Love
construct a character who is not present (800 words) – FICTION [mostly]
“Let’s go bounce our kisses off the moon.” This is what I told them every night, after their baths, that long summer in Virginia. The nights were so hot and steamy my glasses fogged up when we stepped out the front door, and my shirt clung to my skin within seconds. They were little, then, and always clean-scrubbed and shiny in their fresh pajamas and nightgowns. There was something fantastical to them about going outside in their nightclothes; they always looked at each other with sneaky little grins, as if they were getting away with something. It had been his idea, before he left, this whole bouncing kisses off the moon thing, as if they could throw theirs and he’d catch them, in the other hemisphere.
“Mommy, does Daddy feel our kisses the way you do? How does he get them?” they’d ask, in a hundred different ways. Grace was the oldest and knew this was just a game, but she went along for the sake of her little sister and brother, the same way she gave me a sideways smile when they’d talk about how clever the Easter bunny was to think of hiding their baskets underneath their beds – the last place they’d have looked. She knew what her dad was up to with this story, but the way she threw her kisses, the way she looked so hard at the moon as they flew away, I knew she was hoping that somehow they’d get there, somehow he’d feel her yearning for him and know that this one, this special kiss, was just hers, for him. Beth and Pete always gave a little jump when they kissed their hands and threw their kisses into the air. Beth was just the right age, really, believing in the magic her dad wove into the story. She’d turn to me with light all over her face, letting the kiss go on its way as she gave one to me, too. Pete was usually unsatisfied with just one toss and jump, so he’d push the kiss on its way with both hands a few times, each push getting its own jump. “Daddy is gone,” he’d say, and then he would run into the house, upstairs to his bedroom to play. “Yes, Daddy is gone,” I’d say softly to myself. “Daddy is gone.”
Saturday mornings the kids gathered downstairs, watching cartoons before breakfast. At the top of the stairs, I’d ask, “What shall it be this Saturday morning,” doing my best imitation of the silly-pompous way he used to ask that question, “waffles, or pannnnncaaaakes,” dragging out the last word as he did. “Pancakes! Pancakes!” they’d say, jumping up from the floor. The girls jumped once and ran to me, but Pete just kept jumping around in circles, singing, “pannnnncakes, pannnnnnncakes, pannnnncakes!” and waving his hands like little wings. Of course pancakes didn’t mean pancakes, it meant their dad’s pancakes, shaped like Mickey Mouse, or like a silly unicorn, or sprinkled with candy if we had it, or cupcake decorations. Nothing as boring as a plain round pancake with butter and syrup, there’s nothing fun about that, Daddy always said.
“Daddy makes better pancakes than you do,” Pete said again this Saturday. “Yours are too round and the legs are too short.” Grace glanced at my face and scooted her chair a little closer to mine, and asked if she could have another pancake, please. “I wonder what Daddy’s doing this morning,” Beth said. “I wonder if he got our kisses last night? I want to draw monsters with him, I want him to come home now.” Her eyebrows pulled together and a little pout started forming around her mouth. Touching my hand, Grace turned to Beth and said, “It’s ok, Bethie, I can draw with you this morning!” I looked away, out the glass door into our large backyard, littered with leaves and fallen branches from the recent storm. I sat still, unable to move my gaze, as the girls ran upstairs to get the jar of markers and the big blank book Beth and her dad filled with funny monsters, and palm trees, and dogs that waved their paws. I heard them turning the pages, turning clumps of pages, trying to find an empty space that hadn’t already been filled on Saturday mornings, before he left.
“Mommy? Are you crying, mommy?” Pete asked. I coughed a little into my fist and turned my shining eyes to him. “It’s OK, daddy will come back!” he said. Pete put his arms up, the signal he wanted to be lifted out of his booster seat, so I got up and lifted him out of the chair and watched him run upstairs, to draw with his big sisters.
Daddy said he would come back. He said.
Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. ~Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 10–11
Last night I had dinner with my dear friend. We met in the neighborhood for Thai food, and we’d kind of warned each other in advance that we weren’t doing all that well: she was feeling tired and sick with allergies (this warm winter we’re having in NYC is killing the allergy-sufferers!), and I’m worn down and exhausted and post-migrainey with just a hint of the blues (probably from my continuing inability to sleep). So we met with all this advance knowledge and with our appropriately low expectations. We also both believed that seeing each other would help us feel better. We always talk about our thoughts and feelings, our worries, our plans, we ask for and give each other advice, and we laugh and cry. It’s the best part of life, getting to have that with another person.
So we ate our dinner, and we laughed and cried, and we decided to have a cup of tea at her place rather than at the restaurant, since she lives just a couple of blocks from the restaurant. By the time we left the restaurant, I’d been crying a good bit, and my mood and heart were kind of heavy. (Note: that’s not a bad thing, it’s a relief to share sorrows with someone!) We got to her place with an express mission of making a caffeine-free cup of tea, so she opened her cabinet to see what variety of teas she had to offer.
[sidebar comment of note: we are both women of a certain age, though i am more certain than she is.]
ladies' tea
She said:
“Let’s see. I have FatBuster, Women’s Cycle, and Black Cohosh.”
I fell down laughing. I laugh this morning, remembering it.
She looked at me and she started laughing. I laughed seeing her laugh. I couldn’t stop. And my heart lightened so much.
And so another kind of friendship magic happened, another of those moments that are just a bit of crystalline joy — surprise! You can’t make them happen, they come in the midst of time together. This reminds me of the old “quality/quantity time” argument people will make about time with their kids…..usually as a justification for not spending much time with them, “it’s the quality, you know.” Yes, but quantity is critical too, because connection and life happens in a surprise moment like this, and you need a luxury of time, a spread of it, to give space for moments like this.
Lucky me.
edit: this is post #666. of all things. 
it’s hard for everyone — what matters is how you face it. right?
I’m quite late to the game on many things, including the pleasures of Downton Abbey. I didn’t know anything about it until I saw a facebook post Marnie made about Downtown Abbey, followed by a “stupid autocorrect” comment. Well, I couldn’t imagine what was misspelled – downtown is indeed spelled downtown. Finally I found my way to the program, and I’m consumed by it. Of course there’s the delicious wicked pleasure of the Dowager Countess / Maggie Smith (and I want to be a dowager something!). The dignity of Carson and Mr. Bates and Mary, the savagery of war, the consequences of war for everyone, the experience of war when it occurs where you actually live (unlike the US, which is always so removed from the wars we involve ourselves in; I wonder if we’d be so quick to cause war if it was going to happen on our own land).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Ava Gardner was the most beautiful woman in the world, and it’s wonderful that she didn’t cut up her face. She addressed aging by picking up her chin and receiving the light in a better way. And she looked like a woman. She never tried to look like a girl. ~Sharon Stone
Somewhat unusually, I’m editing an academic paper for a peer-reviewed journal, in a discipline that’s outside my own. This means the jargon sounds very dumb to me. And I quickly race to acknowledge that the jargon in my own discipline likely sounds dumb to people in other areas. This one is about cathected objects for Latin American identitarian thinking. I have to keep reading it over and over just to get it. I know you can add -ism to the end of anything, but Latin Americanism just doesn’t make sense to me, no matter how many times I read it.
And so I am here, avoiding work. It’ll bite me in the butt later this week, my procrastination, but whatever. How’s about a couple beautiful women?
beautiful 62-year old Mary Louise Streep
Where even to begin with this gorgeous photograph. The thing about Meryl Streep is her gaze, always, and it’s arresting in this photograph. But what grabs me and keeps me coming back to stare at her face is the softness, the creases, the tissue-ey luxury of her skin. And I love the way her lipstick has bled into the feathery lines around her mouth. I love this photograph, and I love these two things she said recently:
[2009] My daughters had helped me to stop worrying about my appearance over the years. I wasted so many years thinking I wasn’t pretty enough and why didn’t I have Jessica Lange’s body or someone else’s legs? What a waste of time.
[commenting recently on what she'd like people to take away from her newest movie Iron Lady about M. Thatcher] I would like to think that everybody that got on a subway and saw some old lady sitting across from them, that they would imagine that a whole huge life lay behind all those wrinkles, and that seemingly nondescript, forgettable [face]. I mean, there is almost nothing less interesting in our consumerist society than an old lady. Um … dismissed. We don’t make movies for her. We don’t give a damn. You can’t sell her anything, she doesn’t buy anything. But just the idea that everything — the whole panoply of human experience, births, deaths, struggles, joy — everything’s in there. And just to imagine that. That’s what I would hope.
It’s so funny the way our daughters help us grow; my daughter also helped me stop worrying about my appearance. Thank you again for that, Marnie.
And then here’s another true beauty. I confess to a secret about this one; you may be surprised by this (I always am) but I’ve been told my whole life that I look like Diane Keaton. Actually, I think it’s just that we both have big smiles and similar cheekbones, and I think we share a similar Golly, gee! sensibility. And I can’t tell you how similar my husband and I are to Annie Hall and Alvy Singer, but that’s a whole different thing.
gorgeous almost-66-year-old Diane Hall
Look at those gorgeous faces! I know they’re celebrities, with lives very different from mine, but there’s something that feels authentic about them and I love that they both put their beautiful 60+-year-old faces out for close-ups. I love that their faces show their ages, and I love that they both seem to recognize their own beauty.
I’m usually very surprised by the kinds of searches that bring people to my blog (someone in the Bronx always searches me by name, and I’d love to know who you are!). “Crazy Train” is a very common search — I used that in a post about a nutty subway trip — as is “woman with big feet” which takes people to a post I wrote about funny proverbs. And then there are the ones that freak me out a little bit, of a creepy sexual nature. I don’t want to type them here and increase the possibility that someone making that search could land here. Curiously, 95% of those searches originate from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. I counted. Over the last five days, you’ve arrived from these places:
such far-flung visitors! Hi, y'all!
No one from Australia in the last 5 days, and never anyone from Africa.
And finally, coming on the heels of my little corneal abrasion day o’misery: I have a second-degree burn on my left thumb. Sunday night I was in a happy frenzy of assembling all the goodies for a box to send to Austin, filled with Christmas gifts. I was making tomato soup in the kitchen and wasn’t paying close enough attention; I heard it furiously boiling over, so I ran into the kitchen and grabbed it off the stove. I’d placed my giant soup mug in the sink and I grabbed the handle and poured the boiling soup into the mug but somehow missed, and poured it all over my thumb. The whole thumb immediately turned a bright red, and the burn went down onto my hand. All night long I was in a lot of pain, and kept a baggie filled with ice on it. It blistered, and there are blisters underneath the blisters. It’s awful-looking, and it’s probably going to peel and who knows what will happen. At this point, as long as I don’t accidentally scratch it, it actually has no feeling at all. I can lightly stroke the thumb and I just can’t feel anything at all. The worst of it is on the knuckle, which will be nasty when it starts healing after the skin opens up. OY. It made me feel so old, having two painful accidents in three days.
The yarn came for Marnie’s Moby sweater today, and I finished Anna’s socks, so one of these evenings I’ll do the swatches. Not tonight — poetry group. Not tomorrow night — Selected Shorts at Symphony Space. Maybe Thursday.
Have a nice evening, y’all.
another one bites the dust! Two Amy Herzog sweaters in about 6 weeks’ time. Pret-ty, pret-ty, pret-ty good.
And….here it is! My new sweater, dubbed Laurayana, because Laura gave me the Ayana pattern for my birthday. It took me less than 3 weeks to make the sweater, from swatch to block. I really love it, though I may undo the hem facings and redo them in simple bind-off or something. I’m not sure I like the bulk there. But it’s flattering, and very comfortable, and it was a fun knit:
such great texture in that front panel
red in the sweater's hem, and in the sleeve hems, too! surprise!
really such a comfortable sweater to wear.
This is my first sweater knit in pieces, and the first time I’ve used Cascade 220 for a sweater. I’ll do both again, for sure.
Here’s my project page on ravelry, where I note a lot of details. And this leads me to a mini-rant, now that I think about it. I wish people would indicate the size they knit, and how much yarn they used! It’s also nice if they list mods, or problems they encountered, and I love to read notes about how the yarn wears with time. But at a minimum, I wish everyone would list the size they knit and how much yarn they used. This isn’t about comparing (ooh, she’s a 42!!), it’s about knowing how it’ll look in your size, and how much yarn you really need for that size. Good grief.
And with this, I suspect my long run of knitting posts will slow down. Though I’m nearly done with the deep ribbing on Audrey……
Have a wonderful Saturday, everyone!
that’s right, i’m droooling….droooooooling.
them's marrow bones, friend
My husband trekked out to Queens Chinatown to buy 40 pounds of marrow bones (half the price he could get them in Manhattan, so well worth the trip!). He does this every late fall/early winter, though I don’t think he used to get 40 pounds. It’ll eventually produce the most lovely, delicate beef stock that’ll find its way into his drool-worthy french onion soup, and his hearty cabbage soup, and even a rich lentil soup studded with the leftover ham from our Thanksgiving feast.
Today, though, is the kind of smelly day, though it carries hints of the great tastes to come. He’s been roasting the bones to get them that rich mahogany color, then he’ll simmer them for lots of hours. It’s good to do this when the weather is so cold because he can set the giant pots outside overnight so the fat can solidify and then be lifted off in a huge thick disc, leaving just the delicate stock. And oh my is it good. His french onion soup has so much flavor, you’d never ever think it was nothing but this stock and caramelized onions. No other flavors, and none needed — his stock is so rich and delicious. He makes his own croutons for that soup, and he uses the best cheese of course, but the star is the stock.
It’s cold and raining, and I’m about to head out for my downtown journey. As Laura said in her last comment, I hope I at least see something fun or strange, some great NY story! At the least, I’ll leave here with daydreams of soup floating around in my head.
like Van Morrison says: Put a smile on my face, get back in the human race, on a golden autumn day.
It’s one of those gorgeous, gorgeous fall days that make me so thrilled I live in this part of the world. We went out to enjoy the weather and the foliage (and the nice New Yorkers, who are all as happy-seeming as we are!), and my sub-mission was to take some photos of my newest sweater in the wild. Also, there was a 4-block green market near the Museum of Natural History that was a likely source of apple cider and cider donuts, and to be honest, that was the primary point of the excursion for me. Unfortunately, there were no donuts….boo….you know how it is when you get your mouth set for something. After that disappointment, we walked a couple blocks to that other park — Central Park. Since Riverside Park is my backyard, I tend to forget about Central Park. I should not do that.
central park, so moody
central park, so artistic
central park, such a destination
central park, so dreamy
And now, without further ado, here it is: my version of Thea Colman’s Vodka Gimlet, which I named Ozma’s Delight (my rav project page here). The yarn is Plucky Knitter Primo Worsted, which is merino and cashmere with a soupçon of magic.
my sweet, sweet Ozma Delight. I'll be wearing this one to death.
what's that behind you? yeah, that old trick worked on me.
There isn’t one thing I’d change about the sweater. I’m very very long-waisted, so I had to add a few inches before I did the waist detail; unfortunately, the sweater grew a bit so the detail doesn’t hit me at my waist. Fortunately, I still think it’s amazing-looking. I love everything about it, including the 6″ of ribbing at the cuffs. Of course you can’t see the orange hem that’s hidden on the inside, but you’ve seen that before, a few posts ago.
I figured out the details for my Laurayana sweater, so I’ve cast on and am working away. Knitting + reading + cups of Lady Gray tea = very happy me.
oh, y’all. i love y’all.
This is always my post-birthday caveat: I don’t go on and on about my birthday for reasons having to do with getting presents. I go on and on about it because I’m overjoyed to celebrate my life, a year past, a year ahead. When I was a kid, of course, it was about the presents, but at some point you really have the things you want (or can get them) so it’s not about stuff.
I thought about titling this post “the kindness of [not] strangers” but realized that you who I’ve met through my blog are more than [not] strangers. The feeling of warmth I get whenever we interact, the things I know about you — even if it’s just your most recent finished object, the things you know about me, the anxiety I feel if something is not going well for you, the comfort I feel from you if something is not going well for me, all that together made me ditch the post title, even though I liked it for itself.
This birthday was the best one I’ve had in the longest time, I can’t even remember. It’s not like it was filled with amazing once-in-a-lifetime activities, it was just truly wonderful, filled with connections to people I love, words from daughters that made me cry and feel so loved, time spent in a beautiful day. And in the midst of all that, I received a lot of sweet, thoughtful gifts that speak volumes to the generosity and kindness of the givers. You’ll be seeing some of these things again in future posts, I guarantee!
a cherry Shaker box, from my husband (and filled with yarn already)
lovely Parisian notebooks from Kty, whose birthday is today! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KTY!! My favorite living Parisian, by far. Coincidentally, the day these arrived in the mail, I'd spent the morning poking around bookstores and stationery stores looking for a new notebook for my purse. I found a couple but they weren't quite right, so I put them back and decided to look another time.
the pattern for Semele, a great scarf, a gift from Sara at Wool Durham (I'll call the project Triple S....Sara's Semele Scarf). I'm using my malabrigo sock yarn for this one, in a great orange colorway called terra cotta.
the pattern for Amy Herzog's Ayana sweater, from Laura, which I'll knit with a yarn in my stash that's also in Laura's stash, coincidentally, in the same colorway! I like that.
a perfect hat pattern, from Kelly -- A Hat for Eudora (because of the welts, cute name). I think I'll use my madelinetosh vintage, in baltic, leftover from my D&S which was a gift from Kelly last year. Nice.
the pattern for Scarpetta, by Kirsten Johnstone -- a second gift from Kelly. I HAD to buy yarn for this one .....
tosh lace, colorway: fig -- rich and gorgeous. Scarpetta will be gorgeous in this color!
And then one of my dearest friends gave me an Amazon gift certificate, which I used to buy Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, and Anna sent me The Arrival, a graphic novel by Shaun Tan.
Also incoming in the past week was a cowl I won on Andrea’s blog (Life on Laffer, check her out if you don’t already follow her!):
cowl, won from Andrea at Life on Laffer -- heavy, luxurious fabric!
My problem, with all this great incoming stuff, is the oldest one in the knitter’s book: WHAT TO CAST ON FIRST??
When you’re weary, feeling small, when tears are in your eyes I will dry them all.
I’m on your side….
My Katie girl loves music from the 60s. She always has. In junior high she wore a different Beatles t-shirt to school every day and could rotate for a couple weeks without repeating. You could name a Beatles song — any song — and she’d tell you which album, and in most cases, which side of the album. She goes to concerts as long as Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, CSNY, or any of those guys are on the ticket. So this afternoon, she emailed me with three youtube links to music she’s been looping all afternoon. She just saw Paul Simon in concert on Sunday so I wasn’t all that surprised by the songs, but I was happy to see the list: Sound of Silence, The Boxer, and Bridge Over Troubled Water. Those songs were popular when I was 7 or 8 years old, and listening to them makes me feel that year in my skin and muscles. Music is awesome that way.
The songs were performed live at Madison Square Garden when they were inducted into the Hall of Fame. I was loving, enjoying, remembering, re-experiencing, and just being lost in the music. But the 3rd one she sent, Bridge Over Troubled Water, was mesmerizing for a different reason. For the second verse, Simon comes out to sing a verse solo, after Garfunkel had sung the first verse solo. But the thing is, he didn’t have his guitar. It was just him, standing in front of the microphone. I didn’t think much about it, but then he started moving, moving his hands, moving his body, and it was really hypnotizing, like watching music in a physical way. Here, see what I mean:
See? Kinda cool. I love watching people make music. It was the only redeeming thing about Sunday’s not-klezmer-concert, watching the musicians making the not-klezmer music.
Back to Simon & Garfunkel for me. Thank you Katie!
the guy could handle the whole deal by himself. he didn’t need no stinking dinner partner.
Will had dinner with me tonight, to finish my birthday celebration. It was great — we ate at a diner in my neighborhood that has my favorite salad ever, of all times. He was still zinging around from his crazy busy day at work, so I chattered for a while to give him a chance to settle in and unwind. But sitting next to us was this very strange old man who was talking and gesturing — a lot, and loudly — to a dinner companion who just wasn’t there. He was lit, let’s just say it that way.
It was like getting a glimpse into the guy’s mind, because whatever he thought came out of his mouth, and it was influenced by the slightest things going on in his proximity. So when I took this picture of Will:
my crazy son who cannot take a picture seriously
the drunk dude at the next table started talking about cameras. He stopped the waiter and asked him about cameras, told him stories about an SLR he used to have that could only take great pictures. The waiter humored him for a second and then slipped away. Then the guy started talking about something else, and then he abruptly said MAMMY! while lifting his hand.
It alternated between being extremely annoying, kind of funny in a trainwreck kind of way, kind of sad, and back to extremely annoying. It hit annoying two times out of every four rounds through the emotions. Mainly he was annoying. Yeah.
Today I tried to take a new picture of my Wintry Mix sweater so you could really see it, since the photograph I took in the Catskills made it look like the shoulder was weird and rumply in a way it isn’t, really. It’s a very dark green and I was indoors, and it’s just hard to get a good shot of it. This is the best I could do; see the great cowl, and the beautiful shape? It’s a wonderful sweater if you’re in the mood for a bottom-up pullover.
Wintry Mix, by Amy Herzog (yarn: berroco blackstone tweed, in evergreen)
It’s a great sweater; obviously, I wear a very thin long-sleeved t-shirt underneath it for extra warmth and because it feels a little better. The blackstone tweed is 65% wool, 25% mohair, and 10% angora, and it’s just the tiniest bit uncomfortable for some reason. That’s not really right — it’s just a tiny bit more comfortable with a very thin shirt underneath. I really love the sweater, and can’t recommend the pattern enough. I changed it up so the collar is more a cowl than a big flat Peter Pan-type collar, and I love it that way. And Will approves — he’s been my fashion approver for a very long time.
green is katie’s favorite color, so i think of her with every stitch (like i need a reason to think of her….)
Well, of course I should be working — I’m up against a very hard deadline, and I didn’t work nearly as much as I should’ve when I was in Austin (who would! When you get to be with your beloved daughter so rarely, who’d spend that time working! Not me apparently.). I just finished one project and before I get going on the one with the hard deadline, I thought I’d show you some of the knitting-related stuff that happened last week, on my needles. Katie is making an adorable baby set for a friend — a sleep sack and hat — that look like The Very Hungry Caterpillar; when she posts pictures I’ll share them, it’s just so adorable.
But here’s my stuff. First, my gorgeous green sweater. I decided to add a little flash of color in the turned-under hem. The slipped stitch detail was great fun to knit, and the color makes every stitch a joy to work. I’m going to love wearing this sweater.
my Vodka Gimlet -- dubbed Oz Delight for my rav project page.
This is the yarn I bought for the hem. I used so little, I need to figure out a small project that’ll allow me to use up the rest of the beautiful yarn.
Manos del Uruguay, silk blend
And two skeins of Madelinetosh, tosh merino light:
tosh merino light, in rosewood
tosh merino light, in terra. i LOVE this color!
I’m truly nuts about that orange color. I would’ve bought a lighter neutral like antler if they’d stocked it at Hill Country Weavers. I want to make a Stripe Study Shawl, and I figured these two would be good additions to my small stash of tosh merino light.
I’m knitting the collar on my Oz Delight, and since it’s a narrow collar it shouldn’t take me too long. Then I “just” have to knock out the two sleeves, but I’m highly motivated so maybe it won’t take too long. I didn’t work on my little yellow featherweight at all, just not enough time in the days. What a great problem, too many wonderful things to do!
Now: back to work, Lori! SERIOUSLY.
i miss katie. i really, really miss katie. why can’t i be in two places at once??
The insane boiler heat is back — thanks, co-op board — so I have my cool weather/hounds of hell heat headache once again. I woke up at 2am covered in sweat, and it had nothing to do with hot flashes and everything to do with the hissing radiators. Of course we have all our windows wide open, trying to modulate the temperature.
I’m not ready to get back to my regularly-scheduled life, so I take a minute here to stall it a bit more:
- I put this on facebook so I would remember it — apologies, then, if you read it there. When I was in the Austin airport, the TSA agent was very chatty. I guess Texan trumps TSA, because she wasn’t grim and stern like they usually are. My turn came, and I stepped up to her little table and handed her my boarding pass and ID, expecting to be waved through after she scribbled on the boarding pass. Instead, she said “What’s your specialty?” Well! My immediate thoughts were I’m really good at being happy ….. I knit …. I make excellent bread …. and I just had no idea how to answer her, nor did I know why in the world she was asking me such a bizarre question. I thought maybe it was some kind of new TSA identity check, a person ought to be able to answer that immediately and if they can’t, maybe they’re not who they say they are. Then I ran through possible occupation answers I might give, but I never know how to answer that either: writer, editor, teacher, ah! Psychologist, I said. She smiled and said “It says Dr. on your boarding pass so I was just curious.” (p.s. if you’re on facebook, friend me! I’m ldh.ny)
- My cabbie last night was unusual. First, he was friendly and chatty, which is partly unusual. After he put my suitcase in the trunk and got settled in his seat, I gave him my destination. He said “Columbia.” “Yeah, near Columbia,” I answered. That’s good, I thought, since cabbies often misunderstand my address. Then he asked me if I’m a professor. I do teach undergraduate students, so the easiest answer was yes — and he just beamed. “How did I know!” he said through his big grin. He asked what subject I teach, and when I said psychology he said “Ah! I’m a very lucky person, I can ask you questions! You have a PhD?” When I said yes, I do, he said “I’m right again!” Then he talked a little bit about how arrogant Lindsay Lohan is, what’s wrong with her. He was so charming, seeing himself as such a lucky person, knowing so many things about me. It was a sweet ending to a sad travel day.
- One awful thing about missing my Katie is that now I know the fine texture of her day, I can so easily imagine what she’s doing at any given time. It’s only 8:30 in Austin, as I write, so she’s sleeping, but she’ll be up soon, and she’ll make Trey’s lunch. My chest aches with the missing her.
- My birthday is coming right up, this Sunday. I’ll be 53, which is startling because I think I’ve been saying that I’m 53 for the last several months. I always do this. The coolest thing is that Sunday is the day we change the clocks — spring forward, fall back — which means my birthday is 25 hours long this year. WHEE! And it’s stunningly beautiful weather, and it will be through the weekend:
look at that!
- I bought three gorgeous skeins of yarn at Hill Country Weavers (remarkable restraint, don’t you agree??), which I’ll photograph later. I also made a lot of progress on my Oz Delight sweater, which I’ll also photograph. Knitting post to come, then.
You who live your lives in cities or among peaceful ways cannot always tell whether your friends are the kind who would go through fire for you. But on the Plains, one’s friends have an opportunity to prove their mettle. ~Buffalo Bill
can't you just b-r-e-a-t-h-e?
So the thing is, I always know I love big old skies, big blue skies with clouds as far as the eye can see (and the eye can see pretty dang far; the old joke about the far north plains, the panhandle, is that you can see for 10 miles, unless you stand on a tuna can and then you can see for 20 miles). I always know and remember this, and I quite often miss big skies in Manhattan, even though I dearly love everything about Manhattan including the very tall buildings.
The thing I hadn’t remembered, though, was the loneliness of the plains. There’s a way it’s the loneliest feeling in the world, being on the plains. Maybe it’s the feeling of exposure, of being small in a bald landscape, the vastness of all that land and all that sky and just you, pinned in between. And it’s all kind of burned-up and scorched, here, after this brutal summer, so it’s even more barren. I expect one of Beckett’s characters to be standing just over there, trying to figure out the point of it all.
But it’s kind of heartbreaking, the loneliness of this landscape, and I forgot how much I love that. I was telling Katie that it’s safe to love it, since I’m anything but alone in this world, and I wonder how it would seem if I were really alone — maybe not so great.
The other thing I forgot was the incredible friendliness of people. New Yorkers are friendly (yes they/we are!) as anyone who’s been there knows; there is a stereotype that we aren’t, but it’s just that we’re very busy, and we’re friendly to you if you ask us something but we’re not that stop-you-on-the-street-and-chat kind of friendly. Katie and I had to make a grocery store run, and we finished checking out and I was headed for the door; I turned around and she was still at the cash register talking with the cashier and the woman bagging the groceries. The way they were talking, the ease and what they were saying (and how much there was of it!), made me think they all knew each other but they didn’t. They were just friendly. And what goes with that is a different sense of time — that the next customer is fine with waiting….as she was.
Katie has two adorable dogs — terrier mixes, Oscar and Penny — and they’re sweet and precious little beings, adding such a feeling of home to her already-homey home. Oscar is a little old soul for such a young dog. He loves to lay his head on a pillow, and he loves to be covered with a blanket. LOVE.
put the lime in the coconut and you feel better / put the lime in the coconut drink ‘em both up / put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning (listening to this with Katie right now!)
So life goes up, and things seem mostly good or even great, and life goes down, and things seem to be falling apart — nothing new there. I happen to be in an upswing right now, and it’s occurring to me how subtle the details can be, but how important they are to the overall temperature. Right now, the big things that contribute to my feeling that things are right in the world are travel-related. My vacation to Vietnam definitely helped, and now my time in Texas is a big contributor (of which more in a minute). But I woke up to two small-ish communications this morning that were much more boosting than their word count might’ve suggested.
I’m in a book group and a poetry group, and I just love them both for different reasons. My book group is filled with such interesting, wonderful women — the book is often secondary, and while I regret that a lot, the women are just so wonderful I don’t usually mind not talking about the book. I do mind, but gee they’re so great and I only get to see them once a month and I inevitably come away from the night’s meeting feeling kind of high and happy. My poetry group is also filled with interesting, wonderful women (and one similar man), but we stay tightly focused on discussing poetry, which thrills me. Really, how often in your life do you get to sit and talk about something like that — whatever it is that you particularly love? We actually talk about the poems we bring or write, we deconstruct them, plumb their meaning, see them differently. The poetry group members are very very smart (as are the book group members) so it’s high-wire fun. I brought the woman who organized the poetry group into the book club and last night was her first meeting — unfortunately, I didn’t get to be there, since I am here in Austin, but she wrote me and her note was one of the boosting things for me this morning. Her appreciation of the women in the book group, and her thanks for bringing her in, made me feel so great. My life is so rich with all these wonderful people, women (and one man) whose lives and intellect I get to share so easily.
The other communication that gave me such a boost was a comment left on a previous post. The commenter’s blog-related point spoke to her pleasure in reading my writing, which she characterized as genuine. Well! For anyone who writes, is there a better thing to hear? I love to write and have writing-related dreams that I constantly pull off the shelf, gaze at, and then put back on the shelf. The idea that someone takes pleasure in my words is so thrilling, it’s like an energy boost that shoots my little rocket into the higher levels of space. Her comment reminds me too that we are all kinds of things, big and small, to others and we’re not even aware of it. I mean something to my friends that I’m not all that aware of — you do, too. And you mean more to me than you know, you who read and also you who read and comment.
Now, to Texas. Yee-ha! As always, when I got off the plane at the Austin airport, everything in me settled down and relaxed as I walked through the terminal. The people look SO familiar. I did’t know any of them, but I might have! There is a Texas look, familiar at least to Texans. In New York, the general look (big old over-generalization coming) is Italian or Jewish. I’m neither. But I do look like the people here, and it’s more than bone structure in the face. And then they sound like me, too, double great! Not many have accents as thick as mine, but Texas shows up in certain words pretty reliably. Also, if you’ve never flown into Austin, you should know this so you can quickly plan a trip: LIVE MUSIC in the airport. There’s a stage set up and the band that was playing when I arrived was pretty great! Also, the food in the airport is not the normal airport fare. No Chili’s or Cinnabon or that pretzel place. Instead, it’s local restaurants, really good Mexican food, barbecue, Schlotzsky’s (a local sandwich place with uniquely great bread), a local ice cream joint. You step off the plane directly into Austin sounds and Austin smells.
The flight from Chicago to Austin was kind of neat. You know there’s that very friendly, midwest, Chicago way of being — people just seem not to be guarded, and to smile easily? Well, combine that with Texas and you have friendly squared (y’all do know that Texans are very friendly, right? DO NOT go by our politicians, please, who are assholes). There was so much laughter in the airplane, loud friendly joking by the flight attendants, it helped my weary bones, I’ve got to tell you. And then when we started our descent into the Austin area, it was shocking to see how dry and brown everything was. Nothing green to be seen anywhere, so sad and tragic. So much heat and fire, so little rain, so much loss.
The best thing of all, of course, was my daughter and her husband waiting for me. I ran to them and just felt such overwhelming joy. It sucks not seeing your kid very often. You spend all those years knowing nearly everything about them (though boy can you be surprised to learn the things you *didn’t* know!), being able to look at their faces every day and have a sense of how they’re doing, being able to care for them when they’re sick or tired or blue, playing games with them, laughing or fighting with them…..and then suddenly you see them a time or two a year. I can’t stop staring at Katie, and I don’t want to do anything more than be near her, look at her, listen to her, live in the midst of the life she lives while I’m here. Katie and Trey took me directly to Chuy’s for some delicious TexMex (which you cannot get in New York. No TexMex, delicious or otherwise), and then we came home, to their beautiful and comfortable home filled with Katie’s cozy touches. I’m a happy mama right now. Life is good.
Never EVER underestimate the power of a nice apology. You’ll win friends and admirers.
DANG IT. I just got an email from The Plucky Knitter — providers of the yarn for my forthcoming Vodka Gimlet — letting me know that due to circumstances beyond her control, my yarn won’t be shipping next week, as promised, but instead mid-October.
Now first, you’d think that since I have three other sweaters ready to cast on, plus a scarf underway, plus a blanket mid-way, this could not come as bad news. You’d be wrong. The color of the yarn I chose (Oz) is just this gorgeous emerald green as you’d expect. Oh so beautiful, breathtaking, I can’t wait to see it. So I was all geared up to be bitter. Indignant. Self-righteous. Mad. Peeved. Pissed off. And all the other synonyms. But her email was just so upset and sorry, and genuine, and filled with remorse from someone who doesn’t usually have to write emails like that, that I couldn’t even be mildly bitter. It’s OK, Sarah. It’s OK. I somehow like you even more, after receiving that email.
It doesn’t hurt that she’s going to include a skein of a new yarn she’ll be stocking in November (Plucky Rustic, an aran-weight wool), and that I get to participate in a private shopping event in her online store, just for those of us who were impacted. You know? That’s what I call customer service. Yay for Sarah, leaving me a bigger fan just as she tells me my yarn will be one month late.
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- Berroco Blackstone Tweed in Evergreen, for my Wintry Mix (Amy Herzog)
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- Cascade 220 Heathers in Montmartre, for my Flux (Signe S. Simonsen)
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- Malabrigo Lace in Sauterne, for another Featherweight Cardigan (Hannah Fettig)
Yeah. I’ve got enough to do. Kelly is helping me work my way through figuring out what size Wintry Mix to knit, given my slightly-different gauge. I have a reliable way of understanding gauge backwards; mine was 19, should’ve been 18, so I thought I was knitting bigger and looser. I teach stats to undergrads, but this is beyond me. And then when you add in ease, well…..boggle. I just can’t figure it out.
And on this post, I log off for the day. A few more hours of work, then some dinner and knitting…..something. Whee!!
Chicago, Chicago that toddling town / Chicago, Chicago I will show you around – I love it / Bet your bottom dollar you lose the blues in Chicago, Chicago / The town that Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down
I had such a wonderful time in Chicago with Marnie and Tom. That’s a kind of obvious statement, I guess. If Marnie and Tom, then wonderful. I arrived mid-morning Friday and left early Monday morning, so we had a nice long time together. One of these days my kids and I are going to live in the same place, or near enough to make visits more frequent. It’s boggling that I only get to see them once or twice a year.
Everything we did, saw, ate, whatever, was great — they’re such fun to spend time with because they’re smart and thoughtful, they laugh all the time, and they’re gracious hosts. So I’m necessarily leaving out so many pictures, but here were some of the highlights of the trip. There are lots of photos, so I’ll put in a jump.
CLICK to continue reading toddling... Continue reading »
I have a finished object! Doing the happy dance — it fits!
Meet my featherweight cardigan, light as a moonbeam but brilliant and strong in color. I adore the ground it walks on and will have to make myself not wear it all the time because the yarn’s pretty fine and might wear out with overuse:
the color is dragon's blood
I seem to be fated not to take a good picture of it; just before I finished knitting it a few days ago, the rain clouds moved in and it’s been gray and rainy ever since. It’s nice today, but I was too busy and couldn’t get outside. Finally I decided what the hell, take the picture indoors anyway, it’s better than nothing. Then I learned my camera battery was dead (and I can’t find my charger…grrr) and I only got one shot. It’s not the shot I wanted, but it’ll just have to do. You can see the gist of it, anyway. It’s unstyled, and I’m wearing it over long sleeves because I’m taking it to Chicago tomorrow, where it’s considerably cooler and wearing it over a camisole would leave me too chilly. It’s ok this way, but when I wear it for real I’ll do a bit more stylin. And I meant to drop that last g.
I think I’ll kind of think of this like a shawl with sleeves. It is very very thin so it’s worn for its charm and good looks, really; over a turtleneck it could give a pop of color, as I might wear a shawl (or shawlette, which is a word I hate though I love the object). We’ll see.
Details here, on ravelry.
I got my yarn today for two of my sweaters, and I wish my camera battery weren’t dead (or I knew where the charger is…grrr). I’ll show it to you as soon as I can. I don’t think I’ll take either with me to Chicago, because I need to swatch and pay attention and think and do math (for you Europeans: maths). I’ll probably take my KtyKozue scarf, christened the Zen Grin by Pip. Hi Pip!
wow! I’m proud all right, proud as a whitewashed pig! (~the widow Sugrue, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, 1959)
Artists toil away in poverty and obscurity, making awesome things, giving it out to the universe, and recognition can be slow. Hard to come by. There in spirit, but spirit doesn’t cover a loaf of bread. You know how proud I am of Marnie’s work, and today Chicago is hearing about it. She was featured on the Chicagoist website! She made a wonderful set of graphic prints of the prerecorded announcements on the L train, and that was the primary point of the Chicagoist post. Here’s the one they featured:
They wrote:
Few things become unwanted earworms more quickly than the automated “L” station and train announcements. People have had harrowing nightmares where “Attention customers: an INBOUND train toward the Loop will be arriving shortly” plays endlessly, with the train never arriving at the station.
Monkey-Rope Press is the brainchild of illustrator, printmaker and bookbinder Marnie Galloway. Galloway’s Etsy store is a glorious time suck of amazing prints, none more so than these letterpress posters of “L” station announcements. We also love the bicycle subculture pugilism prints.
It’s never too early to begin your Christmas shopping.
!!!!!!!!! IT’S NEVER TOO EARLY TO BEGIN YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!!! Let the shopping begin!
these are two of my favorite people in the whole wide world: Katie and Marnie, my girls.
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. On easy days, on happy days, gratitude abounds but it’s just part of the scene, like the lamp on the table. But on the other days, remembering (seeking, searching, finding) something to be grateful for, those days it makes a difference.
Today I am grateful for my beautiful daughters. OK, so that made me start crying and feeling grateful, not just for them but for being in the world no matter what else happens, despite whatever small rocks may be in the path. They are in the world, they are my daughters, we love each other, we watch out for each other, we have each others’ backs. They make me smile, nothing delights me like seeing their faces, seeing their names in my email inbox, hearing their voices, hearing about their lives.
One of my dear dear friends has one child, a son. He’s grown, he’s everything to her, she adores him and delights in him and her life is infinitely richer because of him. One day I was talking about my daughters — one was coming to visit, maybe, I don’t remember — and she said that she doesn’t know what it’s like to have a daughter, she wishes she had one. And of course I absolutely positively adore my son, he may be the sweetest gift of my life, I’m not sure how to say it. Daughters and sons are both wonderful, obviously, and they’re different — at least mine are. In a lot of ways the relationship is identical; there’s the same delight, the same preciousness, the same connection and closeness, but still, something is different — for me, anyway.
So thank you God / universe / great wheel / blind luck / good fortune / whatever for giving me these two wonderful human beings. Fine human beings they are, and they’re my daughters.
Dec 2004, here in NYC. Marnie always thinks it makes a more interesting photo when one person is doing something different. Since this picture was taken, the three of us have gotten married.
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.
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.
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
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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- cher
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- dino — dean martin
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- perry como
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- david cassidy
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- fred mcmurray
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.
one of the top 5 weekends of my LIFE
My little idea for “weekend’s best” was to post one or two photos, but I indulge myself this week because it was one of the best weekends of my entire life. Why?
- Marnie came to visit.
- She and Will saw each other for the first time since July 2008. And it was good.
- I got to have dinner with two of my kids at the same time — now I just need to get us all together at the same time….hard, since we’re so far-flung. But I’m going to do it, somehow.
- Marnie and I went shopping and I got this very cute little style going, now.
- Marnie helped set my life on a different course with a strength training routine, and lots of conversation about it. I get it now. I’m ready to go.
So here are some photos that capture some of the above (all photos courtesy of Marnie; click to enlarge any of them). It was wonderful.
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- marnie at highline park
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- heads together. again. always. i love this one.
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- one cute outfit!
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- will at highline park, wearing the hat Katie knitted for him
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- always with their heads together. always.
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- will, smiling at marnie
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- sib play
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- bad Easter candy debauchery. you can’t see the Peeps because I already ate them.
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- smiling at her brother — she has such a great smile!
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- another cute outfit! me happy, facing 2 of my kids and missing the 3rd really badly.
Weekend’s best, of the best weekend.
amen, sisters and brothers.
To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.
~William James
two of the thoughtful people who mean a lot to me
the sweetest baby
She’s here! Marnie arrived very late last night after a nearly-disastrous trip from Chicago — lots of people trying to leave Chicago had nearly-disastrous trips yesterday thanks to fog. Or so I hear. Anyway, Marnie’s here for the weekend and I am so glad to see her.
Marnie in India, in college
I’m not quite sure what we’ll do during her visit, but I know it’ll involve a lot of talking and sharing (our specialty) and probably some art-looking (her specialty) and eating good food (our family specialty). She’s also going to show me how to do some cute things with my currently uncute and extremely long (for me) hair. And maybe we’ll play Scrabble and watch movies. Lots of choices.
Depth, in the post title, refers both to Marnie, who swims in it, and The Pale King, the book that’s just come out by David Foster Wallace. Actually, his editor assembled the unfinished book, but it’s classic DFW, from the sound of it. I can’t wait to read it. The NYTimes book review made me want to cry, from missing DFW’s writing and spirit in the world. Infinite Jest was about our obsessive need for all-consuming entertainment, and The Pale King is about our boredom. From the NYTimes piece:
Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”
Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”
Sigh. There aren’t that many people who talk like that, and people you can talk with about those concerns. Marnie sent me this link to a wonderful article about DFW’s papers, which are now collected at UT Austin. Of course I love seeing the notes people leave in books (as I wrote in this post), so reading his notes is a great experience.
It’s a gorgeous sunny spring day here in Manhattan — I hope you’re facing as wonderful a Saturday as I am! Pictures will be taken, that’s for sure.
I know they come looking for me, boy, know they come looking for me…gotta get behind the mule in the morning and plow.
Just in time for the upcoming Christian holiday:
And don’t think he made this up — this page shows you all kinds of chocolate Jesus confections, if you want to get some for the kids this Easter! Chocolate Last Suppers, chocolate crucifixes, crucifix lollipops, something for everyone. Me, I love Peeps.
Tom Waits LOVE. I love this one too — the line “come on down off the cross, we could use the wood” — is just so great.
The world is not my home, I’m just a-passin through, that line in the song is from an old hymn my great-grandmother sang for the last dozen years of her life.
And this one reminds me of a specific day with my friend Sherlock.
friends, meet my other friends!
I’m thinking a lot about something right now and it’s still a tangled inarticulate mess, not ready to write about. Also, I finished Katie’s second green sock, so when I get them blocked I’ll post the FO. So I was mulling: hmm….do I have anything to say on Thrums today? And then I looked at Tammy’s blog in the midst of my morning blog catch-up, and what do I see? In receiving a blog award, she named mine. Thank you Tammy — ever since we first crossed paths, you have been such a wonderful and kind friend to me.
Of course, the whole point of these little awards is that it gives us an opportunity to highlight other blogs, which is something I’ve been thinking about lately. Those of you who regularly follow my blog and leave comments, you’re very alive to me, you feel like you’re a real part of my life, not a part of my virtual life. I think knitters, as a rule, are among the nicest people on earth, and we all have this thing in common, even if our politics are very different, our lifestyles, everything else is different. I have this crazy little fantasy about all of you who read this blog: there’s some kind of party where all of you/us are in one room, and you all like each other. Of course that’s probably not true; you know how you can bring two of your friends together — they both love you! — but it turns out they really don’t like each other. Anyway, don’t rain on my fantasy.
That’s a long way around to say this: I’m supposed to name 5 bloggers who have fewer than 100 followers. First of all, I have no idea how to find out how many followers someone has, and second of all, I don’t even really care about that. I decided to take this opportunity to highlight five people who show up here at Thrums on at least a semi-regular basis, and who post kind of regularly on their own blogs. Naming people always means leaving out others, which I hate, but I’ve got this little idea perking along in the back of my mind for later, so I don’t feel so bad about it. SO! Check out these blogs and subscribe, if you don’t already:
- Knitting Relaxes Me — (me too!) This is Janna’s blog. She and I have a tiny Austin, TX connection, which always delights me. I love her blog, which is about 99.5% knitting, with the occasional side-bar note, always delightful. She lives in Iowa and she’s a medical librarian. Hi Janna!
- Knitting Linguist — (me too, in an amateur linguist way!) This is Jocelyn’s blog. Jocelyn lives in southern California, and she’s a frequent test-knitter for Anne Hanson so you’ll see her turning up here and there in that regard. Once I was on my rav friends page and the ad on the left caught my eye, because there was Jocelyn! Like me, she has a very big smile. She blogs about her family, her work as a linguistics professor, and her fiber obsession (knitting and spinning). Howdy-do, Jocelyn!
- Yarnfest — This is Dina’s blog. Dina lives in Oregon, and the focus of her blog is on charity knitting, including a very large project she created and organized for homeless kids in her school district. That’s how I met her, and it’s been a great addition to my life, getting to know Dina. Her blog is primarily about knitting, but she discusses life too. Like all of you who circle around here, she’s a woman of great depth. Hey, Dina!
- Ink, Yarn & Beer — First of all, isn’t that a great blog title? Don’t you want to know more? This is Naomi’s blog, and I guess it’s obvious what she blogs about. We all already know about yarn and beer, so following Naomi’s blog also gives you insight into the art of sumi, brush painting. She’s a curious and insightful person, and I’m so glad we crossed paths. I never miss a blog post. Good morning, Naomi!
- Knit 1 Blog 1 — This is Pip’s blog. Pip has an online sock yarn shop, and she’s a teacher, so she’s crazy busy. She lives in Wales, which is so fantastical and exotic to little old me. I’d love to see Wales one of these days, and if I ever get the chance, I’m going however out of my way I have to go to meet Pip. Her blog also includes her very lovely photography of her part of the world, which I always enjoy. Bore da, Pip! (she wished me happy birthday in Welsh, which thrilled me)
I’m being swamped, thinking of all my bloggy friends not listed here: Kelli, Laura, Kty, Anne, Kate, Sara, Noreen, Andrea, Perches (you have to see her gorgeous son, Bebe!), Karie, Pamela, Turtlegirl, another Sara, and I know I’m blanking on others.
oh happy, sunny day. oh how i’ve missed you.
I had breakfast with Will this morning, which made me so so happy. We see each other every week (he only lives a couple blocks away from me), and it’s usually over a meal or a beer. Starting my day with him was especially wonderful. And you mothers out there, you’ll get this: he still smells like my boy.
Will refuses to have a straight photo made; I have literally hundreds of photos he took at arm’s length with every possible facial expression you could imagine. Plus extreme close-ups, some of which freak me out if I accidentally run across them, like his nostril. So I asked him if I could take his picture, and at the very last second he copped this sneer. Too bad, because his smile is gorgeous.
bagels & lox, a cafe au lait, and my son. sneering. c'mon, will, show me your beautiful smile.
And then, not to make so damn much out of the simplest hat in the whole world, here’s the finished hat, on my head. It’s the dreaded “shot in the bathroom mirror” pose. And this will officially end my discussion of Marnie’s hat.
so slouchy! i love it. marnie wanted it because she has long hair and often wears braids, pinned up like katie davies (needled) does. this should cover her.
adorable, fast, fun, and well, adorable. not me, the hat. though i am fun.
I have loads of work to do so this is quick. I decided not to do the Knit Crochet Blog week, though i did it last year and had a blast with it. I don’t know, I’m just not feeling it this year. But I do look forward to reading everyone else’s posts!
Happy Monday y’all. I hope it’s as sunny where you are as it is in NYC today. Glory. Bliss. Sun.
Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away / On my way to where the air is sweet, can you tell me how to get, how to get to, wait. This has nothing to do with Sesame Street.
I was all ready to swatch my new sweater yesterday morning when I had my wonderful weekly phone call from Marnie, who reminded me that I was going to make her a hat — she’d already picked the pattern and the yarn, and in the way things work with a 52-year old mind, I’d been excited about it and then forgot. This happens to me at least three or four times a day. Marnie’s coming to visit me for a long weekend (and to see Will) in a couple of weeks, so I’ll get to give it to her personally. Check it out, it’s the “My Striped & Slouchy hat” (rav link here), knit in Cascade 220:
such a sunny hat!
and with such a wide ribbing -- two stripes wide, great for covering her ears
It reminds me of eggs, eggs and cream, butter and cream, daffodils. I get such delight from knitting the stripes — nothing is cheerier than stripes, in the first place, and anything with white is just wonderful. Red and white (my fave), yellow and white (my new fave), blue and white, black and white, gray and white, all really great.
I have one more set of stripes — it’s very slouchy — and then the decrease section, which decreases very very quickly. It’s cute, and couldn’t be simpler to make. I am watching the old HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (I’d never seen it before), and this hat is so simple I don’t have to look at it at all while I’m knitting, which is good because the show is entirely absorbing. There are scenes I have to look away, so when legs are blown off, or guts are visible, I just check my knitting until it passes. It’s an amazing program, you’ve probably already seen it. It got into my dreams last night.
Here’s my very last attempt to get the colors photographed in my Saroyan, and it failed. I really wish you could see it, because it’s the most wonderful shade of olive green. Sigh.
IT'S NOT BROWN!!! grrrrrr!!
I hope you have a great spring Sunday, and your colors are true!
random recommendations, mostly!
- Snow is lining the tree branches and lightly covering the cars. The forecast is that we’ll accumulate up to 3″ today, and up to 2″ tomorrow. It’s coming down now, I can see it against the street light. Times like these, I miss Texas, where winter is more of a concept.
- How about a little of Kurt Vonnegut’s wisdom?
i love to fart around. i love to fulfill my purpose.
- And speaking of Kurt Vonnegut, do you know the little tumblr blog Slaughterhouse 90210? The blogger does a regular and hilarious juxtaposition of literary quote with photo from a tv show. Here’s a recent example, which (I hope!) encourages you to click over to the blog and maybe even subscribe:
“Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?” — George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
- Hallelujah! One for authors and publishers: Google doesn’t get to give away all the books in the world for free. This is so, so, so, SO good. I know people expect and want everything available immediately, on line, and free, but they just haven’t thought through the implications of that model. The New York Times just moved to a subscription model, and my beliefs are being tested; I’m used to reading it all for free, will I pay for it? Or just find another newspaper online for free and bail on the NYT. I believe it’s worth paying for (though I find the NYTimes to be incredibly biased, like all media), but will I part with my money?
- Do you know Letters of Note? It’s another wonderful blog — there are regular posts of photographs of letters, like this one that Carl Sagan wrote to the Explorer’s Club (of which he was a member), saying that if they don’t change the rules and allow women membership, they will be the big losers.
- And one more recommendation: Unhappy Hipsters. The blogger takes the photos you see of upscale homes and writes often-hysterical captions for them. Here’s a recent example:
Reading the canine’s private diary was nothing short of shocking. And to think he’d believed they might be soul mates.
The blogs I’ve recommended here are in my “entertainment” folder in my Google Reader, so when I need a laugh or have a few spare minutes to giggle I open that folder and scan through them. They’re very good for that purpose.
It’s Wednesday, which means the weekly trip; I hope I see something funny or weird. At this time of year, New Yorkers just seem worn down by winter and the weirdness is kind of buried. On the subway, my fellow travelers look weary, their winter gear is abused and no longer so fresh and “yay, winter!” and there’s a lot of head-hanging. I love to look at the faces; their weariness gives me a better chance to do that. I always see the kids they used to be, I think about who they were when they were 20 and full of excitement and dreams. It always makes me love them, and remember that we’re all just making our way through the day, through our lives, doing what we can.
La bella luna! The moon brings the woman to the man. Capice?
Again I say: well! That was the weekend that wasn’t. I’m not meaning to be silent or cryptic, I’m just in the middle of some unpleasant stuff and (a) there’s not a lot to say about it but (b) it’s hard to say anything else so (c) a bit of radio silence. It’s been a very hard month and I’m ready to get back to normal.
But we did have that amazing moon (la luna! the whole thing made me think of my favorite secret shame movie, Moonstruck) Saturday night:
giant moon over NYC
I got a bit of knitting done this weekend; after finishing my red shawl (which I love), I cast on for a Saroyan, with tosh merino light in filigree, which is a really gorgeous blend of olive greens, golds, light greens, and browns. Since Saroyan has that beautiful leaf edging, I thought the colors would be a nice match. Even though I’ve been kind of pissed-off at madelinetosh lately, she drew me back in with this absolutely gorgeous colorway:
tosh merino light, in filigree
it's hard to capture the colors in the knitting, for some reason; it's more green than this, and a gorgeous rich olive-y green
I hope to be back to my wordy old self soon…..
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