Things I Love Lately

Miss Americana – I adored the Taylor Swift documentary.  Highly, highly recommend.  My favorite line is the one that’s been quoted everywhere: I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart.

My Boyfriend, his Best Friend, and Me: A Love Story – I read this beautiful essay by Lily King with tears running down my face.  What a gorgeous evocation of what relationships – sometimes those that elude words – can be.  More on Lily King (whose writing I adore) below!

Olive, Again – I am halfway through Elizabeth Strout’s book and loving it.  Much like with Olive Kitteredge, I find the interwoven stories evoke ordinary life – in its grandeur, its terror, its heartbreak, and its monotony – in a spectacularly moving way.  I remember meeting Elizabeth Strout years ago at a conference, and I told her my favorite of her books was Abide With Me (it still is).  “Oh!” she exclaimed.  “That’s my middle child! (this was when she had written three books)  Nobody likes that one best!”

My most anticipated books of 2020 are: Friends and Strangers: A novel by Courtney Sullivan (I have had the good fortune of reading this and it’s WONDERFUL), Writers & Lovers: A Novel by Lily King, Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing: A Novel by Allison Winn Scotch, and How to Be a Person: 65 Hugely Useful, Super-Important Skills to Learn before You’re Grown Up by Catherine Newman.

I write these Things I Love columns approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

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.

 

It’s being here now that’s important

“It’s being here now that’s important.  There’s no past and there’s no future.  Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.”

-George Harrison

Fifteen

Dear Whit,

Yesterday you turned fifteen.  As I wrote on Instagram, this one particularly got to me.  We are both the same number of years from how old I was on that cold, dark evening when I labored by myself.  On that middle-of-the-night sprint to the hospital when you arrived 20 minutes after we arrived.  It was 15 years ago for both of us.  For some reason that blows my mind.  After your sister’s long, extended, frankly brutal delivery, I expected your labor to be similarly long.  I told your father to stay at work to finish up what he needed to do as we were clearly many hours away.  I spent several hours in our bedroom, which is still our bedroom, walking around, breathing, feeling you as you agitated to be born.  When your father got home around midnight, he was shocked.  “Lindsey.  We are very close to having this baby.”  He hurried me out the door and we are still joking that it was my passive aggressive attempt to have the home birth I really wanted.  It wasn’t.  But what it was was the last time you were early arriving anywhere!

You were born in the very early morning, on the eve of a snowstorm, on the day of George W. Bush’s second inauguration.  I did not know until your birth that inauguration day is always January 20 (unless it lands on a Sunday).  We have conveniently been able to measure your life in presidential terms.  I will never forget watching Obama’s inauguration on your fourth birthday with my father, you, and Grace.

Back to that cold, dark morning.  You startled us with your speedy arrival, with the face of your boy-ness (we had not known your gender before your birth), with your shock of blonde hair, with your blue eyes.  With the exception of the speedy arrival, those things are all still true of you, a decade and a half later.  You completed our family and one of my very favorite pictures of all is the one at the top of this post, when you and Grace met for the first time.  It always reminds me of the William Blake line that “and we are put on earth/ that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”  You’ve been adored since day one.

This last year you’ve grown into a young man.  There are no traces of early childhood on you anymore; you’re taller than me and have bigger feet than your father.  You are growing into your own, asserting your independence and insisting on doing things yourself (I always think of the phrase I used as a child, “I want to do it my own self.“).  We have no idea what you’re doing in school until you tell us and you manage and execute your homework all by yourself.

One of my favorite things about you – and there are a lot – is the way you continue to try new things.  You aren’t afraid to jump in and I love and admire that about you.  This year you’ve started wrestling for the first time and are really enjoying it.  You’ve started cooking and it’s become a true interest.  I might even call it a passion.  You love to research recipes and to cook them.  You exhibit a quality I don’t have in spades: patience.   You are happy to make dough that needs to rise overnight, for example.  You’ve made pizza from scratch, yeast rolls, steak, coleslaw, reubens (with homemade sauerkraut that took two weeks), cinnamon rolls, fried chicken sandwiches, and so much more. Dad and I are definitely beneficiaries of this new interest.  Other things that you tried for the first time in the last few years include rowing, running for school office, an exercise class you researched on your own, photography, and doing tech for plays.

You are still one of the most thoughtful teenagers I know.  You remember when we mention a big meeting or a doctor’s appointment and ask about it at the end of the day.  You say please and thank you, and you’ve taken to heart the two words that Kirt Mead said separated us from the animals: may and well.  You use both.  You shake hands, look people in the eye, and use Mr and Mrs.  I force you to write thank you notes, but you do it.

It takes time to earn your trust and esteem.  You have a finely-tuned bullshit meter. You are perceptive and intelligent and your observations about other people or situations are usually very astute. You are loving History this year because you love your teacher.  He’s direct and smart and funny.  He also brings his dog to class sometimes.  I’ve ruined your childhood by not getting a dog.  I know that.  Your favorites are samoyeds and we sometimes share photos and videos of golden retriever puppies that make us both smile.

You love to be surrounded by people.  You’re at your finest when with your friends and your favorite place on earth is camp.  You are different from me in a host of really essential ways and you and I sometimes butt heads because of that.  But you also teach me more than anyone else, and please know that my needing to learn about how you approach things is not the same as my judging it.  I respect and admire the way you are in the world and feel absolutely sure that you are going to have a joyful, wonderful life.  I feel honored that I get to watch it from up close.

You will always be my last baby and my first son.  I’m sorry I embarrass you sometimes with the enthusiasm of my love.  I can’t help it.  I adore you, Whitman.

Mum

Previous birthday letters to Whit are here: fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five.

 

Things I Love Lately

Favorite books of 2019 – I have thought a lot about this (and I’m asked it a lot).  Think my two favorite books of last year were Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl and The Overstory by Richard Powers. What about you?

Grief is my Side Hustle – This Facebook page gathers the writing of an old friend (by which I mean we have known each other for a long time, though are only recently back in touch) who lost her mother last summer.  She writes gorgeously about the experience of grief and with every post I learn something new.  Highly recommend, whether grief is a part of your day to day life right now or not.

Nothing to See Here – I’m reading Kevin Wilson’s hilarious, genre-bending book right now and it’s every bit as marvelous as everyone says.  So.  Good.

Green-ness – we finally started composting in 2019 and I don’t know why we waited so long.  2020 is going to be my year of reducing plastic.  Once you pay attention, it is everywhere.  I’m horrified.  I’d welcome any suggestions that have worked for you!

What It Means to be a Man – I read Peggy Orenstein’s cover article in the Atlantic with tears in my eyes.  I can’t wait to read her book, Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity, from which the article is excerpted. There’s so much about this topic that’s complicated, so much that’s new to me, so much that’s vitally important.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.