Month: July 2010

She walks in beauty

Happy Birthday, Hadley

Sending you all my love, halfway across the country, and looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

We met 14 years ago this fall, which seems amazing to me. You were – and are – so impeccably elegant that it took me a long time to believe that there was, as you kept telling me, tumult and anxiety beneath the surface. I’ll never forget the New Year’s, years ago, when another friend met you and told me, days later, that her original impression that you were intimidating had quickly given way to realization of your warmth, generosity, and sense of humor.

You are the calm one who talks me off of the various ledges that I perch on weekly if not daily. Where I am a tornado, you are tranquil, where I am rough you are refined, where I am struggling you are serene. More than once you’ve pulled me through a very dark spot with the tenacity of your friendship (I’ll never forget the Fed-Exed box of pacifiers when Grace was one week old).

I am honored to be able to know the you beneath the gloss, but I also admire tremendously both the way you put yourself together and your view that each day is an opportunity to craft something beautiful. You bring beauty wherever you go, creating lovely spaces, moments, experiences. You are a thoughtful and generous hostess; you have rice milk in the fridge and diapers in the right size in the bathroom. You think of everything. Your aesthetic sense is an inspiration. Every facet of your life always strikes me as almost achingly lovely: your stationery, your Christmas cards, your handwriting, your clothing, the art on your walls, the fruit in your fruit bowls, the food on your table. Patterns, colors, songs all seem more vivid and beautiful in your hands, and you handle all of these things with ineffable, instinctive ease.

Every time I see you I leave dedicated to working harder at cultivating beauty in my life. You are profoundly generous with Grace, your goddaughter, and her friendship with Charlotte is one that I hope will last a lifetime. Our paths have been woven together now for many years, but in many ways I feel our spirits are growing more and more in tune as we get older. We’ve always been able to span a wide range of topics together, from macrobiotic food to Manolo Blahniks, from past life healers to Page Six stories.

Happy, happy birthday, my dear, beloved friend. I look forward to the road that lies ahead, and am more grateful for your support, wisdom, companionship, and humor than I can articulate.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is one of the funniest and wisest books that I’ve read in a long, long time. Rhoda Janzen is simply hilariously funny. I have rarely laughed out loud as often during a book as I did with this one. At the same time, Rhoda is almost blindingly intelligent (I haven’t looked up this many words since The Geography of Love), achingly full of empathy, and hugely self-aware, but in a not-at-all-arrogant way.

Rhoda’s tough year spent recovering from botched surgery with a catheter and a urine bag strapped to her leg was just the prelude to the really, really bad week that kicks off the action of her memoir. Her husband of 15 tumultuous years leaves her for a man (Bob) that he met on gay.com, and she is in a car accident that leaves her with serious injuries. In response to these world-shattering events, Rhoda moves home to California and moves in with her Mennonite parents.

I think my favorite thing about Rhoda’s memoir is the delicate way she points out the incongruities and hilarities of the religious community of her childhood while also clearly honoring them. There is no disrespect in her descriptions, which is quite a feat given how much humor she finds. The tales of her mother’s uncanny and unselfconscious public bodily commentary and the detailed descriptions of the peculiarities of traditional Mennonite food are downright hysterical. And yet these – and so many more laugh-out-loud stories – are told in a loving, respectful way.

Rhoda’s stories of her interval at home are interwoven with reflections and memories from her childhood. Her family is full of characters both entertaining and endearing; I particularly loved her steady, serene, practical sister, Hannah. The shorthand the sisters share, full of private references and the deep intimacy of a common and unique childhood, reminds me of the way that Hilary can say to me, eyebrow cocked, “ADC? Q Kamir? The Happy Hallwegers?” and make me burst instantly into the laughter of keen recognition.

I can’t recommend Mennonite in a Little Black Dress enough. Rhoda’s voice alone is reason to start this book. Tonight. I absolutely adored spending time with her. I want to be her friend! The memoir is also deeply moving. It is a testament to the strength of Rhoda’s spirit that she overcomes crises that would crush the average person with both her sense of humor and steadfast faith in the essential good of the world intact. As she sinks into the comfort of her family’s embrace, realizing the ways that her life has irrevocably ruptured, Rhoda opens to an awareness of the great unknown of the universe. This is, of course, a universal experience, I think, and one for tales of which which most of us have a huge appetite. Only a masterful writer, thinker, and person like Rhoda Janzen can have me laughing uproariously on one page and on the very next reduce me to tears with sentences like this:

…I suddenly felt destiny as a mighty and perplexing force, an inexorable current that sweeps us off into new channels… And how sad it suddenly seemed to be buffeted by the powerful currents to which we had yielded our lives. So many years had passed. My childhood, my early friendships, my long marriage, all seemed to hang from an invisible thread, like the papery wasps’ nest outside my study window. I had watched the lake winds swinging and tipping it, expecting it to go down, but it never did. Memory swayed like that next – hidden but present, fragile yet strong, attached by an unseen force to perpetual motion.

I loved Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. I will be hearing Rhoda’s keen observations, shot through with her trademark humility and intelligence, in my head for a very long time. Her memoir is a rare thing: a book that really makes you laugh and that really makes you think at the same time.