February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
~excerpt of “February,” by Margaret Atwood
My posting has been a little sporadic, though not so much that it’s probably noticeable. I don’t post on the weekends because dadgummit I am loving my weekend digital breaks! I got tired of being fancy-schmancy and calling them “digital sabbaticals,” though I did love it when I started calling them that because it made me feel like it was a real thing I was doing. Now I’m fine with just taking a break from going online. I’m amazed by how easy it was, because of the intensity of need-to-do-it that I felt before I started. Since we don’t have TV, and since the NYTimes has started charging to read their articles, I’m out of the loop about what’s going on in the world, at every level, and you know what? That’s a happier way to be, seriously. I do miss knowing the ins and outs of small news from my fellow bloggers, and I can glance at the NYTimes headlines when I need a jolt of worry (which I don’t need, honestly). I read my weekly issue of the New York Review of Books, I look at facebook and get the occasional longread from various longread-type feeds, I know how my kids are doing in a fine-textured way, and otherwise what’s coming into my head is more carefully selected. And it is good.
Also, last night I took something to help me sleep because this zombie thing is getting old, man. Like, really really old. This morning I slept until 9:40. NINE. FORTY. 9:40 a.m. Me. I slept that late. What finally woke me up was a dream that someone closed my bedroom door loudly, or I’d still be sleeping, I think. I feel like a dewy bud of happiness this morning. It’s so wonderful, I want singing birds to come perch on my windowsill and I’ll sing along. I want people to break into song on the sidewalk, and I’ll sing along. I want dancers to come down my street busting any kind of move, and I’ll dance along. Osteoporosis, be damned! I feel so great! Sleep is exclamation-point-worthy! MANY OF THEM!!!!!! If you sleep, never take it for granted. If you do not sleep, I know your pain and you know mine (and you celebrate the rare night of good sleep with me).
Much work to do today, and a busy (non-digital) weekend ahead, including Richard III on Sunday, followed by my long-delayed date with Will — a whole week late, but that’s just fine. Have a good one, y’all, whatever you’ll be doing this first week of February.
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.
listen / do you want to know a secret / do you promise not to tell ~ The Beatles (and me, but I’m not telling)
There’s a lot of stuff going on chez Thrums that I don’t write about — of course. I feel relatively free to write about myself, somewhat free to write about my kids, and not at all free to write about other people I know. There are some people I never write about because their privacy is important to preserve for one reason or another, and others I mention in a glancing way because unlike me, they didn’t sign up for this public airing of thoughts business. Still, there is a lot of stuff going on in my life that isn’t getting discussed here, and it leaves me feeling strange about what I do write about, because without the unspoken stuff, what I present here seems like a sham in some way. [this reminds me of that terrible joke: So, Mrs. Kennedy, except for that one day in Dallas, how was your trip to Texas? terrible joke] So I’m finding it a little harder to make regular posts about my life, since the big middle of it is private.
Remember how I had to frog Marnie’s Moby sweater? I frogged it completely and just started over, and I’m finally back at the point I was in the first edition (I’ve decided to refer to them as editions, like books). So here I am:
Ambergris, by Ann Weaver (2nd edition)
I do note with satisfaction that the cable ropes are all done correctly in this edition; there was one error in the first version that would’ve bugged me forever, so you know, you take what comfort you can from a situation like this. I’ve already divided at the sleeves, so now I’m doing the front up to the neck, and then I’ll do the back. Then two sleeves, each with cable ropes up the center, assembly, and a turtleneck. I hope I can finish this while Marnie still has time to wear it this winter; since she lives in Chicago, the odds are pretty good.
Tonight I’m having a date with Will, which I’m really looking forward to. We’re going to a cool little independent bookstore on Prince St. (McNally Jackson) and then over to an Indian food restaurant he loves, for dosas. It’s been such a warm and dry winter, it doesn’t feel like January at all — but I’m not complaining, especially for this evening, as we tramp around that great little neighborhood. One truly wonderful thing about all three of my kids is that we share a love of words and books. It manifests itself differently in the three of them, but I do share something special with each one of them around books, and that makes me happier than you can imagine. I like to think it’s my gift to them.
* * *
Here’s the next writing prompt — a 600-word story (a narrative describing a shared experience) told from the “we” perspective. No first person pronouns allowed! My first thought was to put the couple in therapy and have them telling competing narratives about something, but I got this idea and ran with it instead. It’s a piece of fiction, again, but again it uses bits of real experience for texture. My husband and I did go to Luang Prabang, which means the details of place are true, but the rest is entirely made up:
We woke up very early that morning because we wanted to witness the monks’ morning alms ritual; since we were staying at a hotel on the other side of the Mekong River, we had to get up early enough to walk across that long scary bridge – remember, honey? – and it made us nervous because of the traffic, especially in the dark. We felt so exhausted when the alarm went off, but we both knew how much you wanted to see it so off we went.
Right – it really wasn’t the kind of thing you like to do sugar plum, you’d rather visit the markets and the food stalls, but you were such a good sport about it. We just had no idea how it was going to turn out, did we? We thought we’d go to the main street, kneel at the curb, and watch the Lao women putting little clumps of rice in each of the monks’ baskets, and then get some breakfast on the way back to our hotel – remember how much we loved the breakfast at that one place? But it didn’t turn out like that at all. And you’re usually such a quiet guy, avoiding trouble. Sure, you’ll speak up if you feel you’re getting ripped off, but you never get involved in violence. You just never do that.
So there we were, walking across that bridge, in the dark. Remember how there weren’t any lights of any kind? Not even headlights, since cars weren’t allowed on the bridge? And remember how tiny the walkway was for pedestrians, with broken boards and loose nails? And how quiet the morning was – we heard the river, the cyclists passing on the bridge, the early morning fishermen, and the birds? You were commenting on the birds just as we left the bridge and crossed onto the sidewalk. We had to stop because your long skirt got caught in the clasp of your sandal, and you were kneeling down to untangle it. We were both a little bit on edge – do you remember why, now? It’s hard to imagine why we felt so unsettled, in Luang Prabang. We’d had such a great time, and felt safer there than anywhere else we’d been in Southeast Asia. Maybe it was just the very early hour, combined with the darkness that we’re not used to, since we’re from Manhattan where it’s never dark. Maybe we were just kind of punchy from exhaustion.
Well sugar, you say “we” were punchy, but “we” weren’t really punchy – you were. Remember?
You’re right – you were singing and laughing and commenting on how beautiful the river was in the dark, and how many stars you saw. OK, “we” weren’t punchy, point taken. But we were both a little anxious in the utter darkness, that’s definitely true. And neither of us expected someone to grab you – you have to agree with that!
No, we certainly never expected something like that to happen, that’s true. Did you see him coming?
No, remember how we were both bending over – you were squatting – trying to get your skirt free? The guy just came out of nowhere, it seemed, and leaned over you, saying something we couldn’t understand.
You did overreact just a little bit honey, you have to admit. If it hadn’t been so dark we might’ve noticed that he was wearing orange robes, and had shaved his head. You didn’t have to punch the poor guy, he was just offering to help us! Granted, it was dark and you were trying to protect me, but come on. You punched a monk.
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.
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.
ghosts of Christmas past
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas weekend, if you celebrate. Mine was very nice — as nice as it could possibly be, without having my kids with me. [But did you hear the awful, awful news from Connecticut, about a house that burned down early Christmas morning, and the owner survived but her three young daughters, all under 10, and her parents were all killed? God...could anything be worse, that poor, poor woman.]
This seems like a non sequitur, but I promise it isn’t. Have you ever read A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry? (I feel compelled to tell you I read it before Oprah picked it for her book club….) It’s a beautiful, horrible, sad, tragic story of people trying to survive during The Emergency, in India. It’s so tragic, there were times I had to put it down because I simply couldn’t keep bearing it. Passages I had to read out of the sides of my eyes because I couldn’t tolerate them head-on. One of the characters, Ishvar, just endures more misery than should be possible, but he always says “life is long.” Although the longer his life goes on, the more misery he endures, that’s not what he seems to mean. It’s that life is long, whatever is happening now isn’t necessarily what will always be happening. There is room in the future for other things — better things, perhaps. Whatever is happening now isn’t the only thing that ever will happen.
Plenty of people suffer during the holidays, and feel excruciating pain and loneliness. Christmas Eve is more painful a time to be alone than Christmas, for me, but maybe that’s because of my Christmas Eve in 1970. Late that afternoon, when I was 12, my mother gathered me and my sister and brother and told us she was divorcing our dad. She walked us into their bedroom, where he sat, on his knees on the floor, and told us to tell him goodbye. He pulled us into his arms, sobbing, and told us how much he loved us. We told him goodbye, and walked out the door. Mother drove us to a motel — The Downtowner — where she had already secured adjoining rooms, and where my soon-to-be step-father was waiting for her. She and he were in one room, and my sister and brother and I sat on the ends of the beds in the next room, staring at the tv. We watched A Charlie Brown Christmas…..our eyes took it in, but I doubt any of us were really watching it. Could there be sadder Christmas music than that soundtrack? I don’t know of it, if there is.
So that’s my sad little holiday tale o’ woe…..we all have them, of one kind or another. I’ve come such a long way, and life has indeed been long. I’ve had joyful Christmas Eves, sad ones, lonely ones, endless ones, happy ones, hilarious ones, new baby ones, warm ones and cold ones, and next year’s celebration will be of another form, I’m sure. Life is long. If your holidays were lonely, I’m so sorry; it’s a particular pain, feeling lonely when the whole world seems to be connected and warm and joyful and spending time with loved ones. You aren’t the only one, and those of us who had a lovely time this year aren’t guaranteed those types of celebrations in the years to come. It’s life, and life is long, and you get to experience nearly everything if you live long enough.
We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving. And we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing. — Louisa May Alcott
This is a question I’ve become kind of obsessed by. For the last year, there has been a simmering background potential that my life might change dramatically, and I’ve been spending a lot of hours thinking about how that might look. And I’ve been extremely specific about it, too — no vague handwaving about it. In the process, I’ve been thinking about moving ahead and doing what I want with my life, making it the way I want it. Not the way it is, necessarily, the way things just kind of develop, and you’re stuck with that table because there’s nothing really wrong with it so you can’t justify getting a new one. Instead, what if I could have what I wanted? Exactly what I wanted? What would that look like?
I actually started thinking about this several months ago, during my monthly writing group. We take turns bringing one-word prompts and each month we spend several minutes doing spontaneous freewriting on each prompt. So this one time, the prompt was different than usual, it was simple: write what you’d do if you had a whole weekend all to yourself, to do whatever you wanted.
Our faces lit up (we’re all women, this “time all to yourself” idea is so novel!), and our heads went down and the pens were scratching feverishly over the paper. Usually one of us finishes in a couple minutes, and the others wind up shortly after that. This time, we just kept writing. Pages were being flipped quickly, and the pens just kept moving. The thing that was so surprising, when we finished and we each read our little piece aloud, the others listened with wide eyes to what were essentially simple things…..but the writer always seemed to think it was some kind of crazy, impractical, impossible dream.
So for the last several months I’ve been thinking about this. Given where I am in my life, what is my big dream, now? At this point, so many of my big dreams have been achieved: my children are here, in my life, and they’re also out in the world living big lives of their own, and they’re wonderful people; I not only went to college, I finished graduate school and earned a PhD, which I never even knew to dream about; I’ve traveled a lot and seen places I’d never even heard of, plus so many places I never dreamed I’d see, and learned that there are other places in the world that feel like home; I earn money by reading and writing.
So it’s not at all about “gee, what’s left?” but more like ok: now, given this stage of my life, what is my big dream? And again, my thinking is focused, not some vague handwaving. Focused. What is my big dream now, given where I am in my life?
Before I tell you mine, I wonder about yours. What is your big dream? Specifically.
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p.s. Giving a shout out to women in my broad age group. We’re gorgeous! Check out this post on A Femme d’un Certain Age, see if you can find me among the beautiful others!
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change. ~Thomas Hardy
Some people hate the passing of time, but I kind of like it. I appreciate the finite nature of my life….easy to say, perhaps, since I’m only in the middle of it….and don’t feel excessive nostalgia for times past. The only exception relates to my kids’ childhoods. When I see photos, touch their little shoes I’ve kept, the smocked dresses I made, I feel their young presence with such immediacy my chest aches. I remember feeling exhausted and overwhelmed when I was actually in the midst of all that, and kind of wish I could do it again, with the grace I’ve acquired in the years since.
the cartwheel galaxy...cool, huh!
But otherwise, I enjoy seeing time happening. I enjoy feeling the shift in the air that means late summer is winding down, and one of these days that new feeling in the air, and the different way the light looks, will mean we’re in fall. One December I was standing at a crosswalk, heading home, and the Christmas tree stand was right there, crowded with people. A young mother and her little girl, maybe 4 years old, stood next to me while we waited to cross Broadway. I listened to the mother answering her little girl’s questions about Christmas, and I knew that my time to be that mother was long gone. Every year, every Christmas, there are new mothers with 4 year old girls standing at the corner. Every year a new wave. One of these years, my daughters will stand on some corner with their 4 year old children, and then one of these years, their time will be gone too.
Once I was crossing a quiet street near my apartment and had a strange experience where I felt like I’d seen time. It was like a special effect in a movie, the kind where the main actor is still and everything whizzes past in a blur, you know that kind of scene? It was like seeing people and the traces they left behind in each instant. Very neat, and it only lasted for a minute.
I don’t know what it is about impending fall that lends itself to this kind of thought, but it always happens to me. Life changes, that’s the main thing you can say about it. Life changes, I change, my interests change, my possibilities change, my circumstances change, people change, and now I’ve even changed from a coffee drinker to a tea drinker. That one is the most surprising of all. 
“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.
ma belle amie — Kty strikes again.
Yesterday I was reading a wholly compelling story in the NYTimes about a man who lives with schizophrenia; he has learned strategies to talk back to his voices and leads a difficult but full life. The whole article was moving, but there was one line that gut-punched me. At one point in his life, the man sat in his bedroom with a gun in his lap, ready to end his life. His wife walked in and said ‘I know you feel like quitting, but what if tomorrow is the day you get what you want?’ A long long time ago, in another life, I’d reached that point too and in a letter, someone said that we keep going because tomorrow we might round a corner and see someone standing there, holding flowers just for us.
I am by no means in that terribly hopeless place, but you know how life just kind of grinds sometimes? World news is terrible, your personal life hits a bump, something freaky happens like you get a hug that breaks your rib, there are too damned many flies and crap it’s hot and muggy. It’s been a long time since you had fun, just some plain old fun. You’re in the grinding uphill part of the rollercoaster, and have been for quite a long time. Nothing’s wrong really, nothing’s terminally bad, there’s plenty of hope lingering in the corners, it’s not like that, but boy. Grind.
Zen Garden Sea Lace -- and why yes, dear Kty, I do think it would be gorgeous!
Today’s bouquet of flowers was brought to me by my favorite living Parisian, Kty, who happens to be on holiday right now. We’ve never met in person, but if you’ve read this blog for long you know of her because she shows up in comments and in posts (like me, her birthday is in November so she feels like my sister or something). One of these days I’m going back to Paris and taking that lovely woman out for a glass of wine or two or three. I just got an email from Kty asking me if I didn’t think a certain pattern (Kozue, which she gifted me) would look beautiful in one of the yarns in my stash, the one shown to the left.
Oh, the many things about her email that transformed my day. The thought behind it, I’m just grinning and feeling like maybe the world is ok, despite all the awful news (note: must stop reading the NYTimes). Maybe we hold each other up, maybe we give each other little smiles, little nudges, and it helps hold the world together. The tiniest things can be just the thing someone needs; I always know that but I don’t always remember it.
I’ll cast on asap and will post a WIP photo. Tonight I’m having dinner with two friends, one of whom is moving back to the UK (boo), and tomorrow night’s my poetry group, but my fingers will be itching to get going. Merci beaucoup, Kty.
Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives — M. Angelou
I hope it’s been a good summer for everyone — it’s been a good summer for me! Thank you to everyone who said something here, or on facebook, or via email, about my seeming disappearance from good old Thrums. I don’t know why this has happened, why I’ve not been here. It’s not because of the glums, or blues, thank heavens; usually when that happens, I have an increasing number of increasingly-heavy posts and then silence. Nope, it’s not that.
It’s not because I just don’t care anymore, don’t have an interest in maintaining this blog, don’t care to stay in communication. Nope, it’s not that either.
It’s not that I’ve quit thinking, quit noticing, quit pondering. It’s not that I’ve given up on knitting, though it is true that my burning desire to knit all the time is in a lull. Still, I’m just about to finish the band on my featherweight cardigan, then I’ll do the sleeves. It’s adorable, y’all. Wait until you see it.
It’s not that life has become boring; in fact, if anything it’s because life is not at all boring! I’ve been seeing friends regularly, going to my writing group, my book club, my poetry group; out to lunch and dinner with friends; I have been out and about in the city, and going to free concerts in Riverside Park (including a semi-bluegrass concert — semi because it didn’t have a banjo or a fiddle!! WHAT???!, and also a Middle Eastern concert, complete with lovely and breathtaking belly dancer); I took a 12-mile hike in the Catskills with a friend and learned that while I love to walk, hiking is not my bag if the rocks are slimy and mossy and muddy.
I’ve been keeping up with my strength training, although I’ve just hit a pretty nasty snag. Someone hugged me very hard last week and broke one of my ribs. YIKES. First, yikes to the pain, a broken rib is excruciating; second, yikes to the setback; and third, yikes! Are my bones so brittle that a hard hug breaks a rib? Really??
And I’ve been writing poetry, which turns out to be a lot of fun. I was too intimidated, and thought I’m a brilliant consumer of poetry and have poetic turns-of-phrase now and then, but I’m no poet (but look at my feet, they’re Longfellows….hahaha). Well, I tried anyway, and it’s wonderful (writing poetry, that is….my first poem, not so much). When I’m a little less shy about it, I’ll post one or two here.
Which — I hope — will be very soon. My next post, that is. Love to all y’all.
Learning about what you’re made of is always time well spent, and I have found no better teacher.
I read a post this morning written by a yoga teacher, about the fact that life is always hard, and it doesn’t get easier. Of course it goes up and down, hard moments do ease off, difficult times do end, down goes up even if up does also go down. Our own personal challenges often stay with us for decades, and then of course life and aging have a way of throwing new and exciting difficulties in the path, just to keep things from getting boring. Hey! Now I can’t remember why I came into this room! Challenge! And what’s up with my knees! What? I can’t quite hear you as well…..
It’s always hard, it doesn’t get easier. When I read the title of her post, my first thought was about the thing I most love intellectually about strength training, which is [duh] that it’s always hard, it doesn’t get easier. But what does happen is that you can do more. It was hard to hold plank for 6 seconds (like, shaky quivery sweaty hard) and 10 weeks later it’s that very same hard to hold it for 75 seconds. It’s exactly the same hard. It’s hard. It’s still hard, and it’s not going to get any easier. But I am different, I have gotten somewhere — in this instance, I am physically stronger.
And I guess it’s frequently the very same thing about life, not to get all corny about it…but it is the same, isn’t it? We go through trials and difficulties, and while they wear us down, they build up something that becomes tougher, something that will possibly help the next time we have to face the tough.
There’s so much to learn from strength training. This morning I had to face the lesson of the meaning of discipline. I’ve been a bit glum, slightly blue, nothing serious. And very tired, kind of feeling like a wire version of myself, inconsequential in some weird way. Empty. Again, nothing serious just a current, temporary deal. But today was lower body workout day — squats, kettlebell swings, hardcore hard — and I went in the room with my kettlebell and closed the door, and just thought no, not today. I’m too tired. I feel too puny. I’ll just not do it today. So I thought OK, I’ll just do one rep, one set. One set of kettlebell swings and one set of crunches. That’s it, then I’ll take a shower. Then I thought well, I’ll just do one more. Then one more. Then I got to the squats and side knee kicks and after one rep I was sure I was quitting for the day. I sat there with my phone and read email, trying to get my breath, feeling perfectly justified in not doing the whole thing today, after all I feel puny and not very good, there’s always next time.
And then I realized this is what discipline is — doing it anyway. Not feeling like it, and doing it anyway. Doing what I promised myself I would do, for myself. Marnie sent me this great article (ignore the fact that it’s Henry Rollins, if you need to), and it moves me. So very many lessons to learn from doing a hard thing.
how is it already mid-June?! Who knows where the time goes?
What have I been doing! Working, working [out], being social, going through the hell of transferring my professional site to a new domain (don’t get me started), eating good summer food, and just doing everything except documenting it all. Oh, and a bit of knitting on my gorgeous red featherweight cardigan, want to see?
that color is amazing
Of course the little cardigan is as light as a whisper, a breeze, a feather, perhaps. I can’t wait to finish it so I can wear it. Even though it’s laceweight yarn, the large needles make it go pretty quickly so I’m not being bogged down by all the stockinette. I’m going to do some waist shaping since my waist does have shape.
Tomorrow morning I’m going to walk over to St John the Divine for the 4:30am Summer Solstice Concert. The Winter Solstice concert was so amazing, and I imagine the summer solstice concert will be, too; sitting in the very dark gothic cathedral, listening to live music as the sun slowly comes up and pours through the stained glass windows….even worth getting up that early, I imagine. We’ll see. Should be a great weekend.
And the same to you, my friends. A great weekend.
if only I could knit while doing the plank. hmm.
Well, I guess that’s what I am — a monogamous obsessive. I am now obsessed with remaking my physical life to the detriment of my other obsessions. My knitting has taken a backseat (strangely enough, it’s not like I don’t still watch movies at night, so I could knit….but I don’t). Reading? Backseat. Baking? Way way in the back seat. Like, in that car behind me, in its back seat.
It’s fun. I am shocked, because it’s not really fun doing a lot of the stuff (if you know what a burpee is, you’ll give me a yeah yeah), but the aftermath of doing it, of having done it, becomes a whole lot of fun. My body is changing. My state of mind is changing. Hell, even my sleep is changing.
Weird. But the word nerd in me still exists; I’m off to a poetry group meeting tonight, in which we will read and analyze poetry! We’ll see, I hope we really do that. It’s the first meeting. Other groups I’m in — a reading group, and a writing group — they’re only nominally focused on reading and writing. Mostly, they’re about chatting.
So, off to walk the 10 blocks to my poetry group meeting, in the wind and rain. Ah, New York City, such a charmer. Happy Tuesday, y’all!
time to listen to the Polyphonic Spree…
The title of this post is yet another AA saying, and it’s one I really love. I like it differently than the Churchill quote there to the left, though they seem to be saying the same thing, generally. Don’t give up before the miracle. And you know, the miracle can be the tiniest thing that just comes from nowhere.
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:
- Five things you love about yourself.
- Five things your body can do.
- Five things you’re grateful for.
- Five things that make you happy you’re alive.
- 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.
no pictures today, just a LOT of words.
Meaning
I get so irritated with people who just moan about the meaninglessness of life and say they’re “existentialists.” I love those big-picture questions and can think about them until the cows come home, but existentialism doesn’t mean stopping at the claim that there is no meaning. That’s just the foyer. You have to keep going, walk through the next door which is “the meaning is up to you.” I’m very comfortable with the idea that the meaning is up to me.
Joseph Campbell said, “People say that what we are all seeking is meaning for life. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.” I tend to agree with that. I think that’s why I love this Vonnegut passage from Cat’s Cradle, the last rites for a Bokononist:
“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.”
Those moments when we really get to experience our lives, when we’re not mindlessly passing hours, when we are connected/connecting to someone else, some other mud, that’s the meaning of life. Leo Buscaglia said, “I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things… I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.” ME TOO, LEO. Me too. We’re here! We get to be here, in this glorious and terrifying and maddening and disheartening and discouraging and beautiful and profound world.
I have a long relationship with Christianity, beginning with my growing up in the Church of Christ (only ones going to heaven, you know), then losing my faith, then finding it again when I had kids, then a few years as a Quaker, and then a profound uncertainty about it all, leaving me agnostic. I sample from the buffet of Big-Picture ideas, like many 21st century Americans — a bit of resonance to aspects of Buddhism, Taoism, Native American beliefs, some aspects of Christianity (though I wish I could be more comfortable with the love part and less focused on the wrath and vengeance part, thanks Church of Christ upbringing). But I don’t understand why believing there is a specific God provides meaning, or why the fact that we die means there is no meaning. None of that makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t understand why believing that when we die, that’s it, means life has no meaning. I just don’t get it.
Other stuff: Fitness
I’m still involved with my new strength training regimen, and my progress has been surprising to me! It really helps that I have such an amazing trainer (who writes things like this, which every woman should read); she encourages me and is just the kind of trainer you’d dream of. So I’ve been thinking a lot about bodies, and my body, and the woman-specific cultural “problems” with women’s bodies, and developing a personal style, and feeling good about exactly how I am, today. IT IS HARD. Just getting dressed this morning, I had these thoughts [more or less]:
- ugh, my stomach is too big
- my legs are so white, ugh I can’t even look
- saddlebags, gross
- I’d look a lot better if I lost some weight
Instead, I could honestly think these things [but I didn't]:
- I love that white streak in my hair that frames my face — I feel so lucky that it’s all clumped up like that, so striking!
- I’m so glad I have such pretty skin, and I always have. Lucky me!
- Pretty good! 52, pretty happy, pretty smile, getting stronger every day. Pretty good!
- Good job.
I’m thinking and trying.
Other stuff: Knitting
I don’t really know why, but I’m in a big knitting lull. I took knitting with me to Turkey but didn’t knit a single stitch. In fact, except for being forced to pull the needles out at the airport, I didn’t even open the knitting bag. The last time this happened, just as Janna suggested I just needed to finish something to get it kick-started again, so maybe I can finish my giant byzantine Traveling Woman shawl in the next few days. I’m down to fewer than 10 rows (but of course the rows are very long now). But Friday is my son’s birthday; he’ll be 24, and this is the first birthday I’ll get to celebrate with him since he was 18. Saturday we’re doing our one-week-delayed Mother’s Day, and I have some stuff to do. So I may not get to do much knitting for a few days. Unhappily(?) that doesn’t bother me.
Finally, I’m not getting far in recovering from this jetlag. Reliably, I wake up at 2:12a.m., which kind of cracks me up how specific it is. When I woke up this morning and glanced at the clock and saw yep, 2:12, I stifled a laugh. I start dragging hard around 5pm and crash by 9:30. I hope this passes soon!
Don’t know how to end this overly-long, overly-wordy post.
ch-ch-ch-ch-cha-nges…
In psychology, it’s said that people do mesearch. He studies self-esteem? He doesn’t have any. She studies deception? Big liar. He studies social dilemmas with a focus on people who don’t play nice? He doesn’t play nice. Etc. Social psychology is all about us as social animals, the way the world outside us has far more to do with who we are than we like to believe. The way roles, and scripts, and other people shape our behavior — and then of course we swear that no, that’s not right, we wanted to do that.
Digression #1: Here’s the coolest research I know. So some psychologists go to a mall with a fake questionnaire. As a reward for taking the survey, participants get to choose one of a set of items. In one study, for example, the items were pantyhose. The secret is that every single pair was identical, in every way (and that wasn’t disguised; in other words, the researchers didn’t try to make them appear different). People would mull them over, look them up and down, and then pick one (very reliably, the one on the far right). That’s interesting, but here’s the point: They would be asked why they picked that one (the real point of the research) and people just made shit up. “Well, I picked it because it’s the highest quality.” “I picked it because it’s sheerer than the others.” “I chose that one because it’s the best match to my skin tone.” Etc. And they were all identical. The title of the published paper was “Telling More Than We Know,” and it’s a classic. People do all kinds of things and then make up stories — on the fly — about why they did the thing. And they’ll insist, very strongly. Hilarious.
Digression #2: I’m a social psychologist, but a very unsocial animal. I’m awkward, shy, uncomfortable, and hate parties with the burning passion of a thousand suns. I’m good one-on-one (love that), ok with 2 others, start to wobble with 3, and am lost with 4+. I don’t know how to do small talk, and go immediately into inappropriately deep stuff that makes people suddenly remember they need to go to the bathroom. At home.
So all of that is to say this:
Such a busy social butterfly I am! Last week, lunch with a friend one day, breakfast with another friend one day, and my writing group one evening. This week: breakfast with a friend one day, breakfast with Will this morning and dinner with 2 girlfriends tonight, and then breakfast with another friend tomorrow morning. I hardly recognize myself!
I hardly recognize myself right now, anyway. I daydream about doing plank (plank!) and love to think about getting my form right, on squats. [me?! the most exercise i ever did was moving the mouse around.] I care about how I’m eating and want to be sure I get enough protein and the other stuff I need. And I’m kind of dressed up every day….even just to sit around the house. I enjoy shopping! ME! Yesterday, before my Wednesday appointment, I had some time to spare and stopped in at Filene’s Basement to see what’s new. ME!
I woke up from an unremembered dream a couple nights ago, and I didn’t know who I was, where I was, what I was doing, when I was (by which I mean what decade it is), and couldn’t figure out what I might be doing the next day. Complete and utter identity confusion. Who is this exercising socializing careful-eating dressed-up adult-like person?!
amen, sisters and brothers.
To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.
~William James
Hafiz had it going on.
horny toads and arrowheads, signposts of [some of] my childhood. what are yours?
Hey, I’m nearly done with my Saroyan — I should finish it tonight and get it blocking, so FO photo tomorrow, yay! And the light has started to return, I’m feeling better, double yay. Thank you for your kindnesses, really. It’s such a relief to have words and thoughts again, you have no idea (unless you’ve been there, of course).
flint arrowhead
A few days ago, maybe a couple weeks, I was talking to a friend about my childhood, and how we all had collections of arrowheads because you couldn’t really go too far without finding them. They were everywhere, and we did think they were very neat, and very special, but not much more than that. Indian arrowheads, we knew that’s what they were (and that’s how we referred to them), and we knew that was cool, but they were so commonplace it didn’t have the dazzle that it might have, otherwise. I remember picking them up and stuffing them in my pockets, never thinking about how they’d actually been used. Was the one in my pocket used to kill other people? Animals? Surely. There’s a brand new piece in the NYTimes about some new arrowhead discoveries in central Texas that add to archaeologists’ certainty that people lived in North America much longer ago than they’d believed. Outside of archaeological digs, I don’t think anyone finds arrowheads on the ground any more in Austin.
horny toads
We also couldn’t help but find horny toads (as we called them; their actual name is horned toad, or horned lizard). Full-grown horny toads fill your palm, and they’re all sizes smaller than that, too. It used to be so easy to find baby horny toads, which are unbelievably adorable. They squirt blood out of their eyes when they feel threatened, and yet they weren’t scary to us kids. If you rub their very soft bellies with your fingertip, they kind of get hypnotized (at least that’s what we thought). Many Saturday mornings, my friend Billy Burkhardt and I would take empty shoe boxes out to the field and hunt horny toads. We’d fill up our boxes, and then his mother took us to Frisco Burger for lunch. Our shoe boxes sat on the table next to our plates, bound with a big old rubber band, and they’d move around a bit as the horny toads jostled inside. After lunch, we’d go back to the field and release them all; as far as I can remember, none died.
At least in my old stomping grounds, it’s pretty rare to see one these days. The loss of horny toads isn’t due to the encroachment of people, as much as it is due to the invasion of fire ants that consumed all the little red ants that were the horny toads’ diet.
I don’t have exaggerated fondness for the ‘good old days.’ The good old days had plenty of their own problems too. Whenever someone says something like “I wish I lived back in the (insert old date here), back when life was simpler,” I always want to smack them and say yeah, back when you were lucky to live 40 years, lucky if your children survived infancy, and lucky if you didn’t die from the measles or polio, or something that penicillin could easily cure. Yeah, those good old days.
Every age, every generation, looks at what’s been lost (for me, arrowheads and horny toads) and sighs, thinking it’s so sad, such a loss, that kids these days can’t enjoy them, all the things they’re missing. I do absolutely think there are losses that are sad (including a loss of civility and general eloquence), but the fact that my kids didn’t know, and future grandkids won’t know, the thrill of finding arrowheads, or the fun of catching horny toads, that’s just part of the stream of it all.
Today’s post brought to you by the NYTimes article, along with my real desire not to become one of those crotchety old geezers going on and on about how great it used to be.
…little things mean a lot…
- It’s Saturday
- I’m not sick
- I’m even less phlegm-ey
- We ran errands last night, leaving today free for
- a de-cluttering housecleaning day and
- baking and
- knitting
- There’s no snow or trash outside my window for the first time since Christmas
- I have Sweet-Tarts in the drawer by my knitting
- I see white clouds flying past in the little square of blue sky I can see from my seat on the couch where I knit and blog
- I hear birds chirping
- We’re planning a trip….Oaxaca maybe? Barcelona maybe? Turkey maybe.
- I’m meeting a blog friend in person on Wednesday
I hope you have a list of your own today of things to say ‘yay’ about! Happy Saturday, y’all.
smaller and smaller, the sea bashes everything / until voila: sand.
I love Dean Young’s poetry; I’d somehow missed out on him, until McSweeney’s published his book Embryoyo, with the wonderful first two lines on the first page “”They won’t attack us here in the Indian graveyard.” / I love that moment.” Doesn’t that just make you want to finish reading that poem (titled “Luciferin”)? Of all the poems in this very small book, this is one of my favorites. So many of the phrases and lines are just so wonderful. I’m coloring my favorites.
Inverness Gray (by Dean Young)
from Embryoyo
so what is the cause of death? the inner
flying stops, it’s mysterious unless
there’s trauma to organs, bark or head.
a brick falls on a caterpillar,
not much mystery there but even unhurt,
thriving things seem pointing to their end
especially if psychology’s involved.
smaller and smaller, the sea bashes everything
until voila: sand. it is 10:30 then 10:34
then 40 years later. time passing not the causer
but the caused. baby now in trouble
with her credit cards, no more can you ask
the friend what you never could. the pier
turns to splinters, gown to dust-rags,
life to not-life. even though everyone
already knows, is death a secret
that must be told and told? almost sexual
although so many wires in our minds,
it’s easy to cross a few. bend a paper clip
back and forth, it breaks, the molecules
can only take so much. ann-margret
bent back and forth. scarlet king snake
bent back and forth. wooden ladder.
apple tree. every sunset is a crease,
mother weighing less and less but falling
harder. what is the cause behind the cause
behind the cause? smaller and smaller,
bodies slamming bodies, bent and bent
until only a few traits remain: color, cry,
residue of dream in the corner of an eye,
kiss on an envelope then the flying flown.
to where? into solar flares? an angel’s hair?
the next one over there who’s not yet
an embryo. or does it just disperse,
a spurt, a spark from the flinty gears?
so the sea bashes and bashes and the planes
take off and land and the fluffy murre chicks
waddle off the cliff.
The whole ‘circle of life thing’ is such an encapsulated little cliched notion that we say it and keep going without stopping to let it settle. Or, if we’re in a place where we’re sitting with it because our life is making us face it, it’s usually a circumstance that’s so loaded and overwhelming all we can do is see the little bit in front of our feet.
A couple of Decembers ago, I was at my corner waiting for the light to change, standing next to the Christmas tree market. A young mother and her little girl were walking past, and the little girl was so excited about Christmas. I listened to their conversation for a few minutes until the light changed, and I remembered so many years ago, when I was that mother and my kids were that child. It was one of those moments where I really felt time, I felt the way life just keeps going, the earth keeps peopling, every year there are new 2-year old kids being captivated by trees and lights, every year there are new mothers staying up late making magic for their kids, and my turn has passed. And some day I won’t be here at all, my kids will be in my place, their turns will have passed.
There’s something about it that touches me and chokes me up, and I can’t quite figure it out. Obviously it has something to do with my son’s return in my life, with my sense of lost time, of getting older, but it’s not sad. It just kind of is, in some way.
Posted for myself, more than anything.
if you lie like a rug, and you don’t give a damn / you’re never gonna be as happy as a clam
Katie is on her way back to Austin, having done what she came to do. Tomorrow night I have a date with Will, my son, for coffee and Scrabble (at which time he will kick my ass, as he always does. Last night he texted me with this warning: “doldrum = my opening bingo when I destroy you at Scrabble.). Two weeks ago, this wild dream would’ve been too wild to dream.
Today, I opened my tiny NYC mailbox and inside was a puffy envelope — unexpected, what?! Tammy, my friend from Connecticut, mentioned and photographed in the pages of this blog, sent me an adorable little project bag she made, in bright spring colors. The sweet note commented on how she knew the winter had been getting me down. What a thoughtful and sweet friend, sending a thoughtful and sweet surprise.
It is indeed a big old goofy world. It’s one way for a while, then it’s the opposite way for a while. If you don’t already know John Prine, you might enjoy this little video of him singing the song he wrote that gave this post its title. He said his mother liked the little sayings — eat like a bird, quiet as a mouse, etc., so he strung them all together into this song.
If the rollercoaster is flying you down right now and you’re squealing whee!!, enjoy it! If it’s slowly and painfully climbing you up a hill that’s so steep you can’t even see the top, hang on. I’ve thrown my hands in the air and tipped my head back to yell WHEEEEEEE!
don’t compare your insides to my outsides, man. really. don’t.
Although I am not involved with Alcoholics Anonymous in any way, it’s such a pervasive part of our culture and we’ve probably all heard some of the AA-isms. Some are more and some are less meaningful (though I imagine they’re all more meaningful to those in AA), but now and then I hear one that just nails a very important truth.
HALT – hungry, angry, lonely, tired. For addicts, those are dangerous states that might lead them back to their substance of preference, but aren’t they dangerous states for us all? I know when I’m hungry, angry, lonely, and/or tired, I’m very vulnerable. Getting that little mnemonic — halt! — has been a keen little nugget to carry around. I fumble it around in my pocket.
Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides – this one I absolutely love, and it’s something I have to keep saying to myself. I often feel like such a hot mess, I don’t feel like an adult, I feel like I’m always just a step behind everyone, trying to figure it out, and everyone else has got it going ON, man. But really, no they don’t, at least not all the time, and certainly not as often as it looks like it to me. I think about this all the time in the blog world, especially, as we craft a version of ourselves to present to the Internet world. Of course, there’s a good part that we each decide is private and personal. But there’s also the way we choose to present our lives in a more mundane way — our knitting mostly works (and when it doesn’t, we’re a little bit charming about it), our family lives are mostly nice and happy, our work is mostly challenging, our floors and kitchens are mostly clean, etc.
Even if and when we reveal flaws, they aren’t the flaws that carry our shame. They’re the easy flaws, the “oops! silly me” flaws. Few people go around advertising their ugly truths. Of course — of course. Not on their blogs, not on the street, not to their friends (or not to many friends, at least), and not to close loved ones, with some exceptions of course. Of course.
So it’s easy to look at crisp blog templates, bright photos, happy stories, smiling children, stories of celebration and triumph, and think man. They’ve got it together. I really really don’t.
If anyone who reads this ever finds themselves thinking that about me, don’t compare your insides to my outsides. I try to keep that in mind myself.
not to worry but i’ll be quiet for a bit
Another book that meant a lot to me was Little Women. My bitchy grandmother (the other bitchy grandmother) gave me a hardback copy when I was in 2nd grade, I think, and I still have it. It’s falling apart and the pages are brown. I remember crying every time I read it, when Beth died. (no!!) My daughter Marnie’s name came from a misunderstanding of the mother’s name in Little Women (it’s Marmee in the book, but my father-in-law’s mother wanted to use it for her grandmother name and she got it wrong, so she was always called Marnie, but it was a mistake).
ANYWAY. Remember how the little women are always reading (or being exhorted to read, by their mother) Pilgrim’s Progress? I’ve never read it, but somehow I know of the Slough of Despond and sisters, I’m in it. I’m in it up to my waist. Just personal stuff going on, not for public blog consumption, and no one’s dying or anything so in the scheme of things it’s surmountable, but the Slough is sucking me down.
I’ll probably be quiet for a few days — sure I’ll be back.
***
p.s. #1 If, like me, you never said Slough of Despond out loud because you didn’t know how to pronounce it, it’s slough like through — slew.
p.s.#2 And many thanks to Jess for commenting on my political post to let me know that the Republicans have decided to remove the word “forcible” from their definition of rape. Yay, thank heavens for that small favor. Kristen Schaal said on The Daily Show Wednesday night, “You’d be surprised how many drugged, underaged or mentally handicapped young women have been gaming the system. Sorry, ladies the free abortion ride is over.” Guess she’ll get to eat her sadly funny words.
the most powerful story of my life
beautiful Maxine Hong Kingston
Tonight, I am going to the 92nd Street Y to hear a lecture by Maxine Hong Kingston. Toni Morrison will be introducing her. It starts at 8pm, which is really late for me! It’s on the other side of the park, so it’s awkward to get there and back, and it’s still disgusting outside with piles of crappy-looking snow everywhere and unplowed streets. I must really, really, really, really want to go…..which I do.
Kingston wrote a book that had a tremendous impact on me, and I choose the word ‘impact’ purposely; it impacted me like the asteroid that hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. It crashed into me and left me changed forever. My first semester in college, at the age of 36, I took a literature course on women and identity, and among the books we read were Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid, and The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston. There were others, but these two were my favorites. The Woman Warrior is about a 1st generation Chinese-American girl whose mother raises her with stories from China, and one of the important stories is of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior. It’s just an incredible, incredible book, and if you haven’t already read it you should get it immediately and read it. Fa Mu Lan was a young child when terrible people were marauding, decimating villages, destroying everything, so her parents sent her into the mountains, where she lived with a kind of mythical couple who trained her as a warrior. She returned to her village many years later, planning to ride into battle as an avenger. It was illegal for a woman to ride into battle, so she hid her hair and bound her chest. Before she left, her parents had her kneel before the ancestral alter and they took sharp knives and carved their family’s story into her back, washing the wounds with wine so they’d always be visible. That way, if she were killed in battle, her body could be held up as a reminder of what everyone was fighting for. She literally did ride into battle with her story on her back. I later heard that some version of this tale is among the first stories that Chinese children learn.
Anyway. That idea stayed with me, the idea of wearing your story on your back. I knew it had some kind of power for me, it rattled around in my gut and spirit for 4 or 5 years, waiting for me to figure out what to do with it. When I was in graduate school, it all came together, after a period of deep, deep depression. I didn’t want to carve the stories of my own brutal childhood into my back; they’re there already, I carry them around with me all the time. But I did want to honor my experiences and so I decided to carve something else into my back. I spent several months thinking about what I got from those experiences. I selected Chinese characters that represent the concepts. I printed them out, arranged and rearranged them until the order made sense and they were also arranged in a beautiful way.
Because I was extremely poor, I saved and saved and saved any spare money I had, until I had what I thought might be enough for one tattoo. I took my folder of papers, and my $35, and went to a tattoo shop near campus, in Austin. When I walked in, I was the only customer; it was just me and the owner of the shop, a kind of scary-looking dude. I told him my story, and asked him if $35 would be enough for one tattoo. I had kept my head down the whole time, but when I looked up at him, his eyes were filled with tears. He walked around the counter, locked the front door, and pulled the curtain over the windows. (I was more than a little scared by this.)
He told me that he’d give me all the tattoos, for free. Did I want to do it right then? I took a deep breath and grabbed my hands together to stop them from shaking, and said yes. My heart pounded while he got everything together, and when he was ready, I stripped to the waist and got on my knees, leaning over a large chair so my spine was fully exposed. The characters run the full length of my spine, and the process took 4 hours. It was excruciating — I’m no pain junkie. He sat perpendicular to my body, and he’d take a deep breath and hold it, then carve the lines into my back. The lines had to be perfectly straight, it was intense work. He’d carve a line, then explode an exhale and kind of throw himself backwards. My whole body was sweaty from enduring the pain…it hurts, right on the spine….and he kept asking if I wanted to stop, if it hurt too much. I didn’t want to stop, and it was right that it hurt.
hope
I am always aware of those characters on my spine, I feel them and their power. I had space for one more at the very bottom, and it took me 6 years to figure out what to put there. A few years ago, I finally figured it out — at the bottom, the concept on which all the others rest, I have the character for hope. It’s the only one that’s red; all the others are black. Red is a powerful color, and it carries a lot of meaning in China.
- Bill Moyers and MHK
- MHK on Wikipedia
- The Genius of The Woman Warrior (Slate)
- The Woman Warrior study guide
- The Woman Warrior on NPR
This was a long post, but this is an enormous aspect of me and my life. Read The Woman Warrior, it’s really an amazing story. I can’t wait to see Kingston tonight.
EDIT: afterwards, and especially in response to Noreen’s comment. She was amazing. Totally, honestly, tear-streaming amazing. As I sat there, though, I realized that it almost didn’t matter what she was like, or whether she met my expectations. She wrote that book, and that book is part of me. And I got to listen to her talk, and read from it. I cried throughout the whole reading, and I’m so very glad I went.
crappiness squared. cubed, even.
Whatever, whichever order is better, the bottom line is the same: it’s now Sunday at 5-something pm, the weekend is nearly over, and mine was awful. Not big-time awful, like someone I love getting hit by a train or anything (poo, poo, I spit and curse at those gods), just quotidian awful. The kind where you suddenly see that it’s Sunday at 5-something pm and you didn’t get anything good done, and yesterday all day was one crappy thing after another and turns out today was, too.
As always, I had such hopes, such dreams, such plans. I was going to knock out 1.5 socks (didn’t happen). I was going to do some writing (didn’t happen). I was going to take a walk (didn’t happen). I was going to catch up on some work (didn’t happen). I was going to bake some goodies, plus 2 loaves of bread (didn’t happen, with half an exception). I was going to watch a good movie or two (didn’t happen). I was going to curl up on the couch and feel cozy and happy (didn’t happen).
So what did happen? I have no idea. But it was all crappy, and I feel grumbly and grumpy and crummy and crumpy and crumbly. And tomorrow begins another week.
With whom do I take this up. Who do I take this up with. I want cake. Good thing I’ve lived long enough to know that life goes in cycles, that down today won’t last, and then again, neither will up tomorrow. Cake, though, is the eternal constant, perhaps Einstein’s c.
Oh! And last night, at ~3am, a woman across the street started shrieking, help me! OH GOD! Someone help me! Please!! Shrieking, on and on, lights were going on, we were all rushing to our windows. I immediately thought of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was murdered in NYC in the 60s, in full view of neighbors…none of whom did anything. It is the stuff of social psychology. The shrieks and screams last night were pure horror. And a manifestation of the shrieker’s psychosis. We’ve been through this before, with her. We’ve all called 911, the police have come, it’s just a crazy woman. But I feel for her, so much, because even if it’s a psychotic experience, she is clearly in hell. Unfortunately, so are we. Life in NYC, you’re always “interesting.”
que sera sera — but who knows what that is.
Cases in point:
- one of my dearest friends in the world, age 41, in perfect health and with no known family history, had a major stroke just over a year ago and of course everything everything changed in that moment. now she can’t work, she wanted a child and now that’s not possible, she lost her verbal fluency (although it feels much worse to her than it seems to those of us who still love to listen to her, even if it is more halting), etc. she was (is) brilliant, and while she still is brilliant, her fluency problems make it so much harder for her to express herself. so all at once, in one unexpected moment, everything changed.
- another of my dearest friends in the world, newly married, crazy in love with his wife, happy life filled with plans — his mother-in-law, dear to him and his wife, learned she has ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). it was like an atom bomb in their lives, worst for the mother-in-law of course, but big-time life-changing for my friends. they’re selling their home and moving in with her to care for her. all at once, in one unexpected moment, everything changed.
- i just learned that right before thanksgiving, an acquaintance’s wife was ok, then something was wrong, then it was diagnosed as kidney cancer, then she had surgery. in a 3-week period of time.
and of course we all know these things can happen (though they usually happen in other people’s lives), but we don’t even think about them unless we have to. we go about our daily business making all our happy plans, imagining the long string of tomorrows and next months and this summers and next falls. but of course what else can we do? it’s all there is to do – make plans, expect them to be possible at least, and shoot for tomorrow.
but they do serve to remind us — at least a day or two after they happen to other people — that life is fragile, and that we really should appreciate it and that today’s the day, man.
last night i had dinner with my friend who had the stroke. we were talking about the ways we can feel so sorry for ourselves, and how irritating it is when people say “but look at all the ways it could be worse.” (seriously, don’t ever say that to someone who’s dealing with something horrible.) (if you aren’t sure what to say, just say that, that you don’t know what to say but you are so sorry they’re having to deal with it. and also, don’t say you know how they feel unless you’ve had that same experience. and also, don’t say that you couldn’t deal with it if it happened to you — oh yes you could, just like they are trying to.) ANYWAY. we both realized that with enough time, we are able to think about all the ways it could be worse and find some measure of comfort in it — but not in the way you’d think. “it could be worse” stops the spiral of sorrow for yourself, but it does not make it better. it just stops it from getting worse. for a while, anyway.
so my long-winded point: today’s the day. don’t forget that.
it’s just for today – all bets are off tomorrow!
I suspect I’ve arrived at this place for no other reason than I’m older. I mean, everyone is older — older than they were yesterday, for heaven’s sake. But I mean I’m older now, I’m 52 years old. As Sherlock used to describe me, in previous decades I had a kind of thrashing quality about me. Frantic, misspent energy, getting amazing things done but in a thrashing way. I always aspired to calmness and centeredness, but that’s hard to do when you’re a thrasher.
So, acknowledging that about myself, I return to being older. It’s really wonderful being older. Girls (by which I mean y’all who are younger than me), do not fear the 50s. This assumes nothing horrible happens to your health, of course – but otherwise, do not fear the 50s. Amazing things happen to you in your 50s. They certainly have happened to me. Even Sherlock agreed a couple weeks ago that I’m not a thrasher now.
Everyone’s talking about resolutions – either they’re making them, or talking about how they’re not going to make them. It’s funny that such a wholesale effort is focused on one single and specific day out of 365. But the thing is, every single morning it begins. You have this day; it’s your life, this day. This is it! What do you want to do and be?
When I wake up each morning, these are the things I think of:
- just for today, i’m going to walk slowly
- i’m going to remember to breathe, and regularly
- i’ll keep my shoulders down away from my ears
- when i’m spoken to, i’ll take a beat and think rather than just racing out a thought-less response
- just for today, I’m going to think about what I want and let that be part of the conversation too
- And what’s best for me, that’s part of it too
- I don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow, but at least once today I’m going to get up and move my body around. I’ll take a walk outside if I can, but if I can’t, a little bit of yoga will feel so good. Just for today.
It really doesn’t matter what you did, how you were, who you were yesterday. You probably did the best you could with what you had to work with. It really doesn’t matter what I did, how I was, who I was yesterday. I probably did the best I could with what I had to work with. Do my best today.
And probably I’ll eat M&Ms or something. I’m no holy man, dude! Probably I’ll also be impatient at some point, and say nasty things about people who walk too damn slowly on the sidewalk – maybe even out loud so they can hear me.
Katie is preparing to knit her second project – the Habitat hat, by Jared Flood. You know that’s pretty complicated for a new knitter! Knitting in the round, ribbing, loads of cables, and learning to read and follow charts. When I taught her to knit last October, I cast on for her, so she had to do it for herself this time. We don’t have easy video phone capacities; neither of us have computers with built-in cameras. So there were lots of telephone calls trying to work things out, she followed lots of YouTube videos (thank all of you so much, who upload those little how-to videos!), and she’s getting there.
Lots of work today; I’m teaching two sections of statistics, beginning tomorrow, so today I’m trying to finish editing a giant manuscript. Have a wonderful Sunday, y’all, and remember: it’s just for today.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote the best rule to live by
it’s amazing how our kids can transform the tiny gifts we give them, isn’t it.
I’ve been thinking about this for such a long time. We give our kids whatever gifts we have, passing them along from those who gave them to us, and sometimes passing along some that are ours alone to give. Once I was on a bus in Austin – must’ve been the University Shuttle Bus, the only bus I ever took in Austin – and I saw a mother and her grown daughter sitting across from me. It was clear the younger woman was the daughter of the older, she carried a ghost of her mother’s expression underneath her own. And I loved that, seeing the echo.
I didn’t really grow up with my father, but when I met him when I was an adult, I realized all kinds of tiny ways I was just like him, things I couldn’t have picked up from seeing him. Like the way I wipe both corners of my mouth unconsciously, the way I used to search the personals section of the newspaper (back when that wasn’t code for porn), looking for something someone might’ve written for me – he did both those things too. OK, big deal, so do many people, but to see that we did both things in the exact same way, it was a little eerie. Gifts, characteristics, invisible threads connecting us across time.
So all my children received many things from their father and from me, and I think about them, and am struck by them now and then. There’s a very clear example in my daughter Marnie. Marnie’s dad draws these little cartoons – always has, as long as I’ve known him. He draws a waving guy, and a dog, and they have not changed over all these years. The only variation is that now and then the waving guy has a palm tree behind him, or something like that. Here’s a new example, he signs all his letters to his kids like this:
he's been drawing this since i met him in 1978
He and Marnie used to spend hours drawing together, filling up page after page with cartoon line drawings, fantastic creatures, all kinds of things. (I can hardly draw a breath, or a straight line with a ruler, so Marnie’s visual art talent didn’t come from me, that’s for sure!) So Marnie took this very small gift from her dad, and some other small gifts from me, and turned them into this GIANT thing. She’s creating a graphic novel now, and it’s staggering and will be staggeringly beautiful. Here’s a seed of it:
something marnie describes as a "sketch"
The link to her professional site is there to the right –> do check it out.
Life is really wonderful in this way, these tiny invisible threads and bonds gathering and growing over time, and changing by the aggregation. I love this stuff.
I don’t care how Paul Klee said it, I like my version better. Color makes life worth living.
In addition to Walt Whitman, one of my other top-10 favorite poets is Yeats. I enjoy re-reading The Second Coming over and over, but was surprised a couple of years ago to learn that I always misread one word, and always in the same way. Ah, the power of seeing what you think you’re seeing. Here is the actual wording:
…The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep…
For years I always read that as stormy sleep. I once had a pretty substantial online presence as stormysleep, drawn from my misreading. And I also thought Paul Klee said that color (though he’d have said colour) makes life worth living. But in preparing to write this post, I discovered that he didn’t say that. He said these near-misses:
- Color has got me. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.
- Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.
I like “color makes life worth living” better, so I’m going with that. Take that, Paul Klee. Anyway, here’s what prompted that meandering beginning:
madelinetosh vintage - colorway baltic. For my Dark & Stormy KellyinTX birthday sweater! WHEE!!
wow. saturated, glad-i'm-alive color
It’s funny how the current project cycle lives all together on the color wheel, isn’t it. Obviously, the blue is for the Dark and Stormy sweater, as I said in the caption. I want to do the swatching for that tonight, if possible. I’m sure you recognize Eve Shrugged, there at the top. She’s in time out because she was mean to my friend Jocelyn. I’ve kind of lost my punch with it; I’m ready to pick up the sleeves, and it should go quickly, but I don’t know. It’s been one thing after another with that one, and then it didn’t work for Jocelyn. meh. Anyway, the bright red is the beginnings of a swatch for the adorable little Laar sweater, with that great colored yarn called Dragon’s Blood. The purple at the bottom is the Owl Eyes Scarf for my friend Marian.
And here’s my current luxury problem. I wish everyone’s problems were this sweet, I really do: what knitting to take to Laos and Cambodia, of course. That’s my dilemma. The flight from JFK to Hong Kong is like 20 hours. Then we’re in the HK airport for a couple of hours, followed by the flight to Phnom Penh which takes 1.5 hours (I think). So that’s an awful lot of time, right?! However, it’ll be in a cramped Cathay Pacific coach seat, and the cabin will be darkened for most of the flight. I can of course turn on my overhead light without bothering people too much, too. So that’s not the place to do anything that requires a lot of chart-watching, a lot of stitch-counting, a lot of attention-paying. Still. A lot of time. And obviously, I’ll have the same amount of time coming home.
In between, of course, will be in-country traveling, Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to Vientiane and Luang Prabang (Laos) and back. Walking around Angkor Wat, riding in boats up/down the Mekong. Nevertheless, I am lazy and I piddle, so there will be time for knitting.
But as I keep saying, this last giant manuscript isn’t editing itself so I’d better stop this fun piddling and get to it. Happy Friday y’all.
what? I was gonna wha…oh yeah! That’s right. I was going over there to do that wait why am I here? Why is the refrigerator open, and why are my keys in there?
Well, my attitude is to roll with it. Don’t fight it too hard, don’t waste time griping that this is how it is now, taking it to mean that death is just around the corner. Yes, I’m getting older, and yes, things change in all kinds of ways. Yes, some things are harder (but some things are easier, too!). And sometimes things are just different, now.
My short-term memory has a very weak grip, these days; if I don’t act on something when I’m thinking about it, odds are pretty good that I’ll forget and that’s that. If the thing comes around again, I frequently don’t even know that I’d thought of it before! New world, and all that.
So here’s how it goes in my new associational way of being in the world:
I’m working and realize that my face is feeling tight because the air is so dry. Oh yeah! I was going to put some moisturizer on my face! Walk to the bathroom, as I’m putting it on I remember oh yeah! I was going to refill the humidifier in the living room because the air is so dry….walk to the living room and get the tank, walk to the kitchen to fill it oh yeah! I was going to empty the dishwasher, empty the dishwasher as I put away the mugs I remember oh yeah! I was going to make some mint tea, go to the cabinet to get tea and see oatmeal oh yeah! I was going to have oatmeal for breakfast…..
My life is a series of ‘oh yeah!s’ now. I experience this in a delightful way, a never-ending series of eyebrow-raising, gasp-inducing insights. Ah! Oooh! Oh! Luckily, I always remember that I’d much rather be knitting. If only these manuscripts would edit themselves…..
chili, pintos, BBQ sandwiches, hamburgers. Austin. Circle of life, yeah.
Austin is a lot of things to me, not all good but not all bad, either. Between 1958 and 2006, I was a real gypsy; there were years in my childhood when we moved 6 times during a school year. I think a reasonable tally is that I’ve moved 80 times; if anything, that estimate is conservative.
But if you cobble together all the times I lived in Austin, it would have to count as my hometown. In a psychological sense to me, it is my hometown, where I’m from. Both my daughters were born here, so two of the most important events of my whole life happened here, on top of the rest. When I returned to Austin for graduate school, the place was so full of ghosts that it was kind of difficult, and I was very very happy to leave when I completed my degree.
Still, it always draws me and I feel excited at the prospect of coming back for a visit. PLUS Katie lives here, so I’ll always come back…..and not often enough. When Katie picked me up at the airport, we were both like little puppies (well, I was anyway) – you know how puppies are when they get excited, there may be … um …. urinary accidents. Katie and her husband bought their first home a year ago, and it’s the first time I’m getting to see it. For those of you who are parents: it’s the strangest feeling in the world to go to your child’s home, to settle into a beautifully-decorated guest room, to put your things away in the guest bathroom, to go downstairs to the living room and kitchen, to eat dinner they’ve prepared for you, to watch your child and her husband watering their yard, cleaning their kitchen. Weird and wonderful and amazing, and it somehow also makes me feel like I just moved to the outer edge of the stream of time. When I was little, I was on the outer edge; then I was in the generative reproducing generation, me and my brothers- and sisters-in-law all having babies and raising kids, tired and busy, not even thinking about that stream of time thing. Not thinking about it one little second, until those babies are now grown up and settling into that part of the stream.
But it’s not morbid, I don’t feel bad, I just feel a good dose of awe.
Aside from the soaking-up-Katie part of it, Austin is about food, about getting the food I can’t get in NY. So my first night we ate tex-mex at Chuy’s. You’ll see my adoration of humble food here: I had a bean and cheese burrito with tex-mex sauce and a weak frozen margarita (that’s the way i like ‘em!). Lunch yesterday, a chopped beef BBQ sandwich from Bill Miller’s, and last night, pinto beans and cornbread and I thought I was going to die from happiness. Today we’re grabbing a burger from Sonic, and tonight we’ll get sushi. Tomorrow, a Whataburger for lunch, and homemade chili! for dinner, while we give candy to trick-or-treaters. I can get fancy food deluxe at home in NY, but eating here means the humble food of my background, and it makes me really happy.
Yesterday I “revealed” my “secret” plan to teach Katie to knit – all those quotation marks are important, because of course Katie reads my blog and already knew of my “secret” plan, but the good thing was that she said she wants to learn! So today, our errands include getting the yarn and needles she needs to make her first scarf.
And with that, I’m off — she’s awake and I don’t want to waste a second.
we love the harlot – she speaks for us, the middle-aged, working-class-breasted, short-legged, bad-haired knitters.
She’s not just a great knitter, book writer, sock conference organizer, and all-around swell gal, she’s also a humble knitter who experiences the same miseries that we all experience (see my dreadful post a few back, about how many times I had to restart my Eve’s Shrug) and she tells them in a hilarious way. To wit, Yarn Harlot’s post today included this:
This sweater can bite me hard on the hind-parts, because this is supposed to be what I do for fun. I’m a forty two year old woman with working class breasts, short legs and bad hair. I don’t need my self-esteem any lower and I’m certainly not lowering it myself. I have bathing suit shopping to do that for me, and I don’t need it from a hobby.
HAHA and HA! Amen, and I wish I’d said it that way. Except that as of one month from today I’ll be a 52 year old woman with all the same attributes mentioned in that great quote.
the 1960s were so much more than drugs and sex and rock and roll. they were rudolph and frosty, too.
my hair - the "flip" - was the height of fashion! my dress was red velvet.
I adore Mad Men – love it love it love it. I love the stories, the secrets, the every little detail. The most recent episode, the one with the office Christmas party, was so incredibly familiar it made my teeth ache. The very specific reds and greens, the music, the decorations, every. tiny. little. detail. So familiar. I breathed the air around those decorations, even if my father wasn’t working on Madison Ave.
The other day I was reading a review of this past episode and realized that I would’ve been the same age as Bobby, in the series. It took place December 1964, and I would’ve just turned 6. I can feel the construction paper between my fingers, making chains of rings for the Christmas tree. I can smell the paste, sticking a little red puff onto Rudolph’s nose, I can feel the bits of glitter stuck to my fingertips.
Childhood is such an evocative time; the saying is ‘youth is wasted on the young’ but I think it’s true that nothing is wasted on the young. The tiniest details become so firmly woven into our psychological fabric that they revisit us – with happiness, and with haunting – as long as we live. The photo above was taken in 1969, so I was 10 or 11, depending on when it was taken. Just over 40 years ago, and I can feel the table I was sitting on when the picture was taken; I can feel the wrong side of the polyester velvet of my dress, made by my mother; I can smell the Aqua-Net, sprayed from a tall blue aerosol can, that covered my hair in a misguided effort to make it hold that shape. I can quite literally feel the day in my muscles, and written into my bones.
Memory is really an incredible gift of human-ness, even if they’re not always pleasant. The way a passing smell can bring back other people, other times. The way an old song can fill you with an entirely different feeling than you felt moments before. I just love this part of being alive, don’t you?
,
o how i love annie lennox. i really do.
I had a long conversation with Katie, my older daughter, this morning, which was essentially a conversation about what gives a life meaning and value. Like me, her desire is for close-to-home things – meaningful work, a family, being a mom. Like her, I am often intimidated by people whose lives are more dramatic, or whose work is more “exciting,” or whose lives are more something than ours.
And then, while I was uploading my new sock photo to ravelry, my iTunes randomly played a song from Annie Lennox‘s album Songs of Mass Destruction. (If you click the album cover to the left, it’ll take you to the Amazon page where you can buy the music; I very highly recommend it!) I became fixated on the first song released from the album, Dark Road. Sony took down the video, so I can’t show it here. Bastards. It’s a beautiful video, and the song is heartbreakingly beautiful, as many of her songs are.
55? isn't she gorgeous?!
I’ve been in fan love with Annie since I first heard Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) back in 1983, I think. As a matter of fact, that song always makes me think of Katie; she was a tiny toddler at the time and she was crazy for the song. It could be playing at the other end of the house and she’d squeal, come running, and then stand there, bopping and grinning to the beat. Adorable. Annie’s music has been the soundtrack for much of my adult life; the Diva and Medusa albums truly are the soundtrack to the end of my first marriage, and my devastating divorce. The Peace album is the soundtrack of a year of my life in graduate school, when everything — everything — came together and I was absolutely happy in myself. The Bare album is the soundtrack to one of the biggest changes of my adult life.
So anyway, I’m sitting at my desk, doing my little small life thing, documenting a little sock I knit, for heaven’s sake, and the next song from the album came on – Sing. Sing my sister sing, let your voice be heard, what won’t kill you will make you strong, sing my sister sing. It could be trite, but it isn’t. Annie sings it with urgency – sing, my sisters. Sing. The song is the focus of her Sing campaign to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child.
So there she is (just a couple of years older than me, by the way) making beautiful music and trying desperately to help save lives in Africa, and to help women, and here I am taking too many pictures of a sock.
Of course in light of this morning’s conversation with Katie it struck me. I could say the cliched thing, something trite about “all lives have meaning” blah blah blah (note, it’s not trite because it’s not true! it is true that all lives have meaning. But it’s trite because it’s a too-simple answer to a deeper concern). I don’t know how to resolve it. I feel it, I understand it.
Maybe it’s something like understanding that age 51 I’m probably not going to be an astronaut and should cross that one off my list.
Anyway – here’s Sing, if you haven’t heard it:
now and then, the music is a perfect fit to your moment.
There are moments in life when the soundtrack syncs perfectly. Do you know what I mean? One very hot summer night a couple of years ago, I went out for a walk around 10pm, headed toward the Columbia University campus, which is just a couple of blocks up Broadway from my apartment. I walked to the corner of Broadway, and just as I turned left to head toward campus, someone somewhere started playing Summertime on a trumpet. It was haunting, and perfect, and such an incredible New York moment. The living did feel easy; it was a sultry night, the music was perfectly suited and played by someone who had much more emotion than skill, which made it even better, and I was walking in my beloved city. I got goose bumps then, and I always get them when I recall that moment, like I’m doing now. Perfect, and magical.
blue skies and puffy clouds
And today, just now, another moment like that. It’s the first day of summer, the light is dazzling, the sky is blue, the air smells sweet (so far….check back with me later when the air reeks of trash and urine), shopkeepers are spraying their sidewalks so there is a cool mist in the air all along the sidewalk, and I was walking to the UPS shop with my beloved daughter’s wedding dress in my arms, ready to send her.
As always, I was listening to music. As I turned the corner onto Broadway, a string of absolutely PERFECT songs came on my ipod: Beautiful Day, by U2; Feels So Good, by Chuck Mangione; and Boogie Shoes, by who else – K.C. and the Sunshine Band. I felt my feet leave the ground. And, of course, I cried. That’s so me. You can’t give someone else your synchronicity, but in case you also like these songs, and they fit your day, here they are:
Also: yodeling, banjo music, and laughter in a lot of different languages. Things that add to my feeling that it is fine to be a human being in this world.
beautiful beautiful yarn
So I really liked the madelinetosh eyre light that I received – the reddish orangish skein called jodhpur. But I wasn’t loving it. It didn’t go with anything in my life (except for my memories of Texas dirt). I couldn’t see it on me. I tried it here I tried it there. I tried it in a box. I tried it with a fox. I tried it in my hair. I tried it in my chair.
Nope.
Luckily, there are madelinetosh forums on ravelry, which include destash/trade threads. Within a couple of minutes of posting, I found someone who wanted to trade her skein for mine, in the colorway I wanted – cousteau. Here it is:
cousteau - madelinetosh eyre light
GORGEOUS. And it relates to other yarns in my stash, and to things I wear. Once I’m out of this very intense crunch I can’t wait to get back to madelinetosh knitting. In addition to my more-than-fulltime job, I am trying to finish the wedding dress and shawl, doing the Creativity Boot Camp daily exercises, and taking an online course in preparation for teaching online courses in psychology. And racing to finish my bookclub book (which is amazing). And trying to finish reading 3 manuscripts. And trying to sleep and eat.
So yeah, madelinetosh is waiting for me, and I can’t wait to get back to her.
living in an apartment in NYC does NOT mean you’re too poor to buy a house!
TRANSLATION
If you live outside the greater NYC area, the words probably have a different meaning – they did for me, anyway, before I moved here. People live in apartments because they can’t afford to buy a house. There’s a kind of implied social class aspect to it. A co-op is some collection of resources: an electric co-op, for rural electricity; a financial co-op; a grocery cooperative, etc.
But here, people live in apartments that they rent, or that they buy. A co-op is a legal structure in which residents of a building own shares in the building – it’s kind of like owning your apartment. But it does involve ownership, even if it’s not exactly like buying a house. I live in an apartment in a co-op building that’s pre-war (i.e. built before WWII, but ours was built in 1900). Our building was built before there was a subway. I live on the Upper West Side, which has a particular flavor like all the neighborhoods in NY do – the UWS is the literary, arty neighborhood. Upper East – richie riches, ladies who lunch.
So it sounds pretty fancy! But this is NY, where real estate and space are at a premium, even in these difficult financial times. Except for the upper-est echelons, apartments are small. Space is minimal. Older buildings – the cool ones, like mine – are old! (obvious, but true) This morning, I looked out our bathroom window and thought there had been a dusting of snow, for a minute, until I realized it’s just the general layer of soot and grime that coats everything here. That’s the view from my bathroom, just below. It’s hard to see, but the railing and the steps have a layer of white-ish crap on them, and it’s not paint, and it’s not snow.
The image on the bottom is the view from my kitchen. I’m always struck by how it looks like a prison yard. Our building is shaped like a U, with the bottom facing the street and a kind of courtyard between the two ‘arms.’ It’s not a fancy courtyard that people use, it’s just a space for getting between the buildings. But that door, at the bottom left; the barbed wire; the general gloominess; it always screams prison yard to me.
But our building is absolutely wonderful, and so is our neighborhood, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere other than Manhattan (though I might consider Hanoi, Paris, or Cusco…). We’re very lucky.
100 posts + a giveaway
This morning I happened upon Anne’s 100th post (congrats, Anne!). In celebration, she is offering a giveaway — so hop over and leave a comment. Reading her post caused me to look at my dashboard and what do you know: I was at 99, so my next post would be my 100th post! Coincidence. So in the same spirit, I thought I’d do a little giveaway. I’ll give two skeins of Berroco Jasper, in a beautiful brown color that variegates to an orange-brown:
Berroco Jasper - 2 skeins just for you!
To enter the giveaway, just leave me a comment. On Wednesday, June 9, I’ll do a random drawing at 7am, and send the skeins to the winner. When you leave a comment, the form asks for your email address, which does not show. Be sure to enter it, so I can contact you.
Of course I’d love it if you looked around the blog and subscribed, but that’s not required. Feel free to forward the post to friends, for the giveaway. If you tweet it or repost on your blog, let me know and you’ll get an extra entry.
It’s a good place to pause for a minute and say that I am glad you read, and leave comments. Have a wonderful Sunday!
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