Things I have said to my husband in the last 20 minutes that have stressed me out:

“You need to rethink and scrap or at least undersell that clown joke in your lecture.”

“No, you can’t pack your suit in your backpack.”

“If you’re going to draw a graph on the board, try to base it on fact instead of made-up statistics…or, yeah, sure, I guess you could just draw a cake.”

It’s undoubtedly funnier to me since I know the two of them, but I thought you might get a little laugh, too. And here, I keep it safe for myself, for when I need a chuckle. Happy sunny Tuesday, y’all!

But one thing that has hit me about the show is the importance of grace and dignity, and carrying on. Of course that’s a stereotype about the British as a people, but the points are made explicit and implicit in Downton Abbey in such a moving way. It’s something I’ve thought about for decades; I wish I’d been able to be more graceful as a mother, with less thrashing-around. And now, as there are events going on in my life that require carrying on, and helping, and enduring through hardship, I think about it quite pointedly.

In one episode in Season 2, Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, said that we must help each other carry on, it’s what we must do. And he said something about doing it with grace. I realized this is a value, not just a cultural tradition, or one person’s or family’s attitude. It’s a value. And it reflects a particular belief and orientation to life, that it is worth the carrying on. It reflects an ethical understanding of connection, that we are here to help each other carry on through difficult times, to celebrate with each other, to mourn with each other. That we’re intimately interconnected, because we cannot always carry on all by ourselves.

It’s hard for me to have a good understanding of myself in this regard, as it may be for everyone. We know our innermost snotty thoughts, and whiny thoughts, and the ways in which we wallow and feel sorry for ourselves. We know those things better than anyone else, because we don’t share all the unpleasant things that we feel ashamed of. But we may act differently, and we may be there for others in the way we aspire to be! So our own recognition of our secret thoughts may lead us to misinterpret ourselves overly harshly. I am currently engaged in trying to help someone carry on, and it’s hard. It’s lonely, it’s difficult, it’s taxing, it’s draining. I want to do this with as much grace as I can, and I want to help this person endure it with as much grace as possible. Am I successful? I don’t know. I am feeling sorry for myself, and feeling annoyed, and aggravated, and I bite my tongue, and I sometimes want to shake the poor person I am trying to help, I want to say “come ON.” I feel petty as I desperately long for someone to take care of me for a while, for someone to surprise me with a thoughtful moment designed solely to lift my spirits, to help me.

Perhaps this is just human, this is just me being human, and the important thing is the degree to which I manage these things myself, manage these needs myself and ask for help from others, and just be there and support and help the person I’m longing to help, with grace and dignity and focus on the importance of carrying on. I think of the great AA line: “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.” I try to imagine that the people I admire who do carry on with grace are also troubled by these kinds of inner thoughts, that they also whine and indulge in self-pity in their minds, but that I just don’t know it……as I hope the person I’m helping doesn’t know of my own troubled thoughts.

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.

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.

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.

Merry Christmas Eve, y’all!

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!]

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.

Will peeking out from behind his 'bone

As I stood there waiting for the train, listening to the beautiful music, I wondered why I’d been so dreading it. Was there some kind of trombone stereotype I held? My son Will played the trombone in junior high, but I didn’t hold that against the trombone. (No instrument sounds good when the player is just learning. I played flute and piccolo, one of my daughters played cello and one played viola, I have a lot of experience with new musicians and it ain’t pretty.)

Why the bad attitude about trombones? Sure, there’s “76 Trombones” from the Music Man, but I loved that song! It’s not like they make a hard sound, like trumpets. They’re kind of loopy, slide-y, nice. When I got home I googled “trombone stereotype” and found this hysterical page with more funny information about trombone players than you’d have imagined existed.

Anyway, lovely beautiful trombone Christmas songs in the subway. Just one of the great surprises of life in Manhattan, and one more reason I love living here.

[bonus link: If I got you in the mood for The Music Man, click here for the fantastic scene Pick A Little, Talk A Little. I'm grinning. Baaaalllllzac.]

This list was prompted by walking behind a woman who was wearing a swingy hip-length wool cape — black and white herringbone — over black riding pants and boots. I nearly laughed out loud because I thought she was wearing a very silly costume, and then I realized it’s what she chose to wear today. When I was a young slump-shouldered girl, I wanted a floor-length gray wool cape (with a hood) in the most intensely-felt way. OH how I wanted that cape. My mother refused to get one for me, saying that I’d look like an old lady. And honestly, though I say this rarely, she was right. It was Texas, first. It was the late 1960s/early 1970s (I wanted this for many years). It just wasn’t done. Over these years I’d periodically think about a cape but never got past that, just thinking about it. I even bought that Folkwear pattern once, the Kinsale Cloak, but somehow never got around to making it. Again, TEXAS.

Seeing the woman on the street just now, I realized I’ve outgrown that wish. I have no desire to own or wear a cape, period. This is jarring to me, but it’s true. Remember how fantastic Meryl Streep looked in that cape in French Lieutenant’s Woman (Lef-tenant, for any of you Brits)? She kept my cape dreams going for quite a long time, but you really need to have long quays in foggy weather to make that look work as well as she did.

So farewell, cape wishes. And David Cassidy, and boxes of donuts, and Gobi fantasies. I’ve grown up.  And it’s just fine.