helplessly loving my daughter, from too far away. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
I can have the shittiest day, the worst run of things happen to me, the direst disasters befall me, and while I will stumble and bemoan my fate and all that, NONE of it is as bad as when something happens to my kid. Period. And it doesn’t matter how old said kid may be — I have a feeling that if something bad befalls my kid when she’s, oh, 70 years old (and I am 93), it’ll still be the worst thing ever, much worse than if it happened to me.
A string of bad things came into my daughter’s life today, bam bam, two in a row, and I feel kind of inconsolable. I feel every one of the 1,744 miles between us. She is suddenly the little 4-year-old girl in my heart, the one who’d crawl into my lap, the one who would cry into my shoulder, the one whose trouble I could solve, and I wish I could solve the things that came to her today. She’s strong, and kind, and she loves her family, and she always tries her very best. Always.
She’s the one who has made special little treats every day this month and put them in her husband’s lunch, for a 2-week stretch of Valentine’s Day love. Sweet little things, treats that took time and heart. Just because. She is the one who makes sure our family traditions are carried on, because they mean so much to her. She is the one who always makes me laugh with her dry and wry sense of humor. She is the one who wants to be our family’s solid, strong anchor. She is also the one who came to NYC last year (a year ago, yesterday) and brought her brother back into our lives. She is the one who is obstinate, and stubborn. She is amazing, my first child, and I never wanted any bad thing to happen to her, ever. Of course she’s a human in this world and so bad things have happened to her from the beginning, and I’ve hated the guts of every single bad thing.
So in my impotence, I share this terribly alone feeling with you, other parents, who certainly know what I mean.
Double, double toil and trouble / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. ~Macbeth Act 4, scene 1, 10–11
Last night I had dinner with my dear friend. We met in the neighborhood for Thai food, and we’d kind of warned each other in advance that we weren’t doing all that well: she was feeling tired and sick with allergies (this warm winter we’re having in NYC is killing the allergy-sufferers!), and I’m worn down and exhausted and post-migrainey with just a hint of the blues (probably from my continuing inability to sleep). So we met with all this advance knowledge and with our appropriately low expectations. We also both believed that seeing each other would help us feel better. We always talk about our thoughts and feelings, our worries, our plans, we ask for and give each other advice, and we laugh and cry. It’s the best part of life, getting to have that with another person.
So we ate our dinner, and we laughed and cried, and we decided to have a cup of tea at her place rather than at the restaurant, since she lives just a couple of blocks from the restaurant. By the time we left the restaurant, I’d been crying a good bit, and my mood and heart were kind of heavy. (Note: that’s not a bad thing, it’s a relief to share sorrows with someone!) We got to her place with an express mission of making a caffeine-free cup of tea, so she opened her cabinet to see what variety of teas she had to offer.
[sidebar comment of note: we are both women of a certain age, though i am more certain than she is.]
ladies' tea
She said:
“Let’s see. I have FatBuster, Women’s Cycle, and Black Cohosh.”
I fell down laughing. I laugh this morning, remembering it.
She looked at me and she started laughing. I laughed seeing her laugh. I couldn’t stop. And my heart lightened so much.
And so another kind of friendship magic happened, another of those moments that are just a bit of crystalline joy — surprise! You can’t make them happen, they come in the midst of time together. This reminds me of the old “quality/quantity time” argument people will make about time with their kids…..usually as a justification for not spending much time with them, “it’s the quality, you know.” Yes, but quantity is critical too, because connection and life happens in a surprise moment like this, and you need a luxury of time, a spread of it, to give space for moments like this.
Lucky me.
edit: this is post #666. of all things. 
lucky me, having such wonderful women in my life
I have these two amazing friends, women whose presence in my life adds so much I can’t begin to describe it accurately. They’re very different (from each other and from me) in some ways, but more importantly, we share a lot in common. We love words and books and poetry. We love talking about things that matter. We love sharing our lives with each other. We are eager to help each other when opportunities arise. We admire each other. We find each other beautiful. In different ways, both have been lifesavers for me, and in one way, I was a lifesaver for one of them, once. We had dinner together last night, and this morning one of my friends said something in an email that got me thinking. To give you the context, I’ll tell you a little bit about them, and I’ll use pseudonyms for them because they didn’t necessarily sign up for this public deal. They actually have exotic and beautiful names, but I’m picking simple names here:
Jane is a prolific and beautiful writer — a writer of novels and poems, and decades of journalism. She’s exceptionally smart and insightful. She’s my mentor in saying what you want to say (whether she knows it or not), because she does that. As a southern woman, I nearly choke to death on “nice,” and live with a clenched jaw from not saying what I want to say, so I admire Jane tremendously for this part of who she is. She’s curious, and her training as a reporter means she’s going to ask you questions, and keep asking questions, until she understands. She’s deeply emotional, and easily touched, and grapples with the deep issues of life in a way that resonates with me. Whenever I see her, we talk talk talk and run out of time before we run out of things to say. I love her.
Mary worked in publishing until she had a major stroke at 41. She’s also exceptionally smart and insightful. For a time, it seemed that the stroke caused her to lose everything — fluid speech, the ability to do her job, much of her sense of self — but another thing about her is that she persists in such a wonderful way. It’s like there’s a beautiful light inside her that simply will not go out, no matter what. When she was in the hospital after her stroke, there were so many people who loved her who wanted to visit that we had to create a spreadsheet with sign-ups, in 15-minute slots. Mary is very deep, and we have spent so many hours together talking about our struggles, our histories, our ongoing concerns. She’s also deeply emotional and easily touched. Now she’s getting involved in so many areas of stroke advocacy, and last night she was telling us about this thing she’s spearheading, that place she’s volunteering, this effort she is joining, the other thing she’s eager to work on. I love her.
So me being me, I was thoroughly enjoying talking with them last night while also feeling like the odd woman out, like I was just eavesdropping on the lives of two fabulous women who are Doing Big Things while I sit on my couch editing work others have written, not even doing my own. This morning, in her email to Jane and me, Mary said she felt like she had been “eavesdropping on such a high-level intellectual/literary/writerly/fertile discussion.” Which immediately cracked me up, because she was right there in the thick of it as a participant! For all I know, Jane was doing something similar with Mary and me. I wonder what that’s about. Our conversation was a full and fast river of all three of our voices — no one dominated, no one was excluded at all, the only judgment at the table was encouragement and expressing appreciation. So it wasn’t coming from outside, it must be a reflection of our own senses of uncertainty about ourselves.
Still, when I left them last night, I felt on top of the world, as I always do after I spend time with friends. I suspect this is unique (at least in degree) to female friendships. Whenever I leave a female friend, I feel encouraged, and valued, ready to do whatever I want to do. Worries have been tended to and help given if possible; wishes and dreams have been fanned by their belief in me; and my heart is light because it’s been held up in friendship. It’s a pretty great thing.
[since Saturday Jan 14th is a digital sabbatical day for me, this post was written on Friday Jan 13th and scheduled to publish on Saturday]
“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.” ~Katherine Mansfield
Do you know what that acronym stands for, PWT? It’s poor white trash — a really derogatory name to call anyone, but in the way these things work, you can say it about yourself. When you hear the word, especially if you’re from the south, a specific image comes to mind involving trailer parks, and ratty-looking kids with fat slovenly parents wearing sloppy sweat pants and drinking beer. Driving a beat-up old car to Kmart is part of that scene, too, as are grocery carts at the cheap store filled with processed food and lots of fat. You can take the girl out of the PWT, but you can never really get the PWT out of the girl, so I’ll say it now: I am PWT. At least, I grew up that way, and while I don’t live a PWT life, it’s one of the ghosts inside me.
I have a friend here in NYC who is also PWT, but I guarantee you that you’d never know it if you just met him. He’s very smart, extremely chic, he dresses so well (designer duds in black and white almost exclusively), has an extensive knowledge of wine, is an excellent cook and foodie, and lived in Rome for a long time (with nonspecific plans to move back, since he feels like Rome is his true home). He’s also screamingly funny. And he’s PWT. We used to work together, and when we were in Oxford, England, for a brain science summit meeting, there was some conversation over drinks about Huskies, from Montgomery Wards (Monkey Wards, we called it), and we were off to the races, bonded forever. It was our little secret space, where we could go to revel in some of the old stuff that was so shameful then, but that’s so specific and unique, now — especially here in Manhattan.
He made that job bearable for me, every single day, and is the only person I know in this city who knows what it’s like to be me, in this city. I had dinner with him last night at a semi-fancy restaurant, and we laughed hysterically, talked about work, talked about what’s going on in our lives, and talked about some possibilities for him that would be so very very good for him. I know I love him, because they’re a dream come true for him and terrible for me, but I want them to come true because of what they’d mean to him. I suppose there are plenty of people who have siblings they just adore in an uncomplicated way, but I don’t, so he’s my little brother who I simply love and adore, without the complicated history that true shared childhoods can bring. But we have the best of a shared childhood — a shared understanding of very specific details, of very specific memories, and of the ways things are done.
He organized one (or maybe more, I can’t remember now) of the going away parties for me, at a pub in midtown. The photos are grainy and dark, but I can’t look at them without feeling so much for him. He cracked me up by collecting some of the more humiliating pictures from my past, blowing them up and having them mounted on poster board, and arranging them around the party space. That guy. He’s the one in the black shirt, the one whose face you’ll never see in a photo.
thank you for helping me have such a wonderful birthday!
I had perhaps the best birthday of my life yesterday. Honestly. And since I love my birthday so much, there’s a lot of competition for the “best birthday so far” title. Here’s a rundown:
We were off to the subway at 9:45, to go downtown to City Winery in Soho for my klezmer brunch. There was a jazz guitar player at our station, playing my song (Somewhere Over the Rainbow). It was so beautiful, resonating and echoing in the subway, it made me cry and feel like it was a serendipitous start to my day. Oh — and the day itself was stunningly beautiful, bright blue skies and sun. Then on the way downtown, at one stop a band got in the train. . . mariachi!! I love the mariachi bands, they’re my favorite. They were wonderful, my cheeks were hurting from grinning so hard. Two for two, my favorites, oh what a day.
At the restaurant, the receptionist was downright mean — who cares, it’s my birthday. We arrived at 10:30, and the music was to start at 11, so we ordered our food. Despite what the menu said, our sour waitress said they don’t serve espresso drinks, just plain coffee (maybe she was tired of disappointing everyone since all around me people were trying to order cappuccino). Who cares. Coffee is fine! I ordered a frittata with onions and goat cheese; my husband can’t stand goat cheese, so I get it when I’m out. Score! My song, mariachi, and goat cheese. Winning, what a birthday!
The food arrived just before the music was to start, which made me so happy. The trouble was that the band didn’t seem to be ready. One guy would be on the stage, occasionally two, rarely the same two, and never the whole gang. The restaurant had loud music playing on the big speakers and the band members would do warm-up runs at the same time, and there was a huge group of very loud people off to the side, all shouting at the same time. Cacophony. 11:10, no music. 11:15, 11:20, 11:25, 11:30. No music. And still, the entire band was never on the stage at the same time. Finally, at 11:40, they all gathered on the stage (music was to begin at 11, remember!) but they couldn’t get the sound system set up. The sour waitress came to refill my cup and I guess she was just as startled as I was to see the whole band on the stage, because she poured coffee all over the table and on my elbow.
Still. My birthday. The band finally started playing at 11:45. Here’s what I have to say to the leader of the band: DUDE. Just because you play the clarinet, that does not mean you’re playing klezmer music. It was jazz, and not just jazz, but the kind of jazz where everyone is playing their own thing, whatever they want, and the bongo drums were too loud on top of it. And also, dude? Klezmer bands don’t have bongos.
But I didn’t care too much. Breakfast is my favorite meal to go out for, and it was a gorgeous day. When the 3rd song still wasn’t klezmer, we cut our losses and headed out for a walk to Chinatown, to buy shrimp. Such a beautiful day.
I got emails and facebook posts from friends all over the world, several friends sent me patterns through Ravelry (more on those in coming posts!), all three of my daughters called me and touched my heart, I saw my son after dinner and he touched my heart, and my husband just made the whole day very loving and special. I had an incredible dinner, orange shrimp, my mouth still smiles remembering it. AND I got a funny story out of the klezmer brunch debacle.
So I begin my 53rd year honoring my commitments to myself. I woke up and wrote my morning pages, 750 words more or less; I ate breakfast, and then wrote for an hour and a half and finished a scene for my novel; I did my strength training routine (yay, back in that saddle!); and at noon I’m heading out for a very fast walk in the sunshine, and to drop off a couple packages at the post office.
Lots to say, still, but lots to do! Gotta dash.
put the lime in the coconut and you feel better / put the lime in the coconut drink ‘em both up / put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning (listening to this with Katie right now!)
So life goes up, and things seem mostly good or even great, and life goes down, and things seem to be falling apart — nothing new there. I happen to be in an upswing right now, and it’s occurring to me how subtle the details can be, but how important they are to the overall temperature. Right now, the big things that contribute to my feeling that things are right in the world are travel-related. My vacation to Vietnam definitely helped, and now my time in Texas is a big contributor (of which more in a minute). But I woke up to two small-ish communications this morning that were much more boosting than their word count might’ve suggested.
I’m in a book group and a poetry group, and I just love them both for different reasons. My book group is filled with such interesting, wonderful women — the book is often secondary, and while I regret that a lot, the women are just so wonderful I don’t usually mind not talking about the book. I do mind, but gee they’re so great and I only get to see them once a month and I inevitably come away from the night’s meeting feeling kind of high and happy. My poetry group is also filled with interesting, wonderful women (and one similar man), but we stay tightly focused on discussing poetry, which thrills me. Really, how often in your life do you get to sit and talk about something like that — whatever it is that you particularly love? We actually talk about the poems we bring or write, we deconstruct them, plumb their meaning, see them differently. The poetry group members are very very smart (as are the book group members) so it’s high-wire fun. I brought the woman who organized the poetry group into the book club and last night was her first meeting — unfortunately, I didn’t get to be there, since I am here in Austin, but she wrote me and her note was one of the boosting things for me this morning. Her appreciation of the women in the book group, and her thanks for bringing her in, made me feel so great. My life is so rich with all these wonderful people, women (and one man) whose lives and intellect I get to share so easily.
The other communication that gave me such a boost was a comment left on a previous post. The commenter’s blog-related point spoke to her pleasure in reading my writing, which she characterized as genuine. Well! For anyone who writes, is there a better thing to hear? I love to write and have writing-related dreams that I constantly pull off the shelf, gaze at, and then put back on the shelf. The idea that someone takes pleasure in my words is so thrilling, it’s like an energy boost that shoots my little rocket into the higher levels of space. Her comment reminds me too that we are all kinds of things, big and small, to others and we’re not even aware of it. I mean something to my friends that I’m not all that aware of — you do, too. And you mean more to me than you know, you who read and also you who read and comment.
Now, to Texas. Yee-ha! As always, when I got off the plane at the Austin airport, everything in me settled down and relaxed as I walked through the terminal. The people look SO familiar. I did’t know any of them, but I might have! There is a Texas look, familiar at least to Texans. In New York, the general look (big old over-generalization coming) is Italian or Jewish. I’m neither. But I do look like the people here, and it’s more than bone structure in the face. And then they sound like me, too, double great! Not many have accents as thick as mine, but Texas shows up in certain words pretty reliably. Also, if you’ve never flown into Austin, you should know this so you can quickly plan a trip: LIVE MUSIC in the airport. There’s a stage set up and the band that was playing when I arrived was pretty great! Also, the food in the airport is not the normal airport fare. No Chili’s or Cinnabon or that pretzel place. Instead, it’s local restaurants, really good Mexican food, barbecue, Schlotzsky’s (a local sandwich place with uniquely great bread), a local ice cream joint. You step off the plane directly into Austin sounds and Austin smells.
The flight from Chicago to Austin was kind of neat. You know there’s that very friendly, midwest, Chicago way of being — people just seem not to be guarded, and to smile easily? Well, combine that with Texas and you have friendly squared (y’all do know that Texans are very friendly, right? DO NOT go by our politicians, please, who are assholes). There was so much laughter in the airplane, loud friendly joking by the flight attendants, it helped my weary bones, I’ve got to tell you. And then when we started our descent into the Austin area, it was shocking to see how dry and brown everything was. Nothing green to be seen anywhere, so sad and tragic. So much heat and fire, so little rain, so much loss.
The best thing of all, of course, was my daughter and her husband waiting for me. I ran to them and just felt such overwhelming joy. It sucks not seeing your kid very often. You spend all those years knowing nearly everything about them (though boy can you be surprised to learn the things you *didn’t* know!), being able to look at their faces every day and have a sense of how they’re doing, being able to care for them when they’re sick or tired or blue, playing games with them, laughing or fighting with them…..and then suddenly you see them a time or two a year. I can’t stop staring at Katie, and I don’t want to do anything more than be near her, look at her, listen to her, live in the midst of the life she lives while I’m here. Katie and Trey took me directly to Chuy’s for some delicious TexMex (which you cannot get in New York. No TexMex, delicious or otherwise), and then we came home, to their beautiful and comfortable home filled with Katie’s cozy touches. I’m a happy mama right now. Life is good.
love is all you need. really, that’s true.
The most wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, eloquent women in the world.
How did I get so lucky.
all you need is love / all you need is love / all you need is love / love is all you need. that, and a big enough bandwidth for streaming.
Since I was coming home from Turkey on Actual Mother’s Day, my kids and I pre-arranged a deal where we’d celebrate Mother’s Day today. So I thought that meant I’d chat on the phone with the girls, as usual, and this year (unusually) I’d also get to talk to Will. I was overjoyed.
Despite our arrangement to wait, the girls did a variety of things on the actual day: facebook posts, emails, phone messages, etc. Of course that made me so happy, the bonusness of it.
Turns out, my very sneaky kids had something else up their collective sleeves. When I saw Will for his birthday yesterday, he was somewhat strangely insistent about seeing me for breakfast this morning. I had made plans for a day full of errands; still, Will was really wanting to see me, even 5 minutes, he said. So I said OK, let’s meet at 8am, and I went home and rearranged my plans. No big deal.
Yesterday afternoon my doorbell rang, and these were delivered, from my kids:
in addition to all the lovey stuff, the card said they hoped the flowers made my day a little sunshiney. THEY DID!
So, OK. My daughters live a time zone earlier than me, and typically sleep in on the weekend. My son didn’t get to bed until 3:30 am, and sleeps in on his days off. That’s the context.
I got to Starbucks this morning at 8am, where Will and I were meeting to figure out where to go for breakfast, and he was on the phone, and on his laptop. He held up his finger and asked me to hang on. No problem: mahjong. I love mahjong, and any opportunity to wait is an opportunity to play mahjong guilt-free. After a few minutes, I learned what was going on. Since all I really want is for all 4 of us to be together in the same place, they had planned to all be on video chat, so we could at least be together virtually. It didn’t work, I think because Starbucks has bandwidth limitations on their free wifi, but what an amazing gift. Of course it meant my daughters were up before 7am, and my son was up early enough to get to Starbucks 30 minutes early, to get the whole thing set up.
my sleepy sleepy daughters a screenshot from Marnie's computer.
Of course it would’ve been brilliant for us all 4 to be together like that, with me sitting next to Will, but this plan was the huge gift in itself. We’ll do it, we’ll work it out and do a 4-way video chat, and I really look forward to that.
This was my best Mother’s Day, ever, and I’ve had some very nice ones. One year, when they were little, I woke up to “All You Need is Love.” Remember how it opens with a fanfare? Well, my kids were walking into my bedroom, Katie holding a pillow with a little tiara on it, and they had breakfast in bed for me. All you need is love. That’s right.
It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more. ~herman hesse
It’s all really old news, because there aren’t photos for the past few years that have Will in them. The photos below are bittersweet, and serve to simultaneously make me happy in remembering those times, and make my heart ache for all that came after. Until this happened, my kids were very very close. When they were together, there was always hugging and laughing. Marnie and Will were especially camera-happy, so I have literally hundreds of photos of them, heads together, making faces. And literally hundreds more of just Will making faces.
We all went through a lot together — their dad’s years-long absence, our eventual divorce, the devastation and wreckage of that heartbreak, my being immersed in 9 years of school in the midst of their school years, the hard hard work of making it all happen, the sacrifices and depending on each other, the tough things that happened that caused us to cling to each other in various combinations, the hurts that are best understand by us within this little family, the too-frequent moves. The sense that the only roots we had were within each other, no roots to places or wider family, really, just us.
Hard memories, sad memories, happy memories, dancing memories, sweet memories, just regular old family stuff, you know. Ours was not one of those easy families, and our relative poverty meant there were no busy schedules rushing to this lesson and that, and summer camps, and sports. As a consequence, my kids learned independence and hard life lessons, and they’ve told me since (with a real kindness) that it was hard but they’re grateful for it all and they feel like they got important things from our lives. When I look at the array of photos, I see an awful lot of deep love and affection and care.
I have no idea what I’m doing, still to this day. I don’t know what family means, what “bonds” mean, how tightly they hold, how far they should stretch, what is too far, is there such a thing as too far. I’m making it all up as I go along. My childhood taught me What Not To DoTM but it turns out that knowing what not to do doesn’t really inform you very much about what to do. Hmm. I’m on a highwire and there’s no net and I just have no idea. I look at the way we are managing our way through this, the way we’re fighting so hard to not let that bond with Will go, and I think we somehow got it right, even as it went so terribly wrong.
3.5 hours until Scrabble.
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- marnie and katie
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- ready to be a WheatThins model
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- long ago and far away — texas, ~2002
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- marnie and will helping out the family jugband
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- will hearts boys, according to his t-shirt. :)
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- marnie and will laughing, thanksgiving 2004
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- ALWAYS with the goofy faces, those two!
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- i LOVE this one! look at Will’s expression, enlarge this one. katie’s holding her newest baby cousin
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- christmas 2003. marnie was getting ready to leave for India.
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- will and me, visiting NYC 12/04 – i had no idea i’d ever live here
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- LOVE
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- i adore this picture of him, sun on his beautiful face
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- rocking the bikini
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- goofballs.
three things that choke me up, here on a bitter cold Friday morning
The newest:
How’d they do that without being corny? I was watching it all alone this morning at 6am, kind of steeled against being moved because I’d read that it was moving (like, ‘oh yeah? not me buddy…’) and then there I was with big tears in my eyes.
Next: I know I put this on the Laos blog on Thanksgiving, but I find myself unable to stop thinking about it. When I was a little kid, I was dark. I read too much Kafka and Camus at too young an age, wondered about the meaning of life, blah blah blah, loved to call myself an “existentialist” by which I meant what people usually mean, which seems to be an assumption that it’s all meaningLESS. But of course that’s not what it really means; at least, that’s not the end of it. Existentialism really means that we endow the meaning ourselves, more or less. I once heard Leo Buscaglia say that people who wonder about the meaning of life are really just talking about the experience of life, that the point is to experience life. I’ve become very impatient with people who mope around and say there’s no meaning. FUCK THAT, yes there is. You’re here, we’re here, we get to be here. And here’s the bit I can’t stop thinking about, that I put on my Laos blog, from Cat’s Cradle, The Books of Bokonon (Kurt Vonnegut, of course):
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night.”
Yeah. Every day that we get to be here – even for the real shitty stuff – it’s an honor. Lucky us, and I mean that in the most honest, least ironic way.
And finally (since this is just the $200 category), this one always makes me cry and fits well with the Vonnegut passage, for me:
Happy Friday y’all.
i love cee-lo green, and i love brooklyn brown ale, and i love my family. wait, that’s not the right order.
- Cee-Lo Green. Maybe you caught him on The Colbert Report, singing a modified version of his big hit (replacing the “f*^ you” with “Fox News”). I’m not embedding the video here in case you’re offended by the F word (in which case don’t click his linked name….but really, you’re missing SUCH a great song, maybe you can just pretend he’s saying Fox News or something).
- Brooklyn Brown Ale – man, if you like a very hoppy beer, this one is GREAT. I don’t drink much, never more than one drink of anything, and this one will be my new go-to ale. YUM.
- anticipating my trip….I leave Thursday morning for Phnom Penh, as I keep saying. Because I am so so SO excited!!
- knitting. See posts on this blog for evidence. I don’t need to tell y’all about this one.
- Y’ALL. My friends, my deeply loved kids, strangers who just aren’t friends yet. All a y’all.
i love my friends – i’m such a lucky person
So my dear friend Craig, another editor at my office, organized a smallish going away party for me at a neighborhood pub I’ll just call the Galway Hooker. Because that’s the name of it. There was an intimate, lovely room near the back, with 4 seating areas, and a waiter I fell in love with named Col. He reminded me so much of my son I had to keep forcing myself not to hug him.
Anyway.
Unbeknownst to me, Craig had taken 4 very old photographs of me and had them enlarged and mounted on foam core board. He and I got to the place a few minutes before everyone else, to kind of set up, and he started pulling these things out of his bag. He stuck them all over the room, and mounted one on the door frame going into the room. MY SHAME. First of all, it gave the space the air of a wake, and second of all, three of the photos are humiliating. But everyone liked them, and kept picking them up, gazing at them, and asking me about them. It was kind of sweet. Here’s the room:
here it is, the party room
It was a wonderful space, filled with people I love. Since you don’t know these people, I’m just inserting a slideshow – my kids and family, who’ve heard me talk about all these people, might want to see faces to go with the names. Otherwise you can skip them.
When each person left, he or she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. It was stunning and warm and loving, and I thought “this isn’t how people think of New Yorkers, and they’re so very wrong” because this is how people here can be. I love these people.
Today is the last day I’ll go into the office as a regular employee. I will work at home until July 7, which is my last real day as an employee – I’ll go back at the end of that day for the big going-away shindig, which is on the rooftop of a hotel in midtown….a gorgeous space. More about that party afterwards. On the way to the office, I’ll start the next Peasy swatch, with the next size down needles. It’s a beautiful summer day, and I am very happy. I hope you are too.
i gave notice at work, and guess what happened….
So. On Monday I gave notice at my job, and I didn’t know what to expect. I knew they would be surprised – and they were – but beyond that I just didn’t know. I was prepared for everything except what happened.
They cried. They really did. My boss cried when I told her, and came into my office the next day, sat down, and did it again. Colleagues said the most incredible things, things that were hard to take in. Inside, I imagine myself as just slinking around the perimeter, and not registering with people. I imagined that I’d just quietly slip out the door and no one would even know I left for a while. But that’s not what happened, and it has blown me back off my feet. It’s hard to take in, hearing people tell me what they think of me, what I mean to them. (Remember when you were about 12 years old, and you’d get mad at your mom for something and imagine that you died, and everyone was at your funeral, and they were all so sad, they’d all be so sorry then? This has been something like that, but without the death part!)
They immediately started listing freelance work they want me to do, so they can keep me around and also to help me, which is kind. My authors have wailed, and sent me the most amazing letters that I will absolutely cherish.
I think this is true for most people, and we just don’t realize it. We make an impression, we have an impact on people, people in our lives feel all kinds of things that they don’t ever say, because they think they don’t need to, or they’re shy, or they’ll just tell you tomorrow. I think you’re a very lucky person if something happens while you’re alive and you get the chance to hear it – especially if it’s all at once. So maybe the other side of that is that we should actually tell people these good things we feel about them.
One thing nearly every person said in their little lists referred to my sense of humor. Well, I am a dramatic person, I do have a quick and dry sense of humor, and my reactions can be large and hilarious. For example (you can see that I like you, I’m willing to be ugly in front of you), someone snapped this shot at a birthday party they gave me. I was responding to something someone said. Oh the humiliation….
silly, dramatic me
So anyway, I’ve been silent because I’ve been silenced by all this. Plus I’ve been insanely busy. I did finish the wedding dress and today I bought beautiful little Italian mother-of-pearl buttons from Tender Buttons, which is such a cool store. Only in New York, man. We have a button district, yes we do. In the morning I’ll take it to the cleaners for a good pressing, then get it off to my girl, the bride-to-be.
I promise knitting content will return soon. I’m dying to return to knitting…
pink is making me strangely happy today
I guess I read a little too much Elizabeth Barrett Browning when I was an impressionable young teenager, because “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” came to mind when I was looking at the beginnings of these socks, No Purl Monkeys in KnitPicks Felici (colorway positively pink, as if they had to say that). So let me go ahead, then, and count the ways:
I love thee for thy bright pinkness
p!i!n!k!
I love thee for the pleasure of dpns and clever-feeling fingers
I love thee for thy springy feeling
I love thee for the one who will wear these when I finish
Pretty Marnie, in her senior year at Smith
PLUS: I bought a new mattress! Yippee! Hallelujah! Boy did I need one, that’s all I’m saying about that.
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