Things I Love Lately

Stop killing the magic of books with required summer reading – In this wonderful Washington Post essay, Elisabeth Egan has inadvertently provided a parenting manifesto: “lazy with a side of you-never-know.” I could not agree more with Egan’s point, and have had similar experiences, of prodding Grace and Whit to plod through assigned reading while also watching them fly through books that they chose.  I’d rather they chose, and loved, lighter books than find heavier classics a chore.  And I’m happy to report that both Grace and Whit’s schools provided a summer reading list (long lists) and asked students to choose a group to read.  I like this approach a lot.

Reunions Make Me Cry – I have long loved this essay and huge thanks to my friend Allison for reminding me of it this week.  Reunions make me cry, too, and so does this essay.  When she evokes the campus full of orange costume-clad alums, my eyes fill with tears.  And then the truth of what she says next: “perhaps most absurdly, it didn’t look absurd.”  I’m crying at my desk right now, having just re-read these familiar words, knowing precisely of what she speaks when she describes her husband being subsumed into something bigger than he is.  And of what she speaks when she describes the older alums marching, and the Old Guard. Yes, yes, and yes. “…it was simply a right and good thing to honor something you loved very much as loudly and wholeheartedly as you could, and the devil take sophistication, civilization, undue examination, or whatever else threatened to get between you and it.”  May we all love something as purely and as openly as do the marching alums at the P-Rade.

Abby Wambach’s commencement speech at Barnard – Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.  I shared this with Grace and she loved it too.  My friends have been forwarding these words around, urging us to watch and read, to share with our sons and daughters.  I love Wambach’s points about solidarity, about demanding the “ball,” about how life’s not a zero sum game, about learning through both losses and wins.  AMEN.

The Immortalists – I finally read Chloe Benjamin’s book, about which I have heard so much.  I loved it.  Entertaining, interesting, thought-provoking, and beautifully written.  I highly recommend!

Bombas – Instagram advertising works!  At least it did with me.  And I am so glad.  Both Grace and I are wearing our new Bombas and we. love. them.  My favorite socks for running, hands down.  I also got the no-show ones for regular wear (since I wear sneakers almost every day now), and I love them.

What are you reading, thinking about, and loving lately?

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

where we really live our lives

Our most important experiences are not the great big ones that knock you down breathless and change your life forever. The most important experiences are the ones that we go through all the time. That’s really where we live our lives – in the most modest of details.

-James Carse

What do Wicked, Whit’s teacher, Kelly Corrigan, and everyday aggravations have in common?

Last fall was the most difficult of my life so far.  In the wake of Matt’s and my father’s back-to-back deaths, we walked, dazed and numb, through the holidays.  I wrote about the radical perspective that marked this time in an Instagram post in mid December.  I talked about how the fall made our priorities crystalline.  December and January feel like a blur to me now, and I can barely remember the specifics.

But I was comforted by one thought.  At least these tragedies had made a dent in my universe.  I had been changed for the better (this reminds me of the song from Wicked, which one of Whit’s teachers sang outrageously beautifully a few weeks ago at a farewell event to mark the retirement of their long-time headmaster).  John and my father’s deaths had taught me something, and I was a better person.  I knew what mattered.  Priorities were clear.  Everything else fell away.

And then, as we edged into and through the winter, ordinary things began to irritate me again.  A line that wasn’t moving smoothly.  Difficulty getting a parking spot.  A long hold for Jet Blue.  Stupid, stupid stuff, of the sort I’d sworn I’d never get worked up about ever again.  Because I knew, didn’t I, that this stuff really didn’t matter?

It seems I forgot again.  I saw Kelly Corrigan speak last month, and read from her book Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say.  She referred to a very similar process: a period of clarity after the deaths of her father and dear friend followed by the re-entry of life’s small annoyances.  She spoke of her dismay, of her frustration, of her desperate wish that these losses have an impact on her, a permanent changing of the way she lived in the world.

I nodded hard.  I blinked away tears.  Yes, yes, and yes.

Were the losses of last fall not, ultimately, for something?  Now and then a few seemingly random things coalesce in my consciousness to make a point, and that is happening now.  Mrs. H singing from Wicked.  Kelly Corrigan speaking and bringing  me to tears.  My own anger at myself for being, in fact, the same shallow, irritable person I was before everything went black.

There’s nothing I can do but try to remember the intense clarity of those early days, of December.  Maybe that kind of crystalline awareness of life itself is unsustainable, and maybe that’s as it should be.  But I can remember the way I saw, like light through clouds, what really mattered, and the way I swore to remember that.  It’s only been six months since dad died, eight since John died.  I owe it to them to try to remember that beam of truth.  And so I will try.

how many greater things

We shall see but little way if we require to understand what we see.  How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding!  How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

-Henry David Thoreau

Happy birthday, Matt!

Tomorrow is your birthday, and this is one of two times a year I explicitly write about you here.  I thought about various ways to tackle this birthday, this letter, coming as it does on the heels of the most eventful year in our lives.  Two new jobs.  Two new schools.  Two fathers gone.  It’s hard to really think about the world on your birthday last year and your birthday this year; so much is different.  But of course so much is the same, as well.

I feel a little daunted by trying to capture in words all I want to say this year on your birthday, and a little overwhelmed given everything that’s happened.  Truthfully, I feel a little blocked, and mostly I just want to say thank you.  So here we go, freestyle, inspired, as I often am, by Gail Godwin’s words: “the more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”

Let me count the ways I love you.

I love the way you are handy and can take care of a lot of things – the stove in Cambridge and the dryer in Marion come to mind.

I did not love the way you broke the door off of our oven days before I hosted Christmas for 15, but I do love the resourceful way you got it fixed.

I love the way you sat alone on all seven flights to, within, and from Hawaii (see above).  I love the way you could laugh about some of your particularly colorful seatmates. I love the way you always give me the aisle at a wedding.

I love the way you make coffee in the mornings (sometimes, feel free to bump that up to always).

I love the way we spin and run together.

I love the relationship you had with my father and the one you have with my mother.  I’ll never forget the look on her face on Christmas Eve when you sat at the head of the table, in Dad’s seat.

I love the way you make me laugh, and our long list of private jokes (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” A-Aron, and the Kailach family come to mind).

I love the way you ziplined in Hawaii, even though I know it sort of unnerved you at first (see video above).

I love the way you call your mother every day.

I love the way you read books.  I do not love the way it often takes another person recommending a book I’ve already suggested for you to read it, and for you to comment on what a great suggestion that was X made!

I love the deep, almost-impossible way that we can relate to each others’ realities right now.  I do not love the way this makes us blow up at each other sometimes, but I do love the way we let the dust settle, remind each other of what’s going on, say I’m sorry, and move forward.

I love the way you told me, when we were on our honeymoon, that “I like to get up the morning and do things!” and yet sometimes you need me to remind you of the wisdom of this comment.  We’re all better when we get up the morning and do something.

I love hearing you speaking to our children, and watching you parent them.  I love seeing aspects of you animate in them.

I love the notes you leave for me, in my wallet, on my desk, often in brown ink written by my father’s fountain pen.

I love you for a million other reasons, big and small, and I’m not listing here.  I hope you know what some of them are, and I consider it one of the tasks of my life to keep telling you.

I love them, and I love you, and I love our family.  If we can make it through this past year, we can make it thrpugh anything.

Happy birthday.

Previous birthday posts are here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.