blue skies, smiling at me / nothing but blue skies, do i see. / blue birds, singing a song / nothing but blue birds, all day long.
I was taking a walk with someone a day or two ago who looked up at the beautiful cloudless sky and said “the sky looked exactly like this on September 11.” This time of year, in this city, perfect days with cloudless blue skies call that to mind, I guess. That kind of juxtaposition is often associated with tragedy, and I guess it just magnifies everything so much…..there we were, just having a good time, when out of the blue….
Anyway. It’s another gorgeous day, with cloudless blue skies, and I’m so grateful for it. My nasty-ass summer cold is finally starting to ebb, after a solid week, so good things seem even brighter. The sun is out, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you, even if your name isn’t Prudence. In honor of the beautiful day, I offer you two versions of musical blue skies. One version, Willie Nelson’s cover of Blue Skies, is a bluesy melancholy-tinged version and the other, ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky is right up your alley if you’re feeling sunny and happy. I aim to please, no matter where you may be emotionally!
Also! One sleeve down, and I’m super-motivated to knock the second sleeve out as fast as I can because I’ve got my Vodka Gimlet yarn coming, and I want to wear this sweet little cardigan while I can:
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- the band is 1×1 ribbing, to prevent the stockinette roll.
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- sleeve 1, woo-hoo!
wistful: Having or showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing; showing pensive sadness; a sadly pensive longing; full of yearning or longing; sad and thoughtful; longingly; sadly remembering something nice
I guess the general consensus is that people want to be happy. All people just want to be happy. We can get off on a side-rail and talk about what that means, happy, but let’s just say that we’re talking about the feeling of being happy. The happy feeling. It’s pretty great, I love the happy feeling. I can zoom straight away from happiness into bliss, without too much trouble. Certain songs make that happen before I know it — a Spice Girls song (shut up), Light and Day by Polyphonic Spree — and sometimes I’m just caught off guard by it, by a feeling of pure happiness.
My writing group meets once a month, and each month one of us is responsible for bringing three writing prompts, individual words, usually. A couple months ago, one of the words was joy and man did I take off on that. It’s so easy for me to feel joy, blah blah blah. I was shocked when the others wrote that they’re terrified of joy, that they don’t feel it, that it’s not in their repertoire. So happy, joy, bliss, all are really nice (for me anyway), I get them. But I’m not sure I’d say happy is my favorite feeling, as great as it is.
I think my favorite feeling is wistful, with a slight tinge of melancholy. It’s a deep feeling, with a lot of layers, and I like that about it. It makes me look backward, and it holds me fast in the moment. I like that about it, too. It focuses on happiness, on pleasure, but with a bit of darker edge, about the loss of it. There’s a huge soundtrack for it; I seeded an iTunes genius playlist with I Think It’s Going to Rain Today, by Randy Newman, and MAN! Wistful playlist deluxe! It’s chock-full of John Prine, Rickie Lee Jones, Annie Lennox, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams, kd lang, and Tom Waits.
It’s so perfect, the music fits this mood exactly. Do you like wistful? I sure do. Even though I’m feeling wistful, I have a lot of great travel ahead of me. A trip to see Marnie and Tom, then a trip to Vietnam and Borneo, then a trip to see Katie and Trey, all before my birthday. Those trips are exciting and I look forward to them, but for now I’m going to nestle into wistful and enjoy that lovely feeling for a while.
it’s a small world after all / it’s a small world after all / it’s a small world after all / it’s a small, small world, dadgummit.
What are the odds:
Within 7 minutes, people in Brussels and Oregon both googled dadgummit and ended up with me. It’s a small world after all. But then — somewhat frighteningly — this, a few hours later:
words to live by — not mine, they belong to other women….and the rest of us.
I need to bookmark this post for myself, because it’s filled with words that mean a lot, with ideas and concepts that I want to return to again and again. Do you know Anne Lamott? You’ve probably read Bird by Bird (if you haven’t, you must). She’s an incredible writer, and I wish I could hang out with her. She wrote this piece that was published on Oprah’s site:
Becoming the Person You Were Meant to Be: Where to Start
We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren’t? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?
Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
Oh, yeah, and whenever I could, for as long as I could, I threw away the scales and the sugar.
When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he’d make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he’d imagined, he’d paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn’t, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.
I can’t tell you what your next action will be, but mine involved a full stop. I had to stop living unconsciously, as if I had all the time in the world. The love and good and the wild and the peace and creation that are you will reveal themselves, but it is harder when they have to catch up to you in roadrunner mode. So one day I did stop. I began consciously to break the rules I learned in childhood: I wasted more time, as a radical act. I stared off into space more, into the middle distance, like a cat. This is when I have my best ideas, my deepest insights. I wasted more paper, printing out instead of reading things on the computer screen. (Then I sent off more small checks to the Sierra Club.)
Every single day I try to figure out something I no longer agree to do. You get to change your mind—your parents may have accidentally forgotten to mention this to you. I cross one thing off the list of projects I mean to get done that day. I don’t know all that many things that are positively true, but I do know two things for sure: first of all, that no woman over the age of 40 should ever help anyone move, ever again, under any circumstances. You have helped enough. You can say no. No is a complete sentence. Or you might say, “I can’t help you move because of certain promises I have made to myself, but I would be glad to bring sandwiches and soda to everyone on your crew at noon.” Obviously, it is in many people’s best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours—and your back’s—and the whole world’s, to proceed.
And, secondly, you are probably going to have to deal with whatever fugitive anger still needs to be examined—it may not look like anger; it may look like compulsive dieting or bingeing or exercising or shopping. But you must find a path and a person to help you deal with that anger. It will not be a Hallmark card. It is not the yellow brick road, with lovely trees on both sides, constant sunshine, birdsong, friends. It is going to be unbelievably hard some days—like the rawness of birth, all that blood and those fluids and shouting horrible terrible things—but then there will be that wonderful child right in the middle. And that wonderful child is you, with your exact mind and butt and thighs and goofy greatness.
Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. It would be very nice for nervous types like me if things were black-and-white, and you could tell where one thing ended and the next thing began, but as Einstein taught us, everything in the future and the past is right here now. There’s always something ending and something beginning. Yet in the very center is the truth of your spiritual identity: is you. Fabulous, hilarious, darling, screwed-up you. Beloved of God and of your truest deepest self, the self that is revealed when tears wash off the makeup and grime. The self that is revealed when dealing with your anger blows through all the calcification in your soul’s pipes. The self that is reflected in the love of your very best friends’ eyes. The self that is revealed in divine feminine energy, your own, Bette Midler’s, Hillary Clinton’s, Tina Fey’s, Michelle Obama’s, Mary Oliver’s. I mean, you can see that they are divine, right? Well, you are, too. I absolutely promise. I hope you have gotten sufficiently tired of hitting the snooze button; I know that what you need or need to activate in yourself will appear; I pray that your awakening comes with ease and grace, and stamina when the going gets hard. To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.
AMAZING. And this post, ‘it’s not going to turn out the way you thought,’ also true and wonderful, because very little happens the way you plan, or turns out the way you thought it would. And it’s ok. And this post, how to battle the blues, is about facing the “is this all there is?” feeling and making some changes.
And finally, this image, from this site:
Today I’m so grateful for the women who wrote all these words.
The nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, best-sleep-you-ever-got-with-a-cold medicine
Today I express my deep and unending gratitude to the creator of NyQuil (I actually know the daughter of the man who created it!). I hate this stuff with a burning passion and I’m enormously grateful for it.
I can’t take the drinkable version. Can’t do it. Ask any of my kids, they’ll verify this. I used to pour the little cup, hold it, and start the drama: “OK, I’m going to do it now. OK, here goes. I’m just going to drink this now. 1, 2, 3, ok, here goes. One minute. Ok, now I’ll do it. I’ll drink it now. OK, here I go, I’m going to do it this time.” AND ON AND ON. Such a baby. I could keep that up, without one bit of shame, for half an hour. And each time I said OK, I really meant it, OK, this time I really am going to drink it.
The thing that made it so good and so awful was the high alcohol content. I do not drink hard liquor, can’t bear to be in the presence of it, that smell, ugh. NyQuil tastes chemical green, and the alcohol forces a shudder. But of course that high alcohol content is what knocks you on your butt, what makes you sleep so hard despite being sick. They changed the formula quite a while ago and reduced the alcohol content, so while it still tastes awful, it doesn’t knock you out to the same degree.
Now, thankfully, it’s available in capsule form and I took two last night and slept like a log, didn’t cough all night, didn’t wake up due to my nose doing whatever it wanted to do (run? clog up? all at once!). So thank you, Dr. Hainer, for inventing such a wonder drug.
I made tremendous headway on one of my cardigan sleeves; just another inch or so and I’m ready to do the little ribbing. I’ll take a photo when that sleeve is done. SO CUTE.
“I’ve had enough surprises, it’s better if I’m the one doing the surprising.” Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
I KNOW — Eileen, not Irene, but it’s in my head. Apologies if it’s in yours now. So far, at my place anyway, the hurricane is a big fat ‘meh.’ Some wind, sure, some rain, but really? Really? This is worth closing the subways, closing all the stores, evacuating thousands of people, taping up windows? There are leaves and small branches on the street in front of my apartment — see that often enough with regular storms, and frankly I often see worse — and that’s about it.
The worst part for me is having no voice, a shallow scraping non-stop cough, and goopy eyes. Yeah, that’s much worse. So no worries, loved ones who live far away and worry, it’s just a storm, and not even an interesting one.
Today I’m grateful for Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Well, grateful is one feeling I have about him. Others include envy, jealousy, awe, wonder, reader-love, and curiosity. This is a memoir about his father, really, who was a homeless alcoholic con man. His father wasn’t in his life growing up, except as a presence out there, a kind of vaguely menacing life lesson. His mother committed suicide when he was 22 — at least she didn’t leave a note blaming him, but like any suicide, it has a profound impact. He grew up to battle some of the same things his dad did, and he saw his life in parallel with his dad’s. If any of this is in your own history, I promise you’ll vibrate and cry with the way he describes things. If it’s not, you’ll read in the kind of awe people feel when they see a tragedy start to unfold and they can’t stop it. Here are some of my favorite passages:
I look at the photos, at Travis, look in his eyes as he speaks, somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow barbed wire. (Travis is a homeless guy at the shelter where he works.)
“I was unable to throw myself in the ocean,” she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms.
I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn’t a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.
Then there is a whole chapter that’s nothing more than the euphemisms and synonyms for being drunk. I keep thinking that’s it, but then the next one in the list is the most common thing ever, and it just keeps going. Tight. Tiddly. Juiced. Plotzed. Potted. Pie-eyed. Inebriated. Stoned. High. Swimming. I say off the wagon. I say gone out. I say a slip. I say in my cups. I say riding the night train. I say the drink. I say the bottle. I say the blood bank. I say drinkie-poo. I say a drink drink. A drink a drunk a drunkard. Swill. Swig. Faced. Shitfaced. Fucked up. Stupefied. Incapacitated. Seeing double. Taking the edge off I say. That’s better I say. Loaded I say. Wasted. Looped. Lit. Pages and pages of it, it’s stunning.
Nick Flynn is a poet, primarily. His father always said he was a writer, always wanted to be a writer, and Flynn actually is. This book is heavy, definitely, but not grim, despite the content. There’s a way he writes about his parents that is compassionate without being overtly so — he doesn’t ever say things like “but she did the best she could,” it’s more his emotional stance in describing their lives. It’s a remarkable book, one of those that grabs you and reminds you that there are amazing surprises to be found in the world, and this is one. I am so enormously grateful for him and this book, and for the power of words and art to transform a single experience into a universal one.
You look very fetching in that outfit! And your mitts ain’t bad, either.
For some reason, when you track down the Fetching pattern on ravelry, it appears to cost $10CAD. But it’s published in Knitty, whose patterns are free…hmm…so I just popped over to Knitty and sure enough, it’s free. I had this gorgeous yarn, Cascade Eco Duo, which is beautiful and very soft; I knew I wanted to make something that I’d wear right against my skin. I’ve gotten in this groove of second-guessing myself so much I start and frog things but despite that, I went ahead and finished the pair. In a few hours of knitting. The yarn is very lightly twisted (sometimes not twisted at all), and quite soft, so I don’t know how long the mitts will last but I do know I’ll love wearing them.
blocking on the cookie cooling rack
The yarn is 70% alpaca, 30% merino, and it has a very soft halo. I’m not sure how I feel about the odd little picot edging at the top of the mitts, but I just followed the pattern this first time.
you wouldn't believe how soft these are!
Today I feel very grateful for the rain we’re getting, even though we’re anticipating getting a lot, thanks to Hurricane Irene. I just keep thinking about poor Texas, withering in the excessive heat and long drought, and wish I could transfer some of the cooler air and buckets of rain over to them. I’m also grateful that I live on one of the high points in Manhattan — I don’t live in an evacuation zone, and for me it’ll probably just involve watching the wind and rain out my living room window. And knitting. For which I’m also grateful. Plus hot tea with honey, since I’ve lost my voice and my throat hurts. That’s a lot of gratitude on this rainy old day.
I think I’ll try to finish one of the sleeves on my little red cardigan and get the 2nd sleeve going. I want to wear it, it’s just adorable…..you’ll see! Stay comfortable y’all, whether that means cool for my Texans, dry for my New Yorkers, or whatever it means for you.
“Sickness shows us what we are.” ~Latin proverb. Apparently I’m a whiner.
Winter colds are miserable, but a summer cold has its own form of ick. The heat makes sneezing and watery eyes feel worse, I think, and the fact that everyone else is cavorting and frolicking around — as it looks to the sick person — just adds a log of ‘unfair!’ to the fire. Yes. I have a summer cold. Boo hoo, poor me.
Today I’m very grateful that I work at home, that I can work at home, that I have enough (but not more) work to make it possible for me to do this. Going down into steaming summer subways isn’t much fun anyway, but with a cold it just feels way too wrong, universe. Way wrong. Instead, I get to sit on the couch, read an interesting manuscript and try to make it even better, drink tea, adjust the air conditioning to meet my changing hot-cold status, wear comfortable clothes (and not wear uncomfortable clothes), moan a bit, and nap if it strikes me. That’s a big thing to be grateful for, so I pause here and say that.
Achoo.
Strangers in the night / Two lonely people, we were strangers in the night / Up to the moment when we said our first hello little did we know / Love was just a glance away, a warm embracing dance away….TED SPINK.
It was popular in 1966, when I was 8 — Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night. Of course, it’s been popular ever since. It’s a great song, kinda swanky, kinda sexy, real Frank. When I was about 9, and my sister about 7, we made up our own lyrics that (looking at them now) really reflected a lot about our family. I used to remember all the lyrics, but all I remember now is this:
What will Johnny think
When he finds out that I am going with Ted Spink.
He will think that I am just a big rat fink
Oh I need a drink
Darling you can’t do this to me, I am feeling so-o gloomy….
It makes me laugh now….oh I need a drink, yeah, heard that one a LOT. Infidelity, oh yeah, heard that a lot too. But still, it’s awfully funny. Ted Spink. Really.
We sang that song everywhere we went, in high voice. The things kids will tell about their families, and so innocently. When Katie was a baby, there were these two little girls who lived a few houses down, who loved to come over and hold baby Katie. I guess they were 4 and 6, something like that. One day they were telling me these very long stories about how their daddy likes to take baths with their mommy. They couldn’t be distracted by popsicles or by my subject-changing efforts, they really just wanted to talk about their own family, which seemed perfectly normal to them.
I don’t even know what unlocked the Ted Spink lyric the other day, but I’ve been smiling ever since.
you’ve got to be thankful for the tiniest things if you want to be regularly happy.
DG1 is my code construction for Daily Gratitude, the first entry. I read a little thing that said ‘gratitude turns what we have into enough’ and I kind of liked that. My life is quite bumpy right now and filled with some bumpy backroom drama, so I think a little dose of reminding myself of all the good stuff in my life will help keep me on track. And I think it’s important to be specific (if only to give me plenty of things to focus on!) — in other words, not “i’m grateful for family” but “i’m grateful for Katie” knowing that “i’m grateful for Marnie” and “i’m grateful for Will” and all the rest will follow.
So here’s my daily gratitude, as specifically as I can make it. It’s a small one. Today I’m grateful for English breakfast tea. I’ve long been a coffee drinker; in my early 20s I drank 8 pots a day…my head hangs in shame over that one, that was kind of nutty and not good for me. I worked for a consulting firm in Austin where the norm was to work 18 hours/day, 7 days/week. We had to pay for our coffee, marking each cup on the honor system notepad. But one other person and I drank so much ours was tallied by the pot. BAD NEWS, man. After I went to Turkey in the spring and fell in love with Turkish tea, which was always sweetened with a sugar cube, I thought I’d try to cut back on my 2 cups of coffee each morning by drinking one cup of tea, with a light sprinkle of sugar.
Yesterday mid-afternoon I got a hankering for coffee and drank one cup and OH MY I’m not used to that jolt of caffeine any more! My heart pounded and my hands shook and I felt so jittery. So I’m very grateful for my morning cup of tea, which doesn’t make me feel bad, allows me to continue my morning practice of having a hot cup of something to drink, and delights me with its flavor which has always made me think of oatmeal. It’s a small thing to be grateful for, but isn’t that the point?
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~Thomas Mann
the dreaded blank page
No one professes to love words more than I do, I’m pretty convinced about that. Not only am I paid to read and write all day long, my graduate research focused on the words we use and what that means about us psychologically, I’ve been a voracious reader since I was 3 years old and had my own library card, and I write a lot. Here, now and then, very long emails to friends, a bit of poetry, and some personal writing. Also: I say I am writing a memoir.
I believe in daily writing, and read The Artist’s Way back in the 80s and imagine that doing morning pages is a brilliant idea. And since I know the research about the striking power of doing regular stream-of-consciousness writing, I think it’s not just brilliant but great for you in every way, physically, emotionally, psychologically, creatively. I adore Anne Lamott’s exhortation to write shitty drafts, and think that’s so liberating. That’s right, this one is expected to be shitty! I can do that!
I want to be a writer, I think it’s the most exalted thing to do. Books saved my life as a young girl, giving me a way to imagine other possibilities than the life I was living. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gave me the idea of searching for sanctuary, even if you’re a hideous outcast. Life saving. No exaggeration. If I could write words that could give someone that kind of thing, well, I can’t even imagine that.
And now, reality:
“Tomorrow morning I’m going to do morning pages.”
I’ll just go through my Google Reader this morning and do that tomorrow.
“Just write a shitty draft of a few paragraphs and see where they go.”
I think I’ll make some tea and look at the NYTimes, I’m just not in the mood to do that right now.
And so on. And so forth. Etc, etc, etc. One of my clients has written a really incredible book, so exciting and vivid and creative, and I feel lucky to be working on it with him. I’m kind of in awe of how he came up with it. He tells me it’s a kind of job, it’s work, he doesn’t wait for ‘inspiration,’ he just works at it, keeps working on it. Another of my brilliant clients (interview with her here) says writing is misery, she does it every day. I read an interview with a writer this morning, who said the way you get better is by putting your butt in that writing chair every day and just writing. Of course I know that. And she made a little video of a song she wrote which includes the point that you just have to “push that c^*ksucking boulder up the motherf^*#king hill”. Go Nike and Just Do It.
I found a website called 750words (http://750words.com/) that presents you with a totally blank screen and your words are counted while you type, at the bottom of the screen. So of course I signed up and wrote today’s 750 words (which translates to about 3 pages). What did I write about today? This. My inability to write, and why I do this, by which I mean I don’t do this. We’ll see.
Do you stop yourself before you start, like I do? How do you make yourself do it anyway? I’m looking for ideas.
Reunited and it feels so good / Reunited ‘cuz we understood / There’s one perfect fit and sugar this one is it / We both are so excited ‘cuz we’re reunited, hey-hey
I used to be a rabid checker of my Ravelry friends tab, to see what everyone was knitting, favoriting, queueing. It was part of my online fanaticism: check my facebook feed, google reader, NYTimes front page, ravelry friends. After my vacation to Laos last fall, I quit checking my friends tab. Why? I kept checking the others! I think I just felt some kind of overwhelm, like I couldn’t go back and see everything I’d missed so I didn’t check. That doesn’t make much sense, because I could just start from the day I returned.
Another factor, though, was a kind of satiation. How many more sock patterns, shawl patterns, sweater patterns, could I look at? How many more can I queue that are really all that different from the 172 currently in my queue? I’d look at them and kind of yawn, or feel tired: ah, but that one’s just miles of stockinette. Ah, but that one’s just another triangle shawl and too similar to my Ishbels. Yeah, but I know how that one would look on me (or its corollary: I am not sure how that one would look on me). And since I’m on a yarn-buying severely restricted diet, I had to go cold-turkey on my feverish following of every new madelinetosh colorway.
Anyway. I noticed this morning that I’ve returned to checking my friends tab, and feeling excited about the things I see. I spent last weekend knitting — all day Saturday and all day Sunday — and have returned to knitting while I watch tv. Finishing my byzantine traveling woman probably helped; Janna taught me that the cure for a knitting slump is an FO, and it worked again. I’m on sleeve #1 of my little red featherweight cardigan and I’m enjoying working on my KtyKozue, though the yarn is kind of hard and hurts my stranding finger. When I hit the long middle of pure stockinette I may bog down, but it’s an enjoyable scarf to knit:
I know, it looks like a grinning face or something. Zen Garden Sea Lace yarn, Kozue scarf, combo suggested by dear Kty
The most visible sign, to me, that my love of knitting is returning is that I have already bought the pattern and materials for this year’s birthday sweater. Last year, Kelly gave me the Dark & Stormy pattern (Thea Colman) which I knitted with madelinetosh vintage, in Baltic. I enjoyed the pattern so much that when I saw the newest one – Vodka Gimlet – I knew it was the one.
Vodka Gimlet, photo from Rav
And for the first time ever, I’m even using the recommended yarn (The Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted), in this gorgeous emerald color called Oz. I thought about making it in dove gray, or even charcoal, but decided that the brilliant green would be spirit-lifting in dreary winter. The sweater’s cute, with some waist shaping (I may make mine a bit more shaped, since my waist is relatively small and my best body feature), and a cropped length which I never thought I could wear until I began my strength training and coincidentally lost some weight.
I’ve also been so tempted to make a stripe study shawl — I think I’m the only knitter in the world who hasn’t made one yet. I keep looking at my stash page, trying to come up with striking combos. I haven’t felt it yet.
How about you? Got any exciting fall knitting plans?
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change. ~Thomas Hardy
Some people hate the passing of time, but I kind of like it. I appreciate the finite nature of my life….easy to say, perhaps, since I’m only in the middle of it….and don’t feel excessive nostalgia for times past. The only exception relates to my kids’ childhoods. When I see photos, touch their little shoes I’ve kept, the smocked dresses I made, I feel their young presence with such immediacy my chest aches. I remember feeling exhausted and overwhelmed when I was actually in the midst of all that, and kind of wish I could do it again, with the grace I’ve acquired in the years since.
the cartwheel galaxy...cool, huh!
But otherwise, I enjoy seeing time happening. I enjoy feeling the shift in the air that means late summer is winding down, and one of these days that new feeling in the air, and the different way the light looks, will mean we’re in fall. One December I was standing at a crosswalk, heading home, and the Christmas tree stand was right there, crowded with people. A young mother and her little girl, maybe 4 years old, stood next to me while we waited to cross Broadway. I listened to the mother answering her little girl’s questions about Christmas, and I knew that my time to be that mother was long gone. Every year, every Christmas, there are new mothers with 4 year old girls standing at the corner. Every year a new wave. One of these years, my daughters will stand on some corner with their 4 year old children, and then one of these years, their time will be gone too.
Once I was crossing a quiet street near my apartment and had a strange experience where I felt like I’d seen time. It was like a special effect in a movie, the kind where the main actor is still and everything whizzes past in a blur, you know that kind of scene? It was like seeing people and the traces they left behind in each instant. Very neat, and it only lasted for a minute.
I don’t know what it is about impending fall that lends itself to this kind of thought, but it always happens to me. Life changes, that’s the main thing you can say about it. Life changes, I change, my interests change, my possibilities change, my circumstances change, people change, and now I’ve even changed from a coffee drinker to a tea drinker. That one is the most surprising of all. 
love is all you need. really, that’s true.
The most wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, eloquent women in the world.
How did I get so lucky.
how long has it been since I had a finished object! finally — meet my beautiful new shawl:
Traveling Woman shawl by Liz Abinante, size extra-large. Madelinetosh yarn (Tosh DK), colorway byzantine [rav project page]. I love this shawl, even though it took me forever to finish. I started it before I went to Turkey, way back in May, and thought I might finish it before/during the trip. Ha! Ha ha ha! Ha! There’s absolutely no reason it should’ve taken me this long, but it did. I’d like to get a photo of me wearing it….one of these days.
It’s my second Traveling Woman shawl (the other was with madelinetosh yarn too, actually, tosh merino light in a gorgeous silver gray color called Tern), and the biggest lesson I learned there was to use a much stretchier bind-off. I didn’t go with Judy’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off, though I kind of wish I had. Instead, I used this one and it’s better than my regular old bind-off, but probably not as stretchy as Judy’s. If I make another Traveling Woman shawl, I’ll try Judy’s.
I think one thing that helped me get this project finished was that I needed a break from stockinette sleeves in laceweight yarn. Yeah. Compared to that, this project was dreamy and oh-so-fast.
This has been a very slow year for FOs, I must say, and all of them have been primary colors — blue, yellow, and red, plus a vivid green. Time for some neutrals, I think.
Stay all night, stay a little longer / Dance all night, dance a little longer / Pull off your coat, throw it in the corner / Don’t see why you can’t stay a little longer. (Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys)
Big Daddy, 1970
I called my grandfather Big Daddy — his name was Harvey Estes Stone, so my name for him was definitely an improvement. I think he had a 3rd grade education, but it may have gone through 8th grade, I’m not sure. His mother, a tiny little wrinkled woman named Mammy, allegedly was in the middle of making biscuits for the hands, stopped, lay on the kitchen table and gave birth to Big Daddy, then got up and finished making the biscuits. The hands had to be fed, you know. I think he was one of 8 kids.
Anyway, I was the apple of Big Daddy’s eye, and there was no close second. He loved my sister and brother I’m sure, but I was the one. When I was a newborn, he walked me around in the middle of the night and when my parents found a place for us to move to, a couple hundred miles away, Big Daddy cried and said “Pete don’t want to go to no Kilgore.” (He called me Pete, obviously, and it’s still my most beloved nickname.)
I’d spend summers at Big Daddy’s, and they were the best times of my life. He said as few words as possible, and rarely cracked a facial expression. He was old-timey country through and through, and now and then if I asked him enough times, he’d get up and dance for me, and it looked like this:
He barely moved his arms, though. All the action was in the feet, and it always made me laugh hysterically. I think it tickled him too; I’d see a smile clinging to the corners of his mouth.
I’m just home from watching the Ebony Hillbillies at Lincoln Center, and they were magnificent. There was this kind of crazy-eyed woman in the crowd wearing a bright orange Brooklyn t-shirt dancing like Big Daddy used to, and it made me cry, it was almost like seeing him. If I let myself, I could break down in tears for missing him, and he’s been gone for 40 years. I hope to make that kind of connection with my grandchildren, whenever they arrive. Whatever else happens, they’re going to call me Pete.
Big Daddy and me, 1970
In summer, the song sings itself. ~William Carlos Williams
It was a beautiful morning — and tomorrow we’re expecting gloomy skies and rain — so I drove up to the Bronx, to Wave Hill Park. Wave Hill is a famous public garden in the northwest Bronx along the Hudson River. It started to get a bit warm as the sun drew directly overhead so I didn’t stay all that long, but it was lovely:
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- i love this color so very much
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- this was so vivid, it was almost neon
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- the gardener in the greenhouse
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- the palisades, across the Hudson River in NJ
Shortly I’m headed out to Lincoln Center to hear the Ebony Hillbillies — I heard them in the subway once and they are just amazing. Here, see what I mean:
Happy Saturday y’all! Summer is starting to think about getting ready to prepare to wind down, so enjoy what’s left!
And they called it puppy love / Oh, I guess they’ll never know / How a young heart really feels / And why I love [them] her so
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- fred mcmurray
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- david cassidy
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- dino — dean martin
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- perry como
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- cher
Welcome to my girlhood crushes. OH how I loved each of these people. David Cassidy — the object of many a girl dream (the most memorable: we were married, and we’d just bought a little house, and we were sitting on the grass in the front yard watching a plane fly overhead. I think I was just about to go get him some iced tea from the kitchen. I had exciting dreams.) and also many a missed dinner. Nothing was more important than watching The Partridge Family (except for maybe The Monkees, mmmm Davy Jones), certainly not dinner.
Cher, I used to fantasize that she was my mother. I imagined that she’d like me and we’d hang out together. I remember wishing that so hard it nearly hurt. Gosh, the idea that she’d like me, my mother, she’d like me. It still kind of takes my breath away. It wasn’t until I was 50 that I realized how much she actually looked like my mother, who was 1/2 Cherokee and who had long straight black hair. Ah, the mysteries of the psyche.
Dean Martin and Perry Como, so suave. (As my dad used to say, swayve and deboner instead of suave and debonair…he knew, he was just joking.) I wanted to live in their worlds, I imagined I’d wear a caftan and billow through the rooms that would have candles everywhere, and big windows, and beautiful views of the ocean.
Fred McMurray I just loved so much; he was kind of my precursor to Mister Rogers, I think, since I first fell for him on My Three Sons. To have a dad like that, too much even to fantasize. But then I grew up a little and discovered Double Indemnity (streaming on Netflix!), with Fred and Barbara Stanwyck, and my crush grew up.
How intense those crushes were, more than any other in life I think. They’re idealized and innocent and not tinged by the understanding of how life and grownup relationships can be/become. It’s amazing how fully the feelings can come back, especially for Cher and David Cassidy, for some reason. When I listen to a Partridge Family song, or see an old photo, my entire body remembers how it felt.
Who were your girlhood crushes….I know you had them.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” ~Mary Oliver. I don’t know, Mary, but I’ve got to find out.
reorient – orient once again, after a disorientation
I’m going to start by imagining that y’all are like me in this regard: You have aspirations to take excellent care of yourself in the widest variety of ways possible. Yeah, you’ll take good care of the physical, you’ll floss regularly and eat carefully and get bone-building exercise and moisturize and take enough care with your appearance whatever that means to you. You’ll tend to the emotional, you’ll value experiencing all the emotions there are and not stuff any away and you’ll express anger appropriately and you’ll take care when you feel low and you’ll spend your time with people who share themselves and make it easy for you to share yourself. You’ll take good care of the intellectual — you’ll read interesting or challenging material, you’ll value learning new things, you’ll engage in great conversation rather than empty small talk. You’ll tend to the spiritual, you’ll look at art and make it if you can, you’ll listen to music, you’ll go out and enjoy whatever natural setting you can, you’ll meditate or do whatever spiritual practice makes sense to you, you’ll practice mindfulness. Yeah, those are my regular aspirations.
I’ll start boldly, and to my surprise I even stick with some of it. Other bits, though, fall by the wayside, and then I notice I’m feeling gunky. The very coolest thing about life is that every single day is a new chance to do it. Every day. Every week. So after a royally crappy day, and after noticing that I’ve felt a very long line of royally crappy days, I reorient myself today:
- No more small, cruel, sadistic people who live to destroy others. As of today, I’m done with them. Life’s too short to have these people in my life, even if they live in another city. Hello, all my dear and loving friends who are such good people, and farewell to the rest.
- And on a lower scale but still dragging, no more people who just refuse to be happy, who refuse even the possibility of being happy. I’m sorry, I tried, and I wish you as well as you can tolerate, but this is a day of my life and I need it.
- Continue with the exercise (yay me!) and keep trying to eat more; this change is kind of rooted now so I just reconfirm it.
- I’ve been seriously neglecting the spiritual side of my life, and I think it’s a big part of my long run of gunk. Mindfulness, some meditation, and more walks in the beautiful park should help. And more effort at creativity, by which I mean creating something from myself. I so enjoy knitting, but I’m following someone else’s creativity. I need to birth some of my own.
- And finally, though I guess this is really just part of mindfulness, I reorient myself to remembering that this is a very precious day of my precious and brief life. How do I want to spend it? I don’t have an infinite number, this one is precious. Absolutely precious, and I am so lucky to have it. I get into a rut of forgetting that, of allowing the days to slip away with mindless junk, of allowing other people to take over to the point that I lose my connection to this fact. This is a day of my very very very precious life. It’s mine.
Thanks for the true knitting confessions, and for the advice. Kelly, I’m ordering a little stash of those red row counters, since that seems to give me the best opportunity to connect the count with the project. I could be prone to set the note card aside, or never find it when I pick up a project.
Gloom, despair and agony on me-e!
Deep dark depression, excessive misery-y!
If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all!
Gloom, despair and agony on me-e-e!
(bonus points if you know the origin of this lyric!)
What in the world is wrong with me. I imagine my knitting friends never do this, just as they always put in lifelines on lace, and always do the things they should do in their knitting……but I can’t seem to learn. I have no idea where I am on my traveling woman shawl. I didn’t make any kind of note about what row and repeat I stopped (in the middle of), and the last time I touched it was before I went to Turkey, back in May. I’m on a wrong side row, so that’s probably just purl across, and I imagine I can figure it out, but that’s precious knitting time lost! WOE IS ME.
Seriously. Why can’t I learn this lesson. If you knew how many times this happens to me, and how each time I smack my forehead and say “from now on, I’m making notes about where I stop!” and yet here I am, you’d just shake your head and walk away. Hopeless, I seem to be.
I’m halfway through one sleeve on my gorgeous little red featherweight cardigan, and itching to start Kty’s new scarf, but decided (a) I needed a brief intermission knitting something heavier than laceweight, and (b) I ought to work a couple rows on the traveling woman shawl every day so I can just get it done. And then I go and pull something like this. I’m sure y’all never do this. If you know some neat trick (other than the obvious….”make a note, Lori!”) I’d love to hear it! I usually just open the pdf on my laptop and set it aside so I can refer to it as I knit and watch tv, so I don’t have a paper copy nearby.
I think I’ll go drown my sorrows in a gorgeous garlicky lemony anchovie-ey homemade caesar salad. And maybe a little white vino. Yeah.
ma belle amie — Kty strikes again.
Yesterday I was reading a wholly compelling story in the NYTimes about a man who lives with schizophrenia; he has learned strategies to talk back to his voices and leads a difficult but full life. The whole article was moving, but there was one line that gut-punched me. At one point in his life, the man sat in his bedroom with a gun in his lap, ready to end his life. His wife walked in and said ‘I know you feel like quitting, but what if tomorrow is the day you get what you want?’ A long long time ago, in another life, I’d reached that point too and in a letter, someone said that we keep going because tomorrow we might round a corner and see someone standing there, holding flowers just for us.
I am by no means in that terribly hopeless place, but you know how life just kind of grinds sometimes? World news is terrible, your personal life hits a bump, something freaky happens like you get a hug that breaks your rib, there are too damned many flies and crap it’s hot and muggy. It’s been a long time since you had fun, just some plain old fun. You’re in the grinding uphill part of the rollercoaster, and have been for quite a long time. Nothing’s wrong really, nothing’s terminally bad, there’s plenty of hope lingering in the corners, it’s not like that, but boy. Grind.
Zen Garden Sea Lace -- and why yes, dear Kty, I do think it would be gorgeous!
Today’s bouquet of flowers was brought to me by my favorite living Parisian, Kty, who happens to be on holiday right now. We’ve never met in person, but if you’ve read this blog for long you know of her because she shows up in comments and in posts (like me, her birthday is in November so she feels like my sister or something). One of these days I’m going back to Paris and taking that lovely woman out for a glass of wine or two or three. I just got an email from Kty asking me if I didn’t think a certain pattern (Kozue, which she gifted me) would look beautiful in one of the yarns in my stash, the one shown to the left.
Oh, the many things about her email that transformed my day. The thought behind it, I’m just grinning and feeling like maybe the world is ok, despite all the awful news (note: must stop reading the NYTimes). Maybe we hold each other up, maybe we give each other little smiles, little nudges, and it helps hold the world together. The tiniest things can be just the thing someone needs; I always know that but I don’t always remember it.
I’ll cast on asap and will post a WIP photo. Tonight I’m having dinner with two friends, one of whom is moving back to the UK (boo), and tomorrow night’s my poetry group, but my fingers will be itching to get going. Merci beaucoup, Kty.
we all need one another. Listen to Asa.
For Sunday morning, when the news of the world is nothing but horrible, when everything seems like it’s going to hell, when someone needs to do something, please. This Asa song came on while I was hemming an ao dai I bought in Vietnam a few years ago and it brought me peace and relaxation. We don’t have to do a 360, let’s do a 180. Drop your guns and your swords. Come on.
If you do not let my people go, I will send swarms of flies on you and your officials, on your people and into your houses. The houses of the Egyptians will be full of flies, and even the ground where they are (and fly pesticide won’t work). — Exodus 8:21 (with an amendment)
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. Weevils? For the last year, every other bag of bread flour I’ve opened has had weevils in it. It makes me mad, a brand new bag of flour, but they don’t creep me out. I’m not crazy about cockroaches, or their gigantic Texas cousins, the water bugs, and like them to be gone immediately please. They’re so ubiquitous in Austin, living in the leaf litter, that you just have them whether you like them or not. I was in the shower once and saw one crawling on the far wall of the shower, CREEPY, and though I didn’t want to, I kind of had to turn my back for a second and when I turned back, it was gone. WHERE WAS IT????!! That was one of the fastest showers I ever took.
But flies, I really really really detest flies. In the south, there are screens over the windows so you can open them without becoming fly infested. They might dash in when you open the door (“shut the door, you’re letting flies in!” I always heard as a kid), but that was it, really. Up here, in NYC, there are no screens. Can you believe that? No screens. And since we keep the windows open whenever possible, year-round, we live with flies. Most of the time, it’s the annoying one or two, but once a year every single year, there is a fly infestation of near-biblical proportions. A plague.
Where do they come from? No idea. Yesterday I was wondering if there was something dead in the walls, a rat or something (happens in a 112-year old building in a rat-infested city), but I’d have smelled that. Nothing smells bad. There is no food left lying about, there is no obvious origin for them, but my apartment is absolutely filled with flies. Two days ago I used half a can of spray thinking that’d get them. And indeed, they started walking pretty slowly, easy enough to swat a bunch of them. The next morning I was shocked not to see dead flies everywhere, I thought surely the morning would be spent cleaning them up. But no, absolutely no dead flies. Just a lot of flies walking around, a lot flying, and a giant swarm in one room. So at the end of the day, I used an entire can of fly-specific pesticide, fumigated the living room which is closed off from the rest of the apartment, and left. Spent the night closed up in the bedroom. Expected to see dead flies this morning……..nope.
What the hell??! These flies are not only completely resistant to pesticide designed especially for flies, they’re either the fastest-breeding flies in the world, or they let their buddies in at night while I sleep. I’m feeling possessed and hopeless about it. Last year when this happened, the pesticide fumigation route worked, the first time.
Isn’t that gross?
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