I often don’t have that courage.
i had seats in the nosebleed section
I attended the final performance of this play at BAM — Brooklyn Academy of Music — with John Hurt. It’s a one act play, one actor, only 55 minutes, more or less. Minimalist setting: just a desk and chair, an overhead lamp, and the tape player and tapes. Plus a couple bananas. He was brilliant, and looked like Beckett himself with his thin body and white thatch of hair.
that's the whole set -- a desk, chair, and overhead light.
There wasn’t an empty seat in the house; as the lights went down, I understood that we were all there to do this together. All of us in the audience were there to create this performance with John Hurt. The lights came up and he was there, at the desk. He held the stage for several minutes in absolute silence, and I could feel us all there, together, in the room, bringing Krapp into being again. It was wonderful.
really brilliant -- John Hurt
Before the performance started, these two women in my row caught my attention. They were older than me, two old Jewish ladies in furs with loud voices. It was hard not to hear them, but their conversation was kind of funny so I dragged out my little notebook to record it. One said — oh so loudly — “It’s a secret, don’t tell anyone. I can’t stand her, she’s a skinny little pinch-faced bitch. She only brought bruschetta and a white bean dip to the party.” Surely she hated the woman for reasons beyond what she did and didn’t bring to the party.
And thus ends my long week o’culture. It was just wonderful, a memorable week of moving experiences. Next week is quiet, at home, and I look forward to that, too. Time to knit and read, time to write, time to pull inward and generate rather than consume. I wish you all a lovely Sunday night….
I should’ve titled this post The Unbearable Whiteness of Ballet
Last night I met my friend Temma for dinner (Indian food, so delicious) before we saw The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center. [and thank you again, Temma, for inviting me!] Let me start by describing what the performance meant to me, before I get to my primary point. When I was a little girl in the sticks of Texas, I used to watch the nutcracker on television each Christmas — Baryshnikov, as I recall. Remember how they used to put “culture” on tv, back in the old days? Anyway, I’d watch the ballet on tv and it couldn’t have been more remote from me and my life. I imagined it taking place in some other universe, not the one in which I lived, or the one to which I could even aspire. It was Fancy. Cultured, sophisticated, rich with meaning and tradition and beauty. Not my life. Not even remotely like my life. So getting to go — and to Lincoln Center, no less — was the realization of that little girl’s dream she couldn’t even dream to dream.
We were surprised there weren’t more children in attendance; Temma was looking forward to seeing little girls with ribbons in their hair, and I don’t think we saw a single girl like that. Our seats were on the 4th ring, right in the center, so we had an outstanding view of the stage and the orchestra. As a long-time flutist and piccolo player, I’ve played that music and could hear every piccolo solo, every note from the flute section. This production is the George Balanchine version of The Nutcracker, and it’s extremely traditional. The children who danced were quite good, and Temma and I kept wondering what it must be like to be the main little girl, what a thing for her. (But then, where do you go from there, when you’ve done that at age ~9, on the stage at Lincoln Center)?
The main thing that surprised me, though, was the supreme whiteness of everything. The dancers were all white — whiter than me, even — as was the audience. There may have been people of color somewhere in the audience, it’s not like I could see every single person, but if there were, there weren’t many. But what struck me and eventually made me kind of sick was that there were only really, really white people on stage. I find it hard to imagine that in all of New York there isn’t a single brown person worthy to dance in this performance.
all white, all the time
Coming immediately on the heels of the brilliant and hot performance by The Forces of Nature Dance Theater, I realize the contrast made this experience stronger than it might have been, otherwise, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.
So it was a mixed bag, for me: deep pleasure at spending that time with my dear friend, deep pleasure over the dinner, deep pleasure for getting to do this thing I’d been too poor a child to dream about — all those, great things — and deep disgust over the pure whiteness of it. Temma and I are going to see more dance performances in the future, but I’ll be more interested in modern dance and a greater mix of people, as will she.
This afternoon: Krapp’s Last Tape, with John Hurt! Another fantastic day for me. Happy Sunday, y’all.
last night I went to the 32nd annual Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine and it was amazing….
I’m dizzy from everything — this morning I’m having breakfast with Will and tonight I’m going out to dinner and then to Lincoln Center to see The Nutcracker with a dear friend, so more on that tomorrow morning. Last night was the Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine, and it was just magnificent. I had one of the little notebooks that Kty gave me for my birthday and I scribbled notes in the darkness, hoping they’d make sense in the light.
The concert featured Paul Winter on his saxophone, of course, and there was a singer and a guy who played the thumb drum (brilliantly!), and The Force of Nature Dance Theater. This video will give you the full flavor, but don’t miss the rest of the post:
When we first arrived, I wasn’t feeling the magic I felt last year — the magic of the solstice, of that one moment when the night is so long and we wait for the light. But the space went dark and I heard that first note, and I slipped into the magic, happily. The show opened with a call and response sequence that was amazing, in a space like the Cathedral of St John the Divine (which is the largest cathedral in the world, and the 4th largest Christian church in the world). The opening moment was Paul Winter playing from a niche high up on the back wall, and someone playing the response on the far opposite wall (whom we couldn’t even see). Back and forth they played, and then the pipe organ began a call and response with an organ on the far end. The one at the back is one of the most powerful organs in the world, and when it plays it plays, boy. That series felt something like noise calling creation into being, since the space was so dark. I love a good call and response, so it was a lovely way to open the show.
The program didn’t list the names of songs so I can’t name anything, but the second song Paul Winter played left me crying. Without knowing the song’s title, and since it didn’t have words, I may have totally missed the point of the song from the creator’s perspective, but it sang to me of goodbye. At first, as I listened, I thought it was about goodbye to the year — makes sense, given the context — but I realized it’s about all goodbyes, about the sweetness of goodbye, and especially the sad sweetness of a goodbye when there isn’t more to be had. Goodbye to the year, it is over now whatever it was. Goodbye to people we won’t see again. Music and art can make you understand something more fully than words, and I understood something I’ll never be able to articulate here, and however I do articulate it, it’ll miss the fuller boat. I was thinking of people who are not part of my life, who died or left, and I realized that they didn’t leave, that they really are in me. Everything that happened with them, between us, is part of me and I’m not at all the same person I was before, and I can’t be that person again. Forever, all the moments with them are part of me, even if I don’t specifically remember them. I mourn not getting to have more of them, perhaps, but they’re not gone.
As the show progressed, I realized it was essentially the same show as last year; one performer replaced another (the incredible Armenian singer named Arto Tunçboyacıyan was replaced by the thumb drum player, for instance), but Winter played the same songs, the same solstice tree was played in the same way, the same earth was wheeled in and raised over the stage, the same series with the sun gong was performed, it was all the same. For a moment I felt disappointed until I realized that this is kind of the point: every year we hit this same mark, the world turns and returns back to where it started, but I am not the same person. I’ve been around one more time, I’ve had hundreds or thousands of experiences that have left me changed, even as I return to the same point. When I was in graduate school, a friend in the clinical psych program said she thinks of therapy like a slinky stretched out on its side: patients move along and may return to the same spot on the rings but they’re farther along each time. So throughout the performance, the sameness gave me reason to reflect on the un-sameness of me.
The performance made a lot of light and dark; occasionally there would be wild flashes of light in the darkness, and the giant scary pipe organ in the back would suddenly blast sounds that made me jump out of my seat. Those kinds of sounds are unnaturally natural — the deep sounds that the earth makes, which are always scary. Once, when the organ was blasting, I put my hand on my chest and felt my body vibrating with the sound, which was kind of cool. And sometimes in the dark there would be clangy bells all around — cowbells, kind of. People walked up and down the center aisle and the side aisles carrying those bells so they were randomly clanging, but so many that it was a constant chaotic sound in the dark. It was disorienting and unsettling, at the least, and frightening (to me!) now and then. But I loved it.
And GOD ALMIGHTY THE FORCE OF NATURE DANCE THEATER. They are incredible, no words I could possibly write, even if I were a brilliant writer, could properly convey their performance. They’re the primary reason I came this year, and the primary reason I’ll go again next year. In addition to the performance they gave in the first half of the show, which was high energy and gorgeous and vivid and alive, they performed a new piece called Water in the second half that had me gape-mouthed, sitting on the edge of my seat, leaning forward with my eyes open as wide as possible. Occasionally it made me laugh out of pure joy of what they were doing. I felt this whenever they were on stage. The notes I wrote in the dark were:
- GOD ALMIGHTY
- bliss
- insane
- big arms (Izzard!)
- ecstasy
- AWE^2
[their movements included very big arm movements, which made me think of the Eddie Izzard piece about Jesus and the disciples posing for Leonardo as he painted the Last Supper....oh Izzard, you've taken over my mind!]
-
- she brought a sandwich and a banana
-
- unbelievable
-
- color and energy
-
- brilliant movements
-
- exuberance and joy
-
- the earth ascends
-
- the giant sun gong ascends; I’d see him strike the gong, but not hear the sound for a second or two
If you’re ever in New York when this concert is taking place, I encourage you to go. It’s an incredible experience, in person. The solstice happens next Thursday, so I’ll have a proper winter solstice post then.
good thing she’s smaller than me, or I might not be able to give away this sweater….
Last night I did some swatching for Marnie’s sweater. The yarn is Valley Yarns Northfield, which is 70% merino, 20% alpaca, and 10% silk, and the fabric is just so beautiful. I’m going to have to buy exactly the same yarn and color to make myself a sweater, assuming I continue to love it as much. Here’s the stockinette pre-blocked swatch, followed by the rope-cable swatch:
so beautiful -- this is what the back of the sweater will look like, since it's the only area that's not cabled in some way
and here's one of the cable swatches; it's very neat, the way the rope emerges.
I’m actually a little bit afraid of knitting this sweater, just as I was afraid to read Moby Dick (which is the craziest idea in the whole world…really? afraid to read a book?). Just as with the book, I’m afraid it’s beyond me, too complicated for my feeble mind to manage. With the sweater, there are multiple patterns and cables going on simultaneously plus shaping. It’s knit in the round, bottom-up, and splits at the arms. So all the busy business happens simultaneously, and since I knit at night, while watching tv with my husband, when I’m kind of tired, well…..I worry. But I want to do it perfectly, so I’m just going to take my time, take each row for itself and make it right, and it’ll all work out. And perhaps I’ll love the FO as much as I love the book. Probably not, but maybe.
Here’s a funny thing about Christmas songs I found on the NPR music page. I especially love #6, though they’re all funny.
so funny!
Tonight’s the Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine, and if I love it half as much as I did last year, it’ll be overwhelming. Happy Friday, y’all! I hope you’re able to enjoy the holiday season and not feel too stressed.
p.s. OH — one more. There are a couple of Ryan Gosling tumblrs, and this is my favorite picture so far:
hey girl.
an odd year-in-review post
It’s almost 2012. Boggling. Even more boggling is that I’m 53, I have a daughter who’ll be 30 next year, another who’ll be 27, a son who’ll be 25, and a daughter who’ll graduate college and be 22. WHAT?! Also, 32 years ago today, as a matter of fact, I got married to my former husband, who saved me in a very real way. How am I old enough to have done anything important 32 years ago?!
I’ve seen this on a few blogs and really liked it, so here’s my version. 2011 in review — the first line of the first post each month, with my favorite photo from that month. The photo doesn’t necessarily (usually doesn’t) come from the same post. Here we go:
an urban snowman, with baby beets for buttons, and that's probably an organic carrot. this IS the upper west side, after all.
Ah, New Year’s Eves I have known. One little night, fraught with such imperative – must have fun! Must be memorable! AAAAGH!!
will and katie, 4 years ago
I’m looking at gray skies, gray buildings, brown-gray-black-filthy snow everywhere, and ice-coated trees that look like glass.
giant moon over NYC
Moody. The dreadful and misleading-sounding labile. All over the place (which sounds like it could be at least partially good, doesn’t it?).
sib play
I finished Katie’s socks — the pattern is Angee, by Cookie A, and the yarn is the ultrasoft and super washable KnitPicks Felici (colorway: green vegetables, in the most obviously-named color ever).
I was here just a few days ago! This was shot behind the Greco-Roman amphitheater at Myra, in Kale, Turkey
Turkey was wonderful — in almost every way, it was a perfect vacation.
all done by hand. Every tiny leaf. The hatching on every tiny leaf. Thousands of tiny bunnies. Really. Marnie is a genius.
Remember that old Steve Martin bit about how to be a millionaire and never pay taxes? Basically, it was: first, get a million dollars.
lovely gorgeous NYC
I hope it’s been a good summer for everyone — it’s been a good summer for me! Thank you to everyone who said something here, or on facebook, or via email, about my seeming disappearance from good old Thrums.
i love this color so very much
Aside from fire ants, I don’t mind ants — regular old in-the-house ants. I know some people are freaked out by them, but I don’t mind them. I try to get rid of them, but I don’t mind them.
picture swiped from Marnie's facebook wall, so it's a copy of a copy of a copy. But that's me in Chicago, holding a Bitter Woman Ale and smiling at Marnie and Tom before digging into a giant sandwich. And being 52 the whole time.
This is the whole point with this daily gratitude thing, I guess. Sometimes you have to make a hard effort to find something to be grateful for, and that’s the very time it means the most.
my last evening in the Mekong Delta
We got home around midnight from our wonderful trip to Vietnam and Malaysia. It was just amazing; if you are interested, here’s a link to the flickr set.
central park, so artistic
So there we were last night, handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, waiting for our wonderful dinner, listening to scary music, talking with a friend who came over to spend the evening with us. We munched on Katie’s roasted pumpkin seeds, Trey tended to the smoking pork, it was lovely.
such great texture in that front panel
Are you in a book club? I really want to know — if you are, tell me about it, and if you aren’t, tell me why! I’m in a book club and I love it so much. Although the true number of members is much larger, there are 6-10 people who reliably show up. There’s no reason we don’t have men in our group, we just don’t.
* * *
So what I’ve learned is that my first post each month is usually quite banal; I need to take more photographs, since I included few of my own across the year and many more scrounged off the Internet; it was a rollercoaster year, with some real highs and some extraordinary lows. But it ain’t over yet, the fat lady sings in 14 days and 14 hours!
she’s a w-o-m-a-n, say it again.
Have you seen this huge print H&M ad?
Jerry Hall and her daughter, Georgia May Jagger
What catches your eye in this ad? I’ll tell you what catches mine, and it’s not the hottie daughter. I think she’s meant to catch your eye (and she does catch mine, secondarily, making me note her daddy Mick’s thick lips, and the pout that’s surely meant to exude sexiness), but it’s Jerry Hall — 55-year-old Jerry Hall — who catches mine. When I look at her face, she’s saying to me, “That’s right, I made this gorgeous girl, she’s mine, I did that. Me.” For my money, she completely trumps her daughter, who appears unformed and like a pupae. Maybe that’s just 53-year old me gravitating to my own, but I don’t think so. I think Jerry Hall is one of those Big Women, the kind that exudes herself, the kind whose confidence is a thing unto itself, the kind of woman who feels like a Professional Woman, while I feel like I’m still in amateur standing, wondering when I’m going to feel like a grown-up, and wondering when I’ll feel comfortable with the word woman for myself.
And she’s a Texan, too, that Jerry Hall. Born in Gonzales, a dusty little town in the south of Texas, she grew up in Mesquite, a suburb of Dallas-Ft. Worth, which explains her particular twangy accent, and her big blond hair. I really love this ad, and love what I see in her face.
Me, I’m sporting quite a huge blister from my Sunday night boiling soup on my hand episode.
and it's worse than it looks
Here’s my public service announcement message just for you: Never pour boiling tomato soup on your hand. It will hurt you, a lot.
From their website: “Spellbinding short stories by established and emerging writers take on a new life when they are performed by stars of the stage and screen. Whether we present stories around a lively theme, the favorite works of a guest author or a special collaboration with a museum or publication, each Selected Shorts event is a unique night of literature in performance. Hosted by Isaiah Sheffer.” LISTEN!!
If you love stories, you may already listen to Selected Shorts — either at Symphony Space, if you live in (or visit) New York, or on the radio (or streaming online), as I did for many, many years. There’s something so special about listening to someone read or tell a story, and I never outgrew the pleasure of it. One of my favorite memories is from the summer I had a new spinning wheel and I’d spin while Marnie read aloud to me — Grendel, John Gardner’s wrenching version of the Beowulf story, from the point of view of the monster. So a couple years ago, still relatively new to Manhattan and constantly dazzled by it, I bought an annual subscription to the Selected Shorts season, and loved going to all the performances. Now I pick and choose, and last night I went to the show called NOLA: Jazzy Tales from the Big Easy. I adore New Orleans, and have been there more times than I can shake a stick at. Here’s the program:
what a lovely menu!
Michael Cerveris
Of course the best part is sitting in the dark listening to the stories, and that’s worth the price of admission. But it’s also just fascinating watching the performers, some of whom perform. Some act the hell of out the piece. Some read it. Some are overly precise in their diction, some are loose and jangly. Michael Cerveris threw himself into reading the chapter from A Confederacy of Dunces, giving Ignatius a deep, slow booming voice, and the other characters quite different voices. He has a lot of familiarity with New Orleans (real being-there familiarity) and got the accents just right. There’s more than one accent there, and he nailed them, which gave me a lot of pleasure.
Patricia Clarkson, so luscious
Patricia Clarkson’s mother “runs New Orleans,” she said, and she grew up there. She’s got that deep, lush, drawly accent, you know, so I figured her readings would be great. She’s one who acted the hell out of it. Before she started, she suddenly took a wide, firm stance as if facing the microphone for a fight. When she started to read the Bukowski, she shifted her stance entirely. She was quite dramatic (big surprise there), raising and lowering the volume of her voice quite a bit, and her facial expressions were fluid and exaggerated. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes it felt a bit much, but I was definitely engaged. I just love hearing her accent, no matter what.
Clarke Peters -- loved him in The Wire, and also in Treme
Clarke Peters was gorgeous, elegant, and with such a deep beautiful voice it was a joy listening to him. I thought he was the best of the night. He really just stood there and told the story of the man trying to teach New Orleans kids how to play jazz, acting out what was necessary, singing the singing bits. He wasn’t flamboyant but he was in it. He also really nailed the accents, and I could close my eyes and listen to him and feel like I was back there. I could hear things that he wasn’t putting into the story, because what he did put into the story was so full. I wish he’d been the last reader of the night, it would’ve been such a lovely place to end. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.
Amy Ryan, loved her in everything she's ever done
Still and all, it was a wonderful evening of intense story. Listening required great effort; it’s not at all a passive experience, even though it seems so. With each performer, the listener has to make a shift and learn how to hear. And listening to stories being read takes more effort, there’s a period of adjustment at the beginning where it doesn’t make sense — true of just reading short stories, too, sometimes.
And thus ends the first of my fantastic NY nights. Next up: Friday night’s Winter Solstice Concert at St John the Divine. It’s so delicious having such great things to look forward to.
Nothing against being taught about things, but finding your own way can be awfully wonderful.
I don’t mean it’s pleasurable to be ignorant, or to stay ignorant, but there’s a real pleasure in being ignorant about something and just finding your own way in. In some ways, I’m so glad to have the exact background I have; I come from uneducated and ignorant people, most of whom took great pride in both those things. I didn’t grow up with books and educated discussions about anything, though I was an obsessed and voracious secret reader, myself. I had to keep it a secret because it infuriated my mother. So I read the things that gave me pleasure, without any knowledge about the things people should read.
After high school I didn’t go to college, I got married and had my children, but continued reading the things that made me happy. I read Homer and Dante, and all of Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s and Faulkner’s books, when I was 23 years old and home with my first baby, Katie. I read those mostly because I loved them and they made my brain vibrate, but I read them partly because I had a sense of my own ignorance and felt ashamed of it. I felt ashamed of the way I spoke….not my accent, but my grammar, my syntax. I grew up hearing “I don’t want none of that,” or “We ain’t got none.” Because we moved so much (occasionally as many as 6 times in a school year), I always seemed to miss the unit on grammar. Either they’d just completed it before we moved to a place, or we were just about to begin it and we’d move away. So I read partly to learn how to speak.
And I came to poetry with the same ignorance. Complete and absolute ignorance of it. I’ve never taken a poetry class, never learned one thing about the mechanics of poetry, the jargon of poetry analysis. I don’t know the members of the academy, I just know poets I’ve found and liked. Are they famous? I don’t know. Are they well-regarded? Beats me. Are they holders of chairs, winners of prizes and awards? No idea. I’m completely ignorant about poetry, except for my understanding of what I see in a poem, and my deep understanding of what it makes me feel.
But great poetry is great poetry, and it turns out that poets I’ve found and loved are usually famous, well-regarded, holders of chairs and winners of prizes and awards. Last night I took a poem by Richard Wilbur to our monthly poetry group meeting, and turns out he’s a big deal. Who knew? Not me. (Here’s a lovely interview with him, highly recommended reading.) And here’s the poem I took last night; it moves me to tears, chokes me up. I was going to save it for my winter solstice post, or my end-of-year post, but it’s so much bigger than those things and it’s so urgent in my mind right now, I want to go ahead and share it. I hope you enjoy it too.
Year’s End
Richard Wilbur
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
Breathtaking.
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