Month: September 2013

More things I love lately

I’m breaking with my three-day-a-week schedule to share a few things that I’ve loving lately.  I haven’t written one of these posts all summer, and I really enjoy them.  My previous reflections on what’s on my bedside table and my mind are here.

Literary & Legal: My old (by which I mean longtime, not elderly!) friend Kathryn Beaumont has started a fascinating blog.  She is a journalist, a lawyer, and a literary agent, and her blog showcases her broad intelligence and her curiosity, as well as her writing chops.  She features insights about the publishing and agenting world, interviews with interesting writers and agents and players in the space, and thoughts about her own writing and reading.  It’s quickly become a must-read for me.

Mindfulness: I have been fortunate to experience Karen Maezen Miller’s powerful work both in person and on the page.  In early September she published two back-to-back posts that I loved: 8 ways to raise a mindful child and 10 tips for a mindful home.  The posts made me gasp with their simple truth, and helped confirm that sometimes my most essential instincts are the truest ones.

Divergent: I. am. obsessed.  I read this book this weekend and can’t wait for the others.  It reminds me of The Hunger Games, of course, in that it’s both compellingly page-turning reading and a very thought-provoking premise.  Also in the strong female protagonist.

calm.com: I have been listening to the short guided meditations on the calm app on my iphone before bed.  They haven’t totally cracked my insomnia yet, but I do like them a lot.  Highly recommend.

What are you reading, listening to, and thinking about lately?  I’d love to know.

Thirteen years

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Today we’ve been married thirteen years.  Thirteen feels both not at all new and not yet very old.  In the middle.  Just like everything else right now, it seems: we are in life’s rich, heavy, wonderful middle, which can be dark and disorienting but which is also shot through with dazzling, startling joys.

This photograph was taken in 1998, during the first summer that Matt and I knew each other.  I was 23 and he was 28.  It seems a lifetime ago.   We are standing in the same place that we celebrated our wedding two years later.  There are storm clouds on the horizon, but we’re laughing.  This feels like a harbinger both of our wedding and of life in general.  Our wedding day dawned beautifully clear and sunny, but by the mid-afternoon clouds had begun to gather.  By the time my bridesmaids, mother, and I walked from our house to the church we were hurrying to get there before it rained.  By the time we were standing at the altar it was thundering so loudly that at one point we had to stop and wait for the noise to stop.  Matt and I walked to the yacht club under a bright red umbrella, and most of our guests rode the one-block distance on school buses.  And then, later, it cleared into a glorious night, full of the crystalline, beautiful skies and dry, tinged-with-cool air that always seem to follow a storm.

I couldn’t have scripted better weather for that day.  I know now, fifteen years after this picture was taken, thirteen years into marriage.  Storms roll in, boats heave in the waves, sometimes you have to pause to let the thunder and lightning take center stage.  And then beautiful weather washes in, and an abiding calm.

We were married by a minister who was very familiar to me and beloved of my maternal grandparents.  It was an honor to have someone who knew both the two of us and my family perform such an essential and important act.  In his sermon, he honored my grandmother who had recently died (I think the thunder may have been her telling us she was there, though she was not a thunderous person) and celebrated the spirit of adventure that had marked our early days together.  But, he exhorted of marriage, “Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to this.”  And how right he was.  It’s been steeper and more difficult than I imagined, the landscape more variable and sometimes treacherous, the nights shorter and the hours longer.  But I wouldn’t want anyone else climbing next to me.  And the views are far more breathtaking.

Happy thirteen years, Matt.  I’m still amazed.

Our hearts were touched with fire

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.  It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

The thing I most want to do for my children

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We got home from our marvelous week in Vermont on a Saturday evening.  Everybody was exhausted and deflated.  The end August loomed, and the big summer things we’d been looking forward to were all behind us.  On Sunday, Matt had to go to work, so Grace, Whit, and I were left with an open day.  We did some errands in the morning, moving slowly, sinking back into regular life.  It was a glorious, outrageously perfect late-summer day.  I suggested a picnic in the park that is three blocks from us.

Grace and Whit responded with enthusiasm.  We packed turkey sandwiches, some goldfish, some tortilla chips and guacamole, and water.  They threw a frisbee for a while and I watched them in the almost-deserted park.  I could sense Grace’s month-old self snuggled in her blue Patagonia fleece one-piece, asleep in my arms as we took our first Christmas card as a family on the rise over to my right.  I could see both of their four year old bodies running in their first soccer games on chilly fall Saturday mornings, smiling as I remembered how often the parental cheering consisted “Wrong way!  Other goal!”  I could hear their pealing laughter as they made snowmen in the enormous, untouched drifts of snow in last winter’s blizzard.

After a bit they came to sit next to me on our towel.  We ate our sandwiches in the shade and in silence, and after a few minutes Whit sighed, “Oh, this is nice.”

“It really is, isn’t it?”

I’m not sure how, but we started talking about facing fears.  We talked about fears we had surmounted, and what we were still afraid of.  We all shared stories.  It was a rare half hour of perfect peace and happy equanimity.  After we finished our lunch we sat for a bit longer, noticing things in the fenced-off city garden plots next to us.  Grace tilted her head back to watch an airplane streak across the sky, pointing up at it, mouth open.  Then we packed up our trash and our towel and headed for home.

I am rarely prouder of my children than when they enjoy small moments like this.  I honestly think this might be (one of) the key(s) to happiness: finding joy in the most mundane things.  It’s also an outright goal of mine as a parent, trying to make the ordinary special, trying to shape a memory out of a regular old day (even knowing as I do that we can’t always control which moments coalesce into the pearls strung on life’s chain).  The day after the picnic, I left my desk an hour early to take the children to our beloved fairy stream, where we worked in companionable quiet for a long time building cairns.  It was spontaneous, it was something we do all the time, but despite that – or maybe because of it – it was an exceptional experience.

How can I protect Grace and Whit’s propensity for joy and their orientation towards wonder?  How can I keep them from becoming jaded in a world that leans towards cynicism so early, so quickly, and so finally?  How can I help them continue to find the white lines of exhaust from an airplane across a hydrangea blue sky or the quiet stacking of small rocks at a bubbling fairy stream things worthy of their time, their attention, and, sometimes, their awe?

I don’t know, but I am pretty sure this is the thing I most want to do for my children.

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Summer 2013

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Spring is the only season that I experience without an undercurrent of sorrow, because there is so much that lies ahead, but it is in summer that I feel I most fully live.  In June, July, and August, life is swollen with family moments, studded with the rituals that have come to mean so much to my children, and lit with bursts of fireworks both real and figurative.  For the last few years I’ve reflected on the summer that was: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.

In late August, I kept hearing Sophocles’ words, over and over again in my head: one must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.  And that is true of this most marvelous, rich, joyful season, too: it is really after Labor Day that I can really see how extravagantly wonderful our summer was.

This summer went by faster than ever.  Oh, what a cliche this is.  And yet it is so true.

In June, for the fourth year, Grace, Whit and I marked the end of the school year with a trip to Storyland.  Their mild agreement that perhaps they were getting too old for Storyland turned by the end of the day into stringent pleading to promise we could come back.  They love our tradition and so do I.

The weekend at the end of June that we spent with Hilary and her family was so humid that my computer shut itself down.  But it was wonderful nonetheless: swinging on swings over a big muddy puddle of rainwater, my father blowing out candles surrounded by his found grandchildren, those children lined up on the edge of Brea as we sailed, four feet dangling towards the splashing water.

Our hydrangea bush exploded into glorious bloom.  Once again I was reminded of the metaphors that are all around us: by late July I had to cut hundreds of past-their-prime blooms in hopes that we might get another round of new flowers.

We spent the Fourth of July with Matt’s family in Vermont.  The children loved being with their cousins.  Later in July we went to Legoland for the fourth time.  This is an extravagant tradition, to be sure, and maybe a silly one, but I can’t express the pure joy that descends on all three of us the minute we walk out of the airport in California.  I have no doubt that the three days in July we spent at Legoland will be among my most cherished of this entire year.

Coming home was hard, but we had a short but sweet visit with Whit’s godmother, my dear friend Gloria, to look forward to.  She came through on her way from Maine to Beijing, we all remembered how fiercely we adore this friend of my heart that I’ve known for 23 years.

Grace and Whit both went to sleepaway camp.  For the first time in 10 1/2 years Matt and I were alone for 10 days.  Saying goodbye was hard, mostly because of the reflection that it forced on time’s heartbreakingly swift passage.  Then, in August we had two weeks alone with Whit.  I spent my birthday with one of my oldest and dearest friends, at the place where we met and where our daughters how flourish.  It was marvelous.

We spent a week by Lake Champlain as a family, for the fifth year in a row, and it was pure magic.  Grace and Whit love it there, and Matt and I do too.  We swam and ran and water skiied and laughed.  The vacation, just like the end of August time that holds it, was tinged by end-of-summer pathos.

I read All That Is and A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, The Engagements by Courtney Sullivan, The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld, Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, Early Decision by Lacy Crawford, Ready for Air by Kate Hopper, Looking for Palestine by Najla Said, & Sons by David Gilbert.  I spent long hours revisiting some of my favorite poetry books.

Grace and I were deep in Harry Potter 7 while Whit and I were on 4.  They both remain entranced by Harry’s world.  Grace and I read Little Women at the same time in August: she marked the pages she read before bed and then left the book for me, and I’d read the same passage.  The next day we talked about it.  We read A Wrinkle In Time (my favorite book from childhood) the same way last year.

We managed to fit some of our favorite rituals into the last week of the summer.  We went to the beach for an end-of-summer day, we swam at Walden Pond, we visited the tower nearby and built stone cairns near the fairy stream.  We spent Labor Day in town for a change, because Grace had a soccer tournament.  It was calm, mellow, and surprisingly wonderful.

There was plenty of yelling and exhaustion and feeling overwhelmed by all kind of small things.  And I’ve already forgotten those moments, as the summer slides into memory, crystalline, shimmering.  And how I miss it, already.