everyday life

A few random things from this holiday weekend …

We are back from a couple of days with a big family congregation, including our patriarch, my 92 year old grandfather (and assorted foreign students and friends). Notably, my children fell head-over-heels in love with my cousin, who, luckily, lives nearby.

Today is the 8 year anniversary of a heart transplant that changed all of our lives forever.

My dear friend Gloria had her second son this week, in London.  Grace and Whit have been asking every single day, breathlessly excited, if the baby had arrived.  They were in a hurry.  And so, it turns out, was he: baby boy was born at home, caught by Dad and the paramedics, because he arrived so fast.  Gloria, goddess!

I’ve been reading Maya Stein a lot this week … I’ve long liked her poetry but only recently discovered more of it.  The poem she shared this week on her blog, Thanksgiving and Wreckage, blows me away.  The last lines: “for a moment, I hope,/ we will each turn from the palpable wreckage, /this unplaced place setting, and feel the featherdust/of healing, let a lick of warm light /enter into the raw edges of/ whatever has been broken,/ thread itself through,/ and stitch us while we sleep.”

Today I spent the afternoon with an old friend and his two sons.  Jeremy and I met in 1996, at my first job out of college.  We’ve kept in touch sporadically since then, and I’m a huge fan of his current company (check it out!), but we haven’t had a couple of hours to hang out like we did today in 14 years.  Jeremy remains one of the very funniest people I’ve ever met, and I found myself laughing hysterically at everything he said.  Just like the old days.

We hurtle now towards the solstice, which has always been a very important marker for me.  Towards the light.  Towards the radiance I talked about this summer.  Always forward.  I think of Vincent van Gogh’s hopeful yet resigned line, which captures how I feel in this season of so many kinds of darkness:

Still, a great deal of light falls on everything.

Denise and I have been bemoaning a shared lack of inspiration right now.  This is sinking pretty low, but it’s Friday, and it’s dark, and it’s what I have.  Vanity Fair has two questionnaires every month – the famous Proust Questionnaire (meaty questions, back page) and the lighter list in the Culture section in the middle of the book.  Today, with very little end-of-week exhausted fanfare, I bring you the latter … and would love to hear these answers from you, Denise, and also from the rest of you!!!

LIVING
Where do you live: Cambridge
Favorite art: Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Lloyd Wright
Pets: None (other than a short-lived guinea pig named Caliban, I’ve never had them)
Favorite neighborhood restaurant: Armando’s pizza
Favorite cocktail: white wine on the rocks.
Who inspires you: dear friends, beautiful writers, people who have struggled and come out the other side.
Necessary extravagance: My trainer, Kimberly once a week
Favorite place in the world: cross-country flights when I’m unreachable, Munich, my childrens’ bedrooms when they are sleeping

CLOTHES
Designer: J Crew, Rebecca Taylor, DVF
Jeans: J Brand
Underwear: Hanky Panky.  Only.
Sneakers: Nike
Watch: Cartier
T-shirt: Old Navy, J Crew
Day bag: snakeskin Beirn bag
Evening bag: my favorite: a black ruffly clutch from Target
Favorite city to shop: www.anywhere! I  do almost all of my shopping online

BEAUTY
Lipstick: cherry chapstick
Mascara: Clinique brown naturally glossy
Shampoo: Suave two-in-one ($2 for a 6 month supply at Target)
Moisturizer: lately, Argan Oil (literally oil on my face – believe me, it’s great)
Perfume: I don’t like perfume and rarely wear it.  When I do, only ever an oil called child
Toothpaste: Crest
Soap: Dove, unscented (which is important)
Nail-polish color: one coat of Mademoiselle on fingers, currently obsessed with Chanel Particuliere on my toes
Who cuts your hair: Anywhere, wherever I can – Supercuts, Judy Jetson, etc
Who colors your hair: no color

The bare branches of the tree outside my window, lit from below as the sun sinks below the horizon.  There’s something painfully, heartbreakingly gorgeous about the flaming ends of things: leaves at their highest pitch of color, the glow of the last light before dusk.  This light comes from below the horizon, and is full of something beyond the edge of our knowing.  It sings a song, part dirge and part hymn of praise, of something more abstract and more powerful than our singular human existence.

An airplane traces straight line across the cornflower blue sky.  Like drawings in the sand at low tide, this mark is bold, but fleeting.  Look again and the bald white line is gone.  Subsumed again into the great cycles of life, against the background of which the linear paints its path and then fades, again and again.

This light is an elegy.  It contains a endless number of farewells and endings, but also, so much beauty.  Against the stark, full blueness of a late-day sky, the light holds much emotion that I experience it as an almost animate thing.

A blazed of red against the sidewalk.  If you didn’t look down you’d miss it.  Luckily, my children are that much closer to the ground – literally and figuratively – and they are constantly pulling my eye and my attention to details I might otherwise overlook.

Even as we turn towards the most barren of seasons, as we hurtle into the months of curling inward, there are many treasures to be found.  Look closely enough and the world reveals its majesty, in the smallest corners (the sidewalk) and across the grandest canvases (the sky).  In the upcoming months the splendor is quiet, hushed.  It reveals itself only to the patient observers and to those willing to accept that joy has many shapes.  So take your time.  Open your eyes.

As Annie Dillard says, what you see is what you get.

Deep thoughts I do not have right now.  The weekend found me oddly discombobulated and tired; I feel lately like I’m not entirely inside my own body.  Or maybe I’m too much inside my own head and not enough inside my body.  Maybe this is just a towards-the-solstice fog.  In lieu of anything substantial, I can offer three scenes from my regular little life.

This summer, while flying to Legoland:

Whit, folded over, examining the bottom of his seat between his own legs, “This is for flotation?”

“Yes, Whit,” I said.

“But only for if we land on water, right?” Still bent over, he was now using his hands to explore under his own seat.  I thought of Kara and how she’d have the Purell ready.

“Yes, Whit.  Only on water.  If we crash on land, well, you don’t need your seat cushion for flotation.”

Grace, sitting by the window and reading Percy Jackson so intently I had no idea she was listening to us, pipes up, without looking up from her book, “That’s always what I have thought. Better to land on water.”

“That’s a good thing to have an opinion on, Grace,” I looked at her, startled.  She didn’t even glance up from the page.  All I could think of was Robert Frost’s iconic poem “Fire and Ice,” and I wondered in what universe my seven year old has thought through what surface she would prefer her plane to crash on.

****

Walking upstairs from dinner, this week:

“Barbies are so lame,” Grace says, her voice tinged with a performative disdain.  She knows how I feel about Barbie.  She glances over her shoulder, looking for my reaction.  I smile and nod, urging her and Whit both up the stairs with my eyes.  Why does it take so long, this final ascent?  “They can’t even stand up on those feet,” she said, and I stifle a giggle.  At least when she’s not wearing her stilettos, she can’t.  So true.

“Barbies are also always losing their heads,” offers Whit, from his spot above us on the Everest of the stairs.  (of course he helps this loss along, enjoying the loud “pop!” Barbie heads make when they are snapped off, but still … inadvertently funny).

****

Before bed, last week:

It had been raining and I had not been able to run my children like dogs after school at the park (which is my usual parenting approach).  They were incredibly hyper and wired and annoying before bed.  So I asked them to do 100 jumping jacks each.  And they did.