Sorrow in one hand, joy in the other. Being human is a prayer.
-Hiro Boga
Around here
I have a word of the year. I have updates. December – and this entire fall – has been a lot more eventful than I had expected, or, frankly, hoped. But first, today, on this holiday, I wanted to remember some of what happened during Grace and Whit’s long break. By December 14th they were both home. We enjoyed a bunch of time as a family. There were also some tears, some pouting, and some yelling. But mostly, the good way outweighed the bad. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s pretty much my goal for life. I know by now you can’t insulate yourself from the bad without insulating yourself from the good, and I have no interest in the latter, so I won’t even try the former.
Hence. Skinless life. A fair amount of heartache. And an awful lot of joy!
We bought our tree with little fanfare, no arguing, and, apparently, no measuring. It was a little smaller than usual, but it was lovely. We decorated it with my dearly beloved cousin and her husband, a tradition I’ve come to cherish.
We attended the wedding of our favorite babysitter of many years. It was an honor to be there, and was a supremely fun evening, with tangible love in the air and much family dancing.
We listened to and sang along to a lot of country. Our family playlist the last several weeks – which Grace actually made – includes Blue Tacoma by Russell Dickerson, Get Along by Kenny Chesney, I Lived It and I’ll Name the Dogs by Blake Shelton, and Knee Deep by the Zac Brown Band.
Grace and I went to holiday tea at a formal club in Boston, for the second year in a row. Last year we went with Matt’s mother, and this year neither grandmother could join us. So we went the two of us, and it was one of my favorite moments of the whole holiday season. Wonderful.
We enjoyed our annual Christmas Eve tradition: church, dinner with my mother and old friends with excellent wine and carols. This was the first year we’ve done it without my Dad (we were together last year but the evening was very different: takeout Chinese. Mum was a week out of her hip transplant) and his absence was felt keenly, but we all appreciated being together.
Grace drove us basically everywhere.
We celebrated Christmas Day with my mother, sister, brother-in-law, and nieces. It was lovely bedlam followed by a long stretch of quiet. We had Triscuit Treats for Christmas lunch standing around our kitchen island (a long-time family favorite with a complicated recipe: Triscuits, a small square of cheddar, and either pepperoni or a jalapeno on top, in the toaster oven. you’re welcome). And then we gathered again all together for dinner, and laughed hard.
We ran family stadiums one morning. It was cold and clear at the Harvard Stadium, and Dad and Grace spanked Whit and me.
We enjoyed a marvelous couple of days in western Massachusetts with my mother, my sister, and her family. We went to Mass MOCA, Mum and I went to the Clark (I loved the Clark), we had a terrific breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was really lovely. The photo above, my favorite of the past little bit, was taken right before we left Lenox.
We played family tennis. The pattern of the last couple of years, where whatever team I’m on loses, continued. Whit and I lost the first set, and Matt and I lost the second. We laughed a lot.
It was really, really good. We are really, really lucky. Onward.
this is the only life I have
This is the only life I have, this one in my head,
the one that travels along the surface of my body
singing the low voltage song of the ego,
the one that feels like a ball between my ears
sometimes, and other times feels absolutely galactic,
the life that my feet carry around like two blind
scholars working together on a troublesome manuscript.
This is the only life I have, and I am standing
dead in the center of it like a man doing a rope trick
in a rodeo, passing the lasso over his body,
smiling inside a twirling of ovals and ellipses.
This is the only life I have and I never step out of it
except to follow a character down the alleys of a novel
or when love makes me want to remove my clothes
and sail classical records off a cliff.
Otherwise you can always find me within this hoop of
myself,
the rope flying around me, moving up to encircle my head
like the equator or a halo or a zero.
-Billy Collins
Thank you to Glenda Burgess, on whose beautiful blog I found this poem, which I’ve never seen before.
back soon!
Tap tap, is this thing still on?
Joke. Actually the giveaway of On Being 40(ish)
I hope you will come back in the new year and in the meantime, I hope everyone’s December is full of light and love.
xo
lament, consolation, hope
“…he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope….”
–Exit West, Mohsin Hamid