musings

The Alphabet of Right Now

Hello?  Is this thing on?  Sorry.  Life has been a little “full” lately.  But I wanted to do an exercise I’ve done approximately every couple of years … now feels like the right time. Past alphabets are here: 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017.

The Alphabet of Right Now:

Aquaphor – it’s my duct tape: I swear it holds the universe together.  Also: airplanes.

Bombas – Obsessed.  Not only do I wear these socks every day, I give them to lots of folks for gifts.  I know.  Socks don’t seem that exciting.  But they really are that good!

Composting – 2019 was the year we finally started composting!  Thank you to my friend Jess for motivating me.  Also: coffee.

Dad – I miss him every single day, and I always will.

Early – I am an early person.  I get up early, I go to bed early, I arrive places early.  I don’t think this is going to change, and I’m okay with it.

Family – Ground zero, always, no matter what. Also: friends.

Grateful – I am. More and more. For all of it, mess and beauty, darkness and light, every single thing.

Harry Potter – Still one of m very favorite books/series.  Actually, my favorite character in all of fiction (a question I’m asked surprisingly often) is from the series but is not Harry himself.  It’s Dumbledore.

Instagram – My favorite social media site by a mile.  I love how I feel in touch with people just through Instagram (though I also recognize the fallacy of that).  Please come find me there!

Jigsaw puzzles – Still my favorite way to relax.  I find doing 1000 piece puzzles on our dining room table incredibly therapeutic.  It’s one of the only activities where I truly turn my thoughts off.

Kombucha – Our whole family is into it, kids and adults both.  I’ve pondered making our own but an intimidated.

Library – I’m a devoted patron of my local library.  I order books and when they come in I head around the corner.  I love all the librarians, who know me by name, and often have quick talks about what they’re reading.  Honestly, the library is one of my favorite parts of my life.

Maiden name – I use it (Mead) for work and for writing. Especially with Dad gone, it feels like a vital link to him.  In retrospect, I might not have changed my name at all, but it’s nice to have both.

New York Times crossword – I do one or more on my phone every day.  I do Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and sometimes Wednesday.  For Thursday-Saturday I go into the archives and do Monday or Tuesday puzzles.  I’m not above using google for an answer either.

On Being 40(ish) – A true highlight of last year (and of my life) was the release of this book.  Our paperback comes out next week!  Cool new cover.  I am biased, entirely, but I think this collection is a great gift (and a great read in general).

Podcasts – I listen to them when I run.  Lately, have been listening to The Baron of Botox and Truth and Lies: Jeffrey Epstein.  I’d love recommendations here!  Also: pajamas.

Qwerty – I type really fast, and I have since I learned in 6th grade.  An excellent life skill.  Correlated: my handwriting has gotten terrible.

Reading – My favorite thing to do, then, now, and always.  It’s kind of weird that someone as type A as me doesn’t keep a list of all the books they read but I don’t.  I probably read 2-3 books a week though.  I can’t go to sleep without reading.

Sleep – As I get older, more and more important.  There’s very little that’s more important to me than getting a good night of sleep, and I’m willing to do a lot to help in that area (turn off my phone at least 30 minutes before bed, meditate almost daily, basically stop drinking wine).

Teenagers – I have two of them.  Yes, there’s occasional moodiness, but I must say that on the whole I love having young adult children.  They are interesting, entertaining, funny, and only maddening some of the time.  How I can have teenagers when I still feel like a teenager myself is something I cannot answer, though.

Useful – More and more, something I want to be.

Vertigo – Probably the scariest health experience I’ve had is the couple of weeks I had bad vertigo.  I live in fear if it coming back.

Whitman – My son’s name, for my sister (her middle name).  I love it.

X – yeah, I don’t know.

Yoga – I’ve been practicing weekly or more for 22 years.  I never, ever want to go to yoga and I’m always, 100% of the time, glad I went.  My favorite pose is Half Moon.  What’s yours?

Zoo – I don’t like them and never have.  Something about all those wild animals in the middle of a city makes me sad.

 

January 2020

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

I think very often of Hurston’s quote.  And, in the last few weeks, even more than usual.

After a series of years that asked questions, 2019 was (at last) a year that offered some answers.  I described 2019 on Instagram as a year “with blessedly rounded edges.”  And it was.  And maybe the lesson was a simple one, one that’s eluded me for 45 years: just let go a little.  Let things come as they may.  Everything, after all, passes.  Both the good and the bad.

I’m grateful that 2019 was a year of relative smoothness, and whose ease offered some answers at last.  I haven’t chosen a word this year, because none has presented itself.  I’m also not a big resolution person.

But I do have Shawn Colvin in my head, right alongside Zora Neale Hurston (remember, years ago, when I wrote about Doctor Seuss and Mark Doty in the same breath?).

Steady On.

That’s what she keeps saying.  So I will.  And I’ll hope for another year that answers questions.  But if it decides to ask them instead, what I know now is I’ll make it through.

 

Thank you

we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

Dad died two years ago today.

Thanksgiving is on Thursday.

I don’t feel sad necessarily, so much as skinless, feeling it all – the bright and the painful, the glory and the hurt, the joy and the sorrow.  There is so much of life that swirls around these last weeks of the year.  That’s always been true, but it’s a more emotional time for me now that it’s inextricably wound together with my memories of Dad’s sudden death two years ago.

I have Merwin’s beautiful words in my head, the same poem a line of which I shared the morning of my last Thanksgiving with my Dad (11/23/2017) and through whose prism I have long viewed Thanksgiving.  I just understand them better now.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.
…
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

– W. S. Merwin

Hard Work

For a bunch of reasons lately, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that I definitely privilege hard work and toughness.  I may over-privilege it, truthfully.  I’ve been thinking about Dad, one of whose strongest messages (in a litany; we have established that his is, above all, the voice that I hear in my head, the original imprimatur that guides my living, doing, and being) was that life was full of uncertainty and challenge.  One thing you could count on, he taught me, was that there was a lot out of your control.

His view was probably overly cynical; I think he felt tht when things worked out that was a happy accident, and that mostly we should be prepared for challenges and switchbacks.  But he was also clear that life’s unexpected detours often took us to the most beautiful vistas.  His Fulbright year in Germany, for example, which happened because of the well-intentioned suggestion of a college professor, kindled a life-long passion for Europe and led to his spending a decade there with his young family.

Difficulty made life worth living.  He often joked that our family motto was “never easy, never dull,” a memory that truthfully makes me squirm a little bit inside.  I guess I would take that over boring, but sometimes, isn’t there value in things being easy?  I told him once, at a dinner the two of us in the mid 2000s, that I wanted someone to “keep the world at bay for me” (I’d been listening to a lot of Dixie Chicks.  I can still remember this facial expression upon hearing this; he shook his head, his scorn palpable.  His message, though delivered slightly more gently than this, was: no daughter of Kirt Mead’s needs the world kept at bay for her.

Run into the world.  Engage with the world.  You can and you will.

I am intolerant of wallowing and of complaining when something can be done to change a circumstance.  I think I can be overly tough on this dimension.  Sometimes life calls for love that isn’t tough.  I know that, and I’m working on it.

But life in the last few weeks has caused me to reflect on this important lesson of my childhood: that when things go wrong, it doesn’t mean all is lost.  There may be surprising adventures to be found in these unanticipated detours and even if not, hard work will get you moving forward again.  Never give up.  Life was not meant to be lived in a straight line.  It was never going to unfold without hiccups.  That’s the way of the world.  The weather is inevitable, and what matters is how you proceed through it.

The end of October 2019

A few random thoughts at the end of October.

  1. These are the darkest mornings of the year.  I think this every year, in the weeks leading up to the clocks going back.  Because I am an early riser I spend my first hour or two in darkness now.  I used to find this depressing, but in a strange way I find it comforting now.
  2. I went to Costco this weekend and was incredibly conscious for some reason of the massive number of individual plastic water bottles they sell.  There was more than one person with a cart full simply of water bottles.  I’m fine with the push to eliminate straws, but I do wonder if we’re missing the forest for the trees.  Plastic water bottles (and individual plastic cups) seem like a much bigger problem.  Please stop using individual water bottles, people!
  3. My spinning class on Monday morning played Landslide and I thought yet again of how much I love that song.  It feels like yesterday I wrote about Landslide here (and then I revisited it here) and since that day I’ve thought of it as an anthem of sorts for this parenting journey.  This LIFE journey.  It’s only getting more true.
  4. I started reading Wild Game at last.  Wow.  I highly recommend.
  5. I don’t write about politics much (or ever, other than my post on the eve of the 2016 election) but it’s not a secret that I’m not a Trump fan.  I’ve been saying since he was a candidate that of the many things I find deeply objectionable about him possibly the top of the list is how poorly spoken he is.  For this reason I adored Frank Bruni’s column in this weekend’s Times.

Happy end of October, all.  The decade draws to a close.  Onward.