And, now, 10 days until I get to meet Ava in New York!
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Back from an amazing weekend in Cleveland with Quincy, Dave, Thacher, and Ollie. Gracie had a blast hanging out with her godbrother Thach, and she always loves playing with dogs. I was reminded again why Quincy is the most amazing of friends. Picture above is FOURTEEN years ago (gulp!!??) and yet we are still the same … different of course in many ways (less hair, fewer pounds, less flannel, fewer baseball caps, more degrees, more wine) but the fundamentals are there. It’s so reassuring and comforting to know that. I wrote a full-on love letter to Quincy in the tabblo of our trip, so I won’t repeat it all here. Suffice it to say I feel so incredibly blessed to have a friend like her in my life. No matter how far we venture, we can always come back to a couch somewhere (Ivy 2nd floor TV room, Bay Head, Beacon Hill, the Regency Hotel, San Francisco, New York, Cleveland) and immediately slip into conversation about matters big and small, trivial and critical. I just wish we lived nearer so that we could share the day to day details of raising small children, juggling careers and marriages and occasional runs and driving station wagons. Yes, the minutiae of our lives! QB, I love you. xox
She’s done it again: here, Catherine Newman articulates everything I felt about the devastating Jim and Kati Kim story. Hilary and I both immediately fixated on the breastfeeding detail – the extraordinary power of the female body and its power to both give and sustain life.
I am crying just reading Catherine’s description of her life and its elegiac patina.
The same kind of gloss is shining on our lives right now, as we stand on the fulcrum between the known and the unknown. Tomorrow I give my notice at BCG and we launch headfirst into the next chapter (of which my job change is only one small part). Here we go.
January. Digging out and throwing away. That stack of mail arrived yesterday after being held for a week … luckily amid the junk and catalogs there were about 20 fabulous Christmas cards! And the folks at our nursery school have finally put their foot down and insisted that I bring home the pile of art that has accumulated over the last couple of months. The eternal dilemma of parenthood: what to keep (10%) and what to throw away (90%?)? The early chicken scratch writing definitely has a special place in my heart (check out her fabulous R’s) … but we would drown if it kept it all. So, back to one of my favorite tasks in life: throwing things away!
The new year has dawned rainy and bleak. We’re stuck in the house and everyone is crawling the walls (save daddy who’s been on a conference call since 8am). Tomorrow morning’s school day can’t come soon enough. We’ve already been to Target and Bread & Circus and I’ve made about six kinds of organic vegetables and homemade chicken nuggets for the children. And it’s 9:50. Diego here we come …
An oldie but goodie that gives me solace in a time of such change and flux:
….have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
– Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet