This heirloom tomato jumped out at me this morning. I think it looks like a human heart. Punctured in places, striated with scars, not as full and round and perfect as it once was, but still shining with reflected light. The scar tissue is even, in its own way, elegant; it surely has its own unique texture that holds many stories. There are holes, there are uglinesses, but there is still great beauty in this bulbous, uneven thing.
Sunset, Wareham, August 31 2009 (iPhone picture)
Summer coming to an end. This morning, as I ran, I basically leapfrogged with a yellow school bus picking kids up (it would stop, I would run past, it would pass me, repeat). That is a pretty good sign my summer vacation is now taking place in the fall.
Reflections on the summer of 2009
Fastest summer in history, despite the fact that the early Memorial Day/late Labor Day one-two punch must have made this actually an extra long summer. More rain than I can ever remember in June.
In the past few weeks, with the slanting evening light, I’ve confronted my own shadow a bunch and have decided that I have Frankensteinishly square shoulders. It occurs to me I must be walking east a lot at the end of the day. Towards Mecca, enlightenment, both, or neither, I don’t know.
There are a couple of professional decisions slowly gaining purchase in my mind. I’m wondering where the line is between being patient while you allow your thoughts on something to settle (living the questions) and being a chicken and using that as an excuse.
Whit is, I think, officially swimming. Though his swimming is definitely in the graceless, dramatic-impersonation-of-drowning style, he seems to stay alive.
I endured my first real injury and had to take almost two months off of running. I am cautiously optimistic that I’ve rehabbed it now, though I need to keep being careful. As a condition of this rehab, my body required that my pride accept that for a while I will be running 8+ minute miles vs. 7:30+ minute miles. And my pride accepted that! (perhaps the greater accomplishment for me).
Grace is tentatively reading for real. Still not sure how much she enjoys it, but she’s delighted to have an excuse to sit in bed with me in the afternoons and read while I read (something deep and educational like US Weekly, usually – me, not her. She is read the Magic Treehouse series.). Of course this means I am a human dictionary, but I am still finding this quasi-charming.
My insomnia is in high gear and I am tired. One fall resolution is to lay off the elephant tranq doses of sleeping “aids” and to try to tough it out. Maybe I’ll get more reading done.
Whit skinned the equivalent of an entire body’s worth of skin. So basically he molted.
I quit biting my nails and then started again.
Feels like a lot of peopled died this summer: Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ted Kennedy, DJ AM (one of these things is not like the others?). Watched the Kennedy service at the Basin Harbor Club with with tears streaming down my face.
Grace lost a top tooth and the remaining one has migrated to the center of her mouth. It’s a weird look, and definitely a Big Girl one. I’m guessing orthodonture is in her future.
I read Judith Warner’s column last week with a heavy heart. Of course I do not understand the nuances of the situation so I can’t comment on the specific instance she cites. But the trend, the overall observation she makes, had me nodding my head in sad recognition.
Then one of my favorite new blogs, Ivy League Insecurities, took up the topic with a thought-provoking response.
I found myself mulling this over all weekend as I hiked, and handed children hand-over-hand down a rock ravine, and lay in a camp bunk trying to sleep as 11 people stirred around me.
My initial reaction is that the growing resentment among the many for the “privileged few,” especially women, is just another form of judgment by superficial labels. How is extrapolating from people’s external situations to draw assumptions about their personalities, values, and problems any different whether the person being stereotyped and judged is privileged or not? Isn’t it the same kind of superficial judgment in either direction?
And then I thought more. I have certainly been made to feel, many times, that my own concerns and fears are somehow less legitimate, less raw and real, because most of my life appears pretty well under control. And, when I am truly honest, sometimes I believe that too. Sometimes – actually, often – I chastise myself, saying: Come on. Pull yourself together. What do you want for? What do you need? You have so much. Why are you sad? And part of me believes this message, but part of me adamantly does not.
On the one hand, of course concerns of feeding your children or pressing fatal illness are much more significant than the things that rattle around my head. In fact, when I push this further, the kinds of issues that occupy me could be thought of as the province of the privileged; is it not an indulgence, a gift, even, to be able to worry about such small things? But then I know how keenly I feel things. I know that these worries are very real, often all-consuming.
So I guess the conclusion I come to is that it is not for any of us to judge the lives of others. It is not for us to make assessments of how valid are other people’s points of view, intentions, or loves. It is impossible to know, from how someone looks on the surface, what is going on inside his or her heart. I have learned enough in my life to know that with absolute certainty.
Both posts are, in fact, about something beyond just this notion of outsides and insides. The claim that educated women are being told, implicitly and explicitly, to muzzle it troubles me. Troubles me a lot. On the most basic level this is because I know many of these women, and most of them have a lot of interest to say – lots that is provocative, insightful, reflective, and honest. But more generally because I fear a world in which any single group is being told, for no good reason, to shut up.
I don’t know that I have a good conclusion to this yet, but I know it’s on my mind. I also know that like other friends and bloggers I know, I am both unwilling and, more importantly, unable to stop talking. I will not be muzzled; I believe there is too much to be gained by telling our stories, whoever we are and whatever formal education we have.
Totally obsessed with the Twilight series (thank you Anna).
And my trusty Oyster Bay (but I had a salad for dinner! Hadley you are such a good influence).
Big day today. 100th day of school. The 1st graders each had to bring in 100 of something to mark the momentous occasion, and the 100 things were displayed on the wall of the hallway outside the 1st and K classrooms – swedish fish, cheerios, toothpicks, etc. I asked Grace what she would like to bring in next year and she said, without missing a beat, “Wine tops!” ie corks. Great. That doesn’t send a message about your mother being a wino, now does it?