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.

After weeks of not sleeping, I took a pill last night that made me sleep deeply, all night long. It’s not something I can do regularly — the drug is not addictive, but it has dreadful side-effects like weight gain and the potential for tardive dyskinesia — but getting one good night of sleep is enough, for now. Happy Friday, y’all. I hope it’s as peaceful and lovely where you are as it is at my desk.

Here’s a different piece by Arvo Pärt, also perfect for a rainy day:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Isn’t that just lovely, and true?

i do love my city. it's heartbreakingly beautiful.

And today I had one of those experiences that are not at all uncommon for me. It’s bitterly cold, and I was about 20 minutes early for an appointment. There was no Starbucks in the neighborhood (what???! No Starbucks in the neighborhood???), but there was a Dunkin Donuts, so I stopped in and bought a small coffee so I could justify sitting at their little table in the window. I was very cold, and the coffee smelled so good, and I sat in the sunlight, smelling the coffee, and looking out the window at the very bright light bouncing off the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. I saw the people curled into commas, hunched inside their thick coats against the cold, walking so fast down the sidewalk. And then it hit me, how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the constructed world is, how beautiful the natural world is, how touching it is that we all walk past each other with our struggles and joys, how beautiful winter is, against the other seasons, and I started crying. I felt cracked open by the world, as I often do. I thought “Cracked open in Dunkin Donuts” and that sounded like some kind of nutty short story. And I laughed.

OH MY it’s gorgeous here. We’re just in this very lovely cool, dry, sunny period right now. The kind of weather that makes you pause, tilt your head, sniff the air a little bit, and go back inside for a scarf. It’s fall, it’s here. The sky is an unbelievably clear blue.  For my money, it’s the most glorious time in this part of the world, and makes up for February and March (well…..almost). If I didn’t live here, it’s the time of year I’d miss the most, it’s the thing I’d long for about New York. As I write, it’s 53 degrees — heading to a high of just 65. See?

oh my. perfection.

I just feel a little twinge — it’s really so pretty, I want to do something this weekend, go somewhere, get out in it, revel in it, glory in it. But that would seriously interfere with my knitting time, which is pressing on me, hard. Why can’t there be two of me. Seriously.

I hope it’s gorgeous where you are on this September Friday!

I haven’t been down in the dumps lately, but there have certainly been a number of times in my life when I got awfully close to the bleakest edge you can imagine. I’m so glad that those moments didn’t go the direction they were headed, and that my life force did not give up. I got struck by a tremendous blow of joy this morning. It happened as I was writing my responses to this little list:

1. Five things you love about yourself.
2. Five things your body can do.
3. Five things you’re grateful for.
4. Five things that make you happy you’re alive.
5. Five people who you love (pets included!).

Well! In a stunning confluence, I became so happy I started crying and just couldn’t stop (the confluence was that the first thing I wrote in response to the first one was that I’m easily moved to tears ).  Does this happen to you, you become so embodied with deep, deep happiness — joy, maybe — that you almost feel like you can’t hold it, or maybe it’s kind of like the boundaries of everything disappear and you feel larger than yourself?

See what happens if you make the 5 lists. Just do them in your head, if you like. I wish you joy, too.

excuse everything about this photo please!

There’s nothing good to say about this picture — my hair is its morning mess, there’s nothing styled here, the sweater is just off the needles and so not yet blocked, and it’s pinned together with yellow-headed pins — but LOOK! My Dark & Stormy sweater [rav link]  is a fait accompli! (and p.s., that’s not really a muffin top around my waist, it’s the unblocked sweater pooching out. i swear. )

And do I love it? With the heat of a thousand burning suns. With the calories of a thousand triple-decker chocolate cakes. With the winds of a thousand level 5 tornadoes. With the spit of a thousand tobacco-chewing cowboys. With the seeds of a thousand watermelons. I’d say I do.

Janna, I think you were on to something. I needed to finish something. I haven’t had an FO in months, and finishing this has re-lit the fire in mah belly. Now I just want to grab Eve’s Rib and finish her off. I’m in a tough spot since I came to be crazy about sweater knitting; knitting small things doesn’t thrill me like it used to, but it takes me a long time to finish a sweater so the FOs are fewer and farther between. I’ll have to figure this out.

Au revoir, ennui! Hasta luego, malaise! Hello, new sweater!

How’d they do that without being corny? I was watching it all alone this morning at 6am, kind of steeled against being moved because I’d read that it was moving (like, ‘oh yeah? not me buddy…’) and then there I was with big tears in my eyes.

Next: I know I put this on the Laos blog on Thanksgiving, but I find myself unable to stop thinking about it. When I was a little kid, I was dark. I read too much Kafka and Camus at too young an age, wondered about the meaning of life, blah blah blah, loved to call myself an “existentialist” by which I meant what people usually mean, which seems to be an assumption that it’s all meaningLESS.  But of course that’s not what it really means; at least, that’s not the end of it. Existentialism really means that we endow the meaning ourselves, more or less. I once heard Leo Buscaglia say that people who wonder about the meaning of life are really just talking about the experience of life, that the point is to experience life. I’ve become very impatient with people who mope around and say there’s no meaning. FUCK THAT, yes there is. You’re here, we’re here, we get to be here. And here’s the bit I can’t stop thinking about, that I put on my Laos blog, from Cat’s Cradle, The Books of Bokonon (Kurt Vonnegut, of course):

God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”

Yeah. Every day that we get to be here – even for the real shitty stuff – it’s an honor. Lucky us, and I mean that in the most honest, least ironic way.

And finally (since this is just the $200 category), this one always makes me cry and fits well with the Vonnegut passage, for me:

Happy Friday y’all.