Frayed

People say to me "How are you?" and I look at them blankly, not sure how to answer. I am so busy all the time, I don't have a spare second to look inside myself and discern how I am feeling, or to be more accurate, to come up with a socially acceptable encapsulation of what I am feeling.

I feel grim and tight-lipped, barreling through. That's how it feels now at work, where everything, it seems, hits my desk. All the sections of the magazine that others were supposed to take over when the respective editors got let go (or quit or went on maternity leave), now end up with me. The others who glibly said they'd top edit fashion, beauty, work, wealth, news, culture, relationships, are generally not around when their stories come through because they're part-time freelancers, or they're in meetings, or out of the office, or because they're executives who aren't really supposed to do this work anyway, and have bigger fish to fry. I don't know why they thought they could do it. I suspect deep down they always knew it would fall to me, they just couldn't say that out loud because it would have seemed insane to expect one person to cover all that. But there you have it. I wake up in the middle of the night, assualted by stray details: Did the art director add that call-out? Did I add that dot.com box to the end of the story? Did I fix that echo in the dek?

I'm supposed to edit the long features and top edit certain sections of the book, plus some admin and supervisory stuff. Now, in addition, I'm editing scores of department stories from early drafts through final proof. Which means the big features are about to suffer. To properly edit a big feature, you have to roll up your sleeves and wade on in. You have to mind-meld with writers, so you can understand their intention and push the piece just that much to help them achieve it. You have to hear their narrative voice in your head, hear the beat and rhythm of their sentences so you can edit within that, so you don't trample all over their story and co-opt it, making it something they no longer recognize as their own.

An editor should have great respect for the effort a writer has made. You have to approach each story with a kind of reverence, even. Even if the writer hasn't achieved what's needed, they have (with few exceptions) made a true and valient attempt. And so you are to help them get the rest of the way there. Secretly, the story becomes as much yours as the writer's, your allegience to it is as great, you fall it love with it as if it were the child of your own mind, but you never want that to show in the edit. To properly edit a story is to be selfless when the glory is being given out. An editor of mine at Life magazine, the legendary Loudon Wainwright, told me this when I was a young reporter starting out: "When a good editor is finished with a story," he said, "the writer should read it and say, Damn I'm good."

I strive for that. I still do, all these years later. But it is hard now, to have that kind of mind-meld with a story, because as I'm weighing the words, piles of layouts keep landing on my desk, requiring my top read so they can move on to the next stage, and I keep getting called into meetings about art concepts, and book branding and coverlines and schedules and on and on and I have to break concentration, again, again, again.

Deep breath. I'm about to head back into the fray. Thanks for letting me share.

State of the Union

For the record, I believe in him. I believe he is doing the best he knows how. He's had a tough first year, and his eyes show it. They don't dance as much. The circles under them are more deeply etched. And no wonder. The stony faces on the Republican side of the room said it all. What must he be dealing with behind the scenes? The really ugly stuff that we don't get to see (the stuff we do see is distasteful enough). I am concerned that the system of government is broken, that the way the legislature and political system are set up can produce nothing but grandstanding and deadlock. How frustrating it must be to try to actually do something for the people when your hands are tied by partisan career politicans who care nothing for the people, who care about nothing but making sure you do not succeed. But I do still believe in this man. I don't always agree with him, I don't always understand the decisions he makes. But he is tough and principled. I trust his intelligence. I trust his heart. I trust his intent. And that is everything.

88 Years Today

Today is my mom's 88th birthday, and in honor of her amazingness, and how blessed we are to have her in our lives, I am posting some pics of her with people who love her absolutely. The photo above is her at age 17. What a beauty!


This one was taken at my cousin's home in Rockland County in the fall of 1986. My dad is being mischievous, tickling my mom with a pen. She, ever the lady, is ignoring him and putting her best face forward for the camera. That's my husband and me as newlyweds on the left (so very young!). I remember we all dissolved into laughter as soon as the camera shutter clicked.

Another picture of the Stiebel siblings. These nine brothers and sisters have been, unabashedly, the love of each others' lives. This was was taken on my mom's 80th birthday at her birthday party at yet another cousin's art-filled home in Nassau. (With eight aunts and uncles on my mom's side and five on my dad's side, I have a lot of cousins!) Two of my uncles had passed away by the time this photo was taken. The third uncle, pictured here, died two years later. The girls are all still going strong. Sort of.

My husband, my mom, an aunt and my sister in law were on the front verandah of my aunt's home in Jamaica in December 2005. I love the way my mom's hand rests on my husband's arm, the easy love it conveys.

My mom attends to her oldest sister on her 91st birthday last September 7. This was taken before the party started and that's my cousin, the professor, who's my fellow power of attorney for my aunt. Another cousin called from Jamaica during the festivities, and my aunt, who struggles with getting words out, declared in a clear and steady voice that she was "19 today!"

I snapped this photo of my mom and my son on the afternoon last August that we drove him to college. My boy looks a bit pensive, but my mom was bursting with pride at the fact that her second-oldest grandchild was being launched. The scaffolds were all around our apartment building, as the brick exterior walls were being tested and regrouted, a major undertaking that continues even now. My mom, my daughter and I pretend the scaffolds are elegant porticos. We find them pretty handy when it rains or snows.

My mom and my daughter posed outside my cousin's home in Virginia last October. This was taken on Columbus Day, just before we all piled into the car for the drive back to New York. How I love these people!

Happy birthday, Mom! I thank God daily that you are mine.

In praise of the subconscious

If my friend will forgive me, I would like to set down for posterity the most meaningful Freudian slip ever.

My friend, an anxious, noisy-brained mother as I am, texted me this: "If I fall to my needs and beg God do you think my child will stop getting a 76 on tests?"

"Fall to my needs." It says everything.

I told my friend to make sure her high schooler continues to understand how bright and exceptional she is, and that she doesn't grow to believe in a grade more than she believes in herself. 76 is merely a grade, not a verdict on our children's future nor a comment on our mothering.

Yes, I was talking to myself, too.

Haiti

Pray for them.

A powerful earthquake, .7 on the Richter scale, reduced Port au Prince, Haiti to heap of sticks and concrete rubble as evening fell on January 12, 2010. It happened in an instant. Some 200,000 people are thought to have perished, a number that I can neither fathom nor bear.

There are sorrowing hearts everywhere. In one photo that I saw, a man holds the head of his brother-in-law, whose wife, three months pregnant, was killed by the collapse of a four-story building during the massive earthquake. The man is sobbing as if grief has literally hollowed him out. I wonder how he will go on.

The National Palace, once a grand two-story structure, sits destroyed, it's top floor pancaked into the ground floor like a crushed wedding cake. Outside its gates, the newly homeless gather. The parliament building collapsed with those who run the country inside. The hospitals collapsed. The cathedral and churches collapsed. The priests and nuns are dead. UN relief workers have died, as have American college students doing humanitarian work in Haiti. Babies awaiting adoption were buried inside their orphanages. Every Haitian person knows someone who died or remains unaccounted for.

I look into the faces of the reporters covering this story, and I see a haunted, shell shocked expression, a soul-weariness that I have never seen before, even on the faces of journalists in war zones with shells exploding behind them. In Haiti, the journalists are witnessing a horror that defies imagination. Anderson Cooper said their camera lenses were too small to capture what had happened there. So great was the need of the Haitians that Dr. Sanjay Gupta quit being a correspondent to practice medicine in the field hospital he was reporting on. He ministered to survivors all through the night, and felt humbled and grateful in the morning to have kept people alive. You can tell the losses are starting to feel personal to the reporters on the ground. You can see it in the light that has gone dim in their eyes.

I asked my husband why people didn't walk into the hills to other villages where there was food and water. He said, "How do you walk when your legs are broken?"

I had photos up on this post before, but I took them down. They were too upsetting to look at everytime I logged on to this blog. I know I should make myself see the pictures, that it is a kind of moral cowardice to turn away. But the mental images are vivid enough.

The simplest way to give to the Red Cross is to text the word "Haiti" to 90999. The Red Cross will then charge $10 to your cell phone bill and use the donation to help the survivors. They've raised about $10 million from these $10 donations so far, which is heartening. But they will need more.

The Call

I am blindsided sometimes by the sheer awesome power of the love I feel for my children, by my wonder at their evolution as human beings.

My son is majoring in kinesiology and exercise science. He is particularly enamored of anatomy and physiology and the musculoskeletal system. This interest happens to coincide with his mother's knee problem. Last night he dug out his textbook and gave me a mini lesson on the knees, asked me very intent and focused questions, and performed a couple of diagnostic movements to see if he could discern what seemed to be wrong. He mused on the possibilities, the leading one being a PCL tear, and he insisted that I get this checked out as soon as possible, this week, he said, so he could come with me to the orthopedic doctor before he goes back to college.

His concern and manner made me feel so cared about, and of all the people who have urged me to go get my knee looked at, he was the one that managed to get me to the phone. He instructed me to call as soon as I got to work this morning, then called me at noon to ask whether I'd yet made the appointment. I hadn't. "Do it as soon as we put down the phone," he ordered (so bossy! Where could he have learned that?). "I'm going to call you back in half and hour to make sure you did."

So I made the call. The earliest date I could get was next Monday at 2 pm. Monday is a holiday, the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, so there is no possibility of my allowing the demands of my job to keep me from getting to the appointment. My son leaves to go back to school that morning, though, so unfortunately he won't be able to accompany me.

There is a part of me that wonders if this little knee issue that I'm having isn't God's sneaky way of helping my boy to his future profession. He is deeply interested in orthopedics and sports medicine, but thinks medical school takes too many years and I also know that secretly he wonders if he's smart enough. He's never truly understood how bright and capable he is. At the moment, he's saying maybe he'll become a paramedic. I simply make assenting noises when he says that, because I am very sure that whatever path he came to this earth to pursue, he will find it. All I need to do right now is get my knee taken care of and let myself appreciate his expression of concern and love.

Thank you, son. I love you, too.

I Love This Woman!

Gabaourey Sidibe plays Precious in the Lee Daniels movie of the same name. She acts the heck out of her role as a sexually abused Harlem teen. But I don’t want to talk about the movie. I want to talk about its star. How amazing is she? Below are excerpts from a frank and funny interview with her in Harper’s Bazaar this month. To read the whole thing, go to HarpersBazaar.com.

This woman has so much personality, she makes me want to sing!

---

Sidibe adores photo shoots. “I feel like a model. It justifies everyone in my life who told me I wouldn’t be anything until I lost weight. It justifies that little girl who cried because she didn’t think she could be in front of the camera. And it’s for other girls who feel like they can’t do this or that and feel like they’re not pretty and not worthy of having their photo taken.”

…

“People always ask me, ‘You have so much confidence. Where did that come from?’ It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl. I wear colors that I really like, I wear makeup that makes me feel pretty, and it really helps. It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and,” she chuckles, “you must decorate it.”

…

“I heard a rumor that President Obama knew who I was. You know, because Oprah is all up in his shizz, so I think that he might be aware of me.” She laughs. “But then again, he’s also aware of the whole world. He’s probably a little brain busy.”

…

If she met herself at a party, “I’d think I was pretty. Is that weird? I might be really interested in me. I’d probably watch myself the whole night, then I’d come over and say, ‘You’re a really good dancer.’ We’d talk for a while and then,” she says, starting to giggle at the silliness of it, “we’d go home separately to avoid the paparazzi.”

…

When Sidibe appeared on Ellen in October, armed with a dance she had been practicing for weeks, Ellen DeGeneres implored her to “stay exactly who you are.” She lights up at the memory. “I’m just happy to show up. So, I don’t have any plans of changing because I really, really like myself. It took a lot of work to get here. It’s reaffirming for people to meet me and ask me not to change.” She smiles, slyly deflating her you-go-girl balloon. “And now we cry.”

Born to Run

The cab I took to work this morning drove down through Central Park. It was a crystalline cold morning, with sunlight falling like watercolors through the lacy branches of trees, the snow still covering the rolling lawns and fields, ice floes still drifting in steel gray water of the rowing lake. Along the cleared paths, men and women with toned bodies and furrowed concentrated faces ran with long easy strides. I couldn't help watching them, marveling at the precision with which they moved their bodies, at the way their limbs seemed to follow effortlessly their mental commands.

My body no longer does that. I can no longer run. My right knee joint has now deteriorated to the point that I am limping, in constant jeopardy of falling. It feels like bone against bone, as if the cartilage is all gone, the muscle like loose elastic, no longer holding the connection firm. I have to set my foot down just so when I walk, so that the knee doesn't buckle under me, so that it doesn't send me sprawling or draw me up short with a flash of pain. I try to disguise it, because even though I know this ruined knee is not the result of my excess weight, but the result of an injury and arthritis and the hyper-extension of my knee joints that I inherited from my mother, I still know that people will silently tsk, if they notice me limping, and think disapprovingly, Well, why doesn't she just lose the weight?

Yes, losing the weight would certainly help. But if it were a matter of "just" losing it, of course I would have done that long ago. My mother has been slender all her life, and still her knees did what my right knee is doing, from her forties on. She eventually had both knees replaced with prosthetics, which I actually consider doing, except I am far too young for prosthetics, and besides, I couldn't afford to take the time off from my job that would be required for such surgery and recovery.

But I have to do something. I can't put off investigating the pain any longer. I wonder if doctors realize that fat people don't make appointments to see them because we are embarrassed, ashamed to take off our clothes, tired of being told to "just" lose the weight. No matter. Tomorrow I will make an appointment with my internist, and go from there.

I'm too young to stop running.

Opera Singers, Subway Revelers, and Cops

Happy new year all my loves. I can't quite believe it's 2010. I remember being a little girl and calculating how old I would be in the year 2000. It seemed like such science fiction then, so far in the future. And now we are a decade past that. It's going to take me a minute to get my arms around that.

New Year's eve was mixed for our family. My husband and I had a lovely time with friends, who were hosting some of the performers from the Concert for Peace held that night at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. There was a rather famous and personally captivating opera singer, her friend the press agent, a sitar and dirigidoo player and her partner who directs a dance troupe, a film producer and her partner who works on women's issues in India, a photographer, another woman who was friendly and lovely, but whose details I don't know, our hosts and us. What a delightful gathering it was! At midnight we hugged and danced and twirled and blew our noisemakers and set off mini firecrackers and wore silly hats and 2010 glasses with little rolling lights, and the opera singer imitated various choreographers' styles to hysterically funny effect, and the dancer twirled scarves and paper streamers and the rest of us clapped and kicked our feet up (literally) and one of the men filmed the proceedings and we drank good champagne and rang in the new year in boisterous style.

My daughter, meanwhile, was out in the city with four girlfriends. They gathered at one house, then decamped to a second and finally a third. Three parties. We let her do it, praying for an incident-free evening for her, knowing that there were aspects of it that were not within our control. We let her know that we were trusting her to call us if anything untoward was going down. She stayed in phone contact with us all night, texting us at every move, and she seemed her cheerful, unintoxicated self when we picked her up from her friend's house in a cab at almost 2 a.m. She described how there were two drunk German girls on a subway ride they took earlier in the night. The girls were yelling "Wake up, New York!" and they led a round of happy birthday singing to one of my daughter's friends, with the whole train car joining in. As my daughter tells it, the night was just rambling fun, at least for her and her little group of innocents.

For our son and one of his friends, the night wasn't quite as sanguine as for my daughter and us. They were going to a party in Brooklyn. They came up out of the train station, looked around and found themselves in an unfamiliar and not great neighborhood. Heads down against the cold and light hail, they walked towards the street where the party was being held. On the way, a police car pulled up next to them. The cop inside, a White guy, rolled down the window and said to the two Black boys on the sidewalk, "Where the fuck do you boys think you're going? Do you know where the fuck you are?"

At first, they thought he was being hostile and gave subversively sarcastic answers, but as the cop continued to question them, it began to dawn on both my son and his friend that he might actually be looking out for them. "You two college boys are going to get yourselves shot and killed out here tonight," he told them. "I'd advise you to get to your party and lock the door or turn around and go home." The boys went ahead to the party, noting that the cop car didn't move from the block till they were inside. At the party, they looked around, decided "the party was whack anyway," and headed back out into the night, to the subway station, where they took the first train back to the city. They decided to get off in Times Square and watch the ball drop with the rest of the hordes, then they got something to eat and came back to our home. We walked in to our apartment shortly after 2 a.m. to see them sitting there, watching The Matrix.

"You're home early," my husband said, surprised.

"Oh, we have stories," my son's friend said. He nudged our son with an elbow. "Tell them."

My son started recounting what happened, sanitizing the cop's language. "No," his friend said, "Give the tone of voice, use the actual words he used. Tell them the real story." So my son did, with his friend adding details.

"How did that make you feel?" I asked the boys when they were done.

My son shrugged. "Like that cop knew something and didn't want to have to clean our dead bodies off the street," he said.

Considering it now, I choose to think that cop might have been a guardian angel in profane disguise protecting our boys on New Years eve night. We'll never know for sure. For which I am eternally grateful.

Street Preacher

My daughter took this picture of a man on Broadway handing out literature of holy reckoning, preaching repentance, warning that the end of the world was nigh. I don't know about the end of the world, but the end of the decade is certainly at hand. By my lights, endings are gateways to new beginnings, as my daughter's friend, laughing and undaunted by dire leaflet predictions in the foreground, seems to suggest. Then there's the lady in the background clearly engaged in her life, and the man himself, whose expression seems not judgmental, but rather gently bemused and kind. I like this picture as a metaphor.

Movie Buff

On Sunday afternoon, my 91-year-old aunt's home care attendant took her to see the movie Invictus, which is about Nelson Mandela enlisting the captain of South Africa's national rugby team to help unite his apartheid-torn nation. My aunt, who usually wants to do nothing more than sit in her chair and follow the thoughts wheeling in her head, had asked to see it. Thrilled by the idea of engaging her in something outside her home and doctor visits, I bought the tickets and escorted her and her home attendant to the bus, which is wheelchair accessible and stops right in front of the theater.

Later, I asked my aunt how she liked the movie. "I left early," she said. "I had already seen that same story years ago on the news." Talking with her more, I got the sense that she had been confused by the movie, thinking the characters were real and that the events were unfolding in real time. It was as if the years had looped back on themselves, and at a certain point she decided she knew how the story would turn out, and she was ready to be back home in her chair. "It was longer than I thought it would be," she complained. She paused and added, "For the next picture, make it a good love story."

I'm thinking, It's Complicated.

Happy Christmas

Christmas morning my husband woke us all early, a big kid wanting to get to the present-opening festivities, but not to see what he had netted. No, he wanted to see the faces of his family as we opened the gifts he had gotten for us. He is that kind of man. On his birthday every year, he buys us all gifts. This year, he came home with five tissue-wrapped packages for his wife, daughter, niece, niece, and mother-in-law, all of whom happened to be in his home on the weekend of his birthday. He gave us lovely pashmina shawls, each of us a different, perfect color. He is that kind of man.

Back to Christmas. Our son's best friend E., who is like my other son, slept over and woke up with us on Christmas morning. He and my son have been brothers in spirit since before they could say their names. They don't know this world without one another. I think they may have been twins in a past life, or maybe they are soulmates. Their friendship is effortless and generous and full of humor. They've both grown into striking young men, my son's friend, who used to be the small scrawny one, even taller than my son at 6' 4". Both boys are handsome enough so that when my daughter's friends come over, they huddle in the back bedroom and squeal, then walk out serenely, as if no one heard them, full of 15-year-old composure.

E. is Muslim. And Jewish. His mother, a Jew by virtue of her mother being Jewish, was raised a Christian, then became a Buddhist, then chose to raise her sons in the Muslim faith. So Christmas isn't really observed in his home, but we fold him into the season anyway when he's in our home. We all had fun Christmas eve, wrapping gifts and sipping egg nog and swapping stories about any and everything. Wonderful stream of consciousness.

We all pulled in a nifty haul, given the economics of the time. My husband and I both gave each other Kindle e-readers. We'd each confided in our kids, who were highly amused by our unwitting synchronicity, and insisted we open our gifts to one another at the same time. We got our daughter her own Nikon SLR film camera, a 1984 model and she was thrilled. Our son wanted the iHome speakers, which I have to say, produce amazing sound. E. got one of those white intentionally rumpled college boy button down shirts that he wanted (he's a high school senior applying to college so he's trying out the look), and there were other smaller gifts to and from and among. And there was great comfort and banter. I paused at one point to be quietly mindful that the moment we were living was perfect.

My niece, the one who just moved into her own apartment in November after living with us since summer, and her boyfriend came over to have Christmas dinner with us. So did one of my aunts (the family friend kind of aunt) and her daughter (with whom I shared a room for several school years growing up--another story for another day). We all visited with my 91-year-old aunt for part of the afternoon since she wasn't feeling up to leaving home and coming over. In general, it was all very low stress, even though I managed to get overly stressed that the food wasn't ready on time. Why do I do that? No one cared. We sat around and watched movies (the new Harry Potter and Up), and when we did finally eat, everything was delicious. My son, who isn't home that much since he arrived for the holidays, stayed in all evening with his family, and everything was cheerful and laughter flowed easily, and it was so good to have all my ducklings home and happy. In all, it was a very good day.

Roots of the Tree

In honor of Christmas, here are some photos from our family tree that have meaning for me.

This image is of my maternal grandparents and eight of their nine children, taken on April 6, 1931. The youngest sibling is in the picture too, in a way: My grandmother is 9 months pregnant. My mom is the sober faced little girl in the front row, second from left. My 91-year-old aunt, who occasionally makes an appearance in this blog, is the first girl on the left, back row. My aunt who is currently recovering from surgery is the baby on my grandfather's lap. Every one of these children is now more than 80 years old!

I love so many things about this photo. I love how serious everyone but my grandfather looks. I love how the cardboard scene behind the family doesn't quite fill the frame, so you see the wooden walls of the room and the curtains behind and the terrazzo tile floor. I love the muffin heads of the girls, whose straight-haired mother never quite managed to tame their kinky hair. My aunt who is farthest on the right was only 5 years old in this picture, but she told me later that she looked at it and said to herself, "Oh Grace, you're going to have to learn to do your own hair." And indeed, she was the aunt who, when I was growing up, could make us nieces feel resplendent when she did our hair. She had a gift. Her nickname to this day is Miss Fixit.

There's so much more in this picture for those who know the stories. But I'll stop here.

This photograph was taken at the wedding of my husband's parents on May 7, 1958. This image is particularly cherished by him because it includes not only his parents but also his four grandparents and a special uncle and aunt.

Going to help my husband cook dinner, now. We're having just a couple of people over, very low-key. Not quite the day my daughter had envisioned (she imagined not getting out of PJs all day, and not even cracking the front door). But close enough.

I hope you're having exactly the kind of day you want today. Merry Christmas.

Personal History

I just read a lovely post over at Life in Progress about a trip the author took with her parents to Paris and London in August 1973. Oh, it brought back memories. My family took almost the same trip when I was 14, we visited almost all the same places, and it was lifechanging. I particularly recall the rush of belonging I felt as we walked around Montmartre in Paris, with its sidewalk artists and crafty vendor stalls. At the time, I thought I wanted to become an artist, and my romantic image of that came to life on the streets of Montmartre. I don't have time at this moment to go into it, I'm rushing off to work, but the post made me want to travel back into my own memories, and visit certain ones anew. So now I have a vague plan to do that here, as soon as I have a moment to breathe, think, meander down the lanes of my personal history.

What memory comes up for you when you think back to 13 or 14? It's such an impressionable age, isn't it?

A Day at a Time

Just heard another editor is leaving. She took a job at another magazine. The losses pile up.

Also, one of my aunts is very sick. She just had surgery to remove a blockage of her carotid artery, and she is so very frail. Her three daughters, my cousins, are scared. They are all traveling to be with her at Christmas. I adore this aunt. She's a little OCD, like me. She worries obsessively about her daughters, all of them married women, every one of them the kind of daughter that would make any mother proud. She and my uncle raised them to be caring, funny, strong-hearted, opinionated women. The youngest shook things up mightily when she came out to her parents right after college. Her father was devastated, and left the room, but her mother, my aunt, followed him out and led him back by the elbow, saying fiercely, "This is your daughter! This is your father! Now we're going to sit here and talk! I am not going to let this break up my family!" At the time, my aunt and uncle were deeply homophobic. Now, fifteen years later, my aunt speaks warmly about how much her youngest allowed her to grow, how grateful she is, and how, when my cousin married her partner is San Francisco last summer, she gained another daughter.

This aunt is also the one who used to press crisp twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills into our hands when we were small. When you're not yet of age and haven't figured out how to get money on your own, you remember such things. She was too generous by far.

I didn't realize until I spoke with my mom today (I had called to complain that more work was about to fall onto my already overflowing desk) just how weak and close to the edge my aunt is after her surgery last week. Now, I'm scared too. As my mom and her sisters all say, Jehovah Jireh, which means, God will provide just what we need at the time we need it. And so I pray for her healing.

The more things change...

I'm starting to realize my daughter has been taking pictures for a while, that a camera of some sort has been constantly in her hands for several years now. I took the top picture at a cousin's wedding three years ago. My girl was using a digital shooter then. Since last summer, she's taken over the Nikkormat FTN that one of my uncles gave me when I was 11. I enjoyed a decades-long entrancement with that camera. I love how its photographs can reveal what the eye fails to notice. I cannot explain the profound awe I feel to know that my daughter, too, connects with this faithful old camera. The thing is built like a truck, it's heavy in your hands, and it's optics are true. It's a beautiful piece of technology. I am so grateful to share it with my daughter all these years later. Life is sometimes more perfect than we can dream.

Contented

Snowstorm! Eleven blizzardy inches fell last night. Through it all, life kept happening. My son and my niece are home from college, and one of my son's friends from high school is also here, and my daughter has a couple of friends staying over. She and her two friends went to a party last night, with my husband and me driving them there and picking them up after, just as our parents used to do for us when we were teenagers. Except we were growing up in Jamaica and Antigua, where driving distances were short and the nights were always balmy.

The cold last night was the least of it. The snow was harrowing to drive in, and as we made our way from Harlem to Soho to pick up our girl from the holiday party for her scholars program, I glimpsed for the first time how terrifying it must be to navigate a blizzard in rural parts, with no visible landmarks. We inched our way down the highway, picking our way through more traffic than you would imagine in such a snowstorm. When we got there almost an hour later, our daughter and her two friends skipped out to the car and chattered happily the whole way home, totally unaware of all the concentration it was taking for me to psychically keep cars away from us on the treacherous road.

Even though it was midnight by the time we got home, the girls, all of them 15 years old, changed out of their party clothes and bundled up to go play in the snow as they did when they were 7, making snow angels, rolling down slopes, catching snowflakes on their tongues. My son had the good sense to wrap himself in a blanket on the couch and watch movies with his friend and exchange man banter with his dad.

My niece had left earlier to meet friends way out in Brooklyn, and almost got marooned there in the 12 inches of snow that fell on us last night. She eventually slept at a friend's house, and left early this morning to come home in daylight. She is catching a flight home to Kingston, Jamaica at 2 p.m., so her mom and dad were on the phone first thing this morning, checking to see whether the airports were open in spite of the snow. They are.

The snow has stopped falling now. The sun is high in the sky, doing nothing for the chilly temperatures. The little kids were out early, sledding on the hill in front of our building while my husband cooked scrambled eggs and spicy sausages for the household. With some amusement, I watched my niece getting ready to go to the airport, groggily stuffing things in her suitcase, her face bare and dry, the desire to just curl up and sleep overwhelming her. She reminded me so much of myself when I was in college, partying all night, rolling out to the curb from the dorm with my suitcase at 6 a.m. to climb into my Uncle Charlie's car for the trip to the airport.

We've just dropped her off at the airport and arrived back home to find our son still on the couch, the blanket now on the floor beside him. He's meeting the day slowly. Our daughter had another engagement today. She and some school friends are baking cookies to hand out to firefighters. It's a tradition started by her friend Julia's family after 9/11. My girl, new to her school last year, is thrilled to be included in this annual event with all the longtimers. Then tonight she has another party, and she and four other girls plan on sleeping over at another friend's house. Meanwhile, our son is heading out later to show off the city to one of his college friends whose flight to Atlanta has been grounded until tomorrow. But first, he wants to go see the movie Avatar with his parents.

All around us, life is happening. My husband and I putter at the center of it all, contented.

Tipping Point

Holiday party! In the conference room, of course. And fruit punch with a kick. Thanks to the alcohol, it's more festive around here than it's been in ages. But with tongues loosened by the punch, people are saying whatever the heck they want to say, making it more apparent than ever that we've reached a tipping point. There simply aren't enough hands on deck to sail this ship through choppy seas. The tone is one of bitter irony, delivered as biting humor. Folks are burned out. And yet, throughout the halls of the office at this moment, there are bursts of laughter. Release.

My son comes home tonight, having successfully completed his first semester of college. Perspective is everything. Happy Holidays!

Friday Night Live

On towards eight last evening, my former editorial assistant, call her Callie (not her real name), swung by the magazine. I was still there, swamped with work, trying to get two stories out my computer and into final pages, so she just sat in my office, hiding out while she waited for her friend, who is the only assistant editor left on staff. All the other editorial assistants and assistant editors have now been laid off; they were let go, I suspect, to balance the picking off of older workers nearing retirement age (that's a pretty incendiary statement, I know it). We have interns and temps to do the assisting now, but mostly we do our own admin work, chasing down invoices when they get lost in accounting for the umpteenth time, and crafting careful emails to incensed writers whose work has long been completed and whose rent or phone or credit card bills are coming due.

Callie was let go in the last round of layoffs a year ago. She had been on staff two short years, and she truly was the best. Great work ethic, a quick study, good-hearted, full of initiative, organized, wry and witty. It was easy and enjoyable working with her. Yesterday, as she sat across from me, both of us not talking much as I tapped on my computer keyboard, but the two of us exchanging comfortable chatter in intermittent bursts, I had the strange sense that she was family, like a niece or a cousin, a young person I would go out of my way to help in whatever way she might need. She's doing well, actually. She found a good job with a publishing house just a couple of months after being laid off, and they seem to appreciate her there.

It was good to see her. It was good to remember that there is life after being laid off. Just in case I'm one of the next ones to be picked off.

Mother and Daughter

The top photo is of me in the coffee shop at the Fort Wayne, Indiana airport, circa 1983. It was taken by photographer Michael O'Brien, with whom I was working on a story at the time (miss you, Michael! And your wonderful family). The second photo is one I snapped of my daughter in our kitchen in New York City, circa 2008. Love how the window light slants through both photos, 25 years apart. Love the girl even more.

A Lesson in Transcending

My daughter has a 10th grade English project on transcendentalism. She posed her cousin and friends in various settings in nature, huddled in stairwells with an X of tape over their mouths, against stark brick buildings, awash in sunlight, lying in the grass, and so on. She had chosen to illustrate ten quotes from Thoreau. The above photo of my niece was used to illustrate this quote:

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence with nature itself."

As part of the project, she had to interpret and explain how each photo applied. This was what she wrote for this one:

"In this photo, my cousin is surrounded by the tree branches. She is connecting back to nature, and simplifying that moment in her life to only the earth and life on it. The trees in nature are such a significant idea in transcendentalism because the goal is to simplify life and be an individual amid a sea of conformity. The trees show this because they have grown from the earth and flourished through many seasons, despite the outside influences. This is a model for the transcendentalist, to be free and grow as a person and defy all the judgments and routines of normal life. Also the branches are bare, showing that there are harsh outside influences that sometimes can change our path in life, however a transcendentalist can still retain individuality because these influences are a natural part of life, and it is our job to be able to stand up to them and grow from them."

I particularly love the sentiment of that last sentence.

I should mention that she took the photos with a 42-year-old Nikkormat SLR film camera and developed and printed the images in the darkroom at her school. The camera is mine, a second-hand beauty given to me by one of my uncles when I was 11 years old. My daughter took it down from a high shelf in the back of my closet. I wasn't even sure it still worked. But it does. I would love to show more of the her transcendentalist series but I'm not clear on whether some of her other subjects would mind their photos being posted, so I'll refrain.

My girl was up till past midnight, meditatively trimming and mounting her photos, and pasting the quotes on the front and the explanations on the back. She'd been going all day, starting with yoga at seven a.m., and back-to-back dance rehersals after school. She didn't get home till seven-thirty tonight, and got right to work on the writing for her project, which took a few hours. Why, I asked, did she wait till the night before it was due? "I couldn't start writing till I knew what photos I wanted to use," she explained, "and I only printed the photos today." Truth be told, she didn't get to any of her other homework tonight, but planned to read history on the 50-minute subway ride to school and do math and Spanish in her free period today. It's one o'clock now, and she just went to bed.

Can I just say, my daughter so impresses me.

South for Winter

My mom left. She flew to Jamaica from New York on the chilly Saturday after Thanksgiving, leaving me both at delicious loose ends and bereft from missing her. She will spend Christmas and New Years in Jamaica with my brother and his family before flying home to St. Lucia in late January. Her beloved sister Grace, who lives in Toronto, will also be in Jamaica, so they will no doubt host tea parties and bridge lunches and giggle like schoolgirls and maybe even take another dip in my cousin's pool (see "Beauties in the Pool").

On Saturday, I went to my mom's apartment after we got back from the airport to wash up the cups in the sink, empty the garbage, put the towels in the laundry and generally set the place up for what will no doubt be several months of absence. My mom leaves the city when it gets cold, when the winter begins to announce itself in her bones. And though I had begun to buckle somewhat under the effort to be around her enough so that she wouldn't get lonely, while still trying to be in all the other places where I am required to be on any given day, even though I had begun to chafe under all that, I miss her absolutely and long for her return.

Boys

Just got home from a long tedious day in the ghost town that is my office. I opened my front door and found three big ole men in my living room, my son and two of his friends. They are 6' 9", 6' 4" and my son at 6' 2" is the short one. Two of the young men are in college and the third is a high school senior, my son's best friend who's been a regular in our home since before both boys could say their names. They are watching Kung Fu Panda. I can hear them laughing and laughing out there.

For some reason, I find this comforting.

Tattoo

My son is home from college for Thanksgiving week. He arrived this morning around 8, looking happy and hale, with a tattoo in the center of his back, between his shoulder blades.

After an hour or so of chit-chatting, he whipped off his shirt, then sat with a quizzical smile on his face, waiting for us to notice. I saw something, a shadow on his back, and asked him to turn around. He did readily, his expression proud and nervous. I guessed he was proud of his art but was nervous about what we would say, because he still cares.

His tat was his birthday present to himself, which he actually had done on his dad's birthday. It is a black and white piece, a stone cross surrounded by angel wings. It is not too big, not too small, nicely centered left to right, not too high, perfectly placed. And the art is lovely, not at all cartoonish, done by a steady, professional hand.

"It's beautiful," I said, and he melted.

"Ahh, that's the word I was hoping for!" he said, and then he hugged me.

"What does it mean to you?" I asked him.

"It's a symbol of faith," he said, "of the way you raised me. A reminder that God has my back."

I thought of my dad, and my husband's mom, my uncles, all the loved ones on the other side, watching over him. I believe he thinks of them, too.

I spoiled it a little by asking him not to get any tats on his neck or forearms, nowhere visible in job interview clothes. I even noted I could be just fine with this one tat on his perfect body that I birthed. My husband, at that point, told me (nicely) to back off, cool it. My son just smiled. His mom is his mom, and that was okay with him at that moment.

I was touched, really, that it mattered to him that we liked it, even though I know, if we had given him grief, he would have shrugged and pretended he didn't care.

I'm glad he cares.

Three Little Birds

You can tell this picture was snapped by someone trusted and loved by the people in the photo. My son is 12 here, my daughter 10. Their dad took the picture.

And now, on top of everything...

Guilt.

Today is parent visiting day at my daughter's school, which means parents are invited to stand in the backs of classrooms and see where their tuition dollars are going. Our daughter asked us to come. She wanted to show me her photography porfolio (she got a solid A in photography, by the way). I wanted, so wanted, to be there, but today is also the day that two major stories are due in, and I have to edit and move them to my editor in chief by the end of the day. One is likely the be in good shape, the other is from a writer I have never worked with before, so I have no idea what to expect in terms of the work needed to get it to a place where I can send it to the editor in chief for her sign off. She is very invested in both stories, and both are potential legal nightmares, so both require careful and hyper attentive handling.

Today is also the last day in the office for the people who got laid off, and I and a couple of the other editors are supposed to be taking the woman I worked so closely with for 11 years to lunch. A goodbye lunch. I could miss it, I guess, but it would look callous and fickle. I want this woman to know how much I have appreciated her as a colleague and as a friend. Today, with her spirit still reeling from the "why me?" questions, I really need to be there to show her this.

I can't find the words to convey this to my daughter. The sentences that come to mind just sound as if I'm putting everything else ahead of her. I know this is what it means to be an adult, that one is always faced with these hard choices. But I wish I could be standing in the back of her classrooms today, watching the light dancing in her face because she is happy that her mama is there.

I wish I could be as pragmatic as my husband. When our daughter stood in the dark at the foot of our bed at 6 a.m. and asked her sleeping parents in a plaintive, guilt-inducing voice, "Are neither of you coming to my school today?" he had no problem saying no. Even though she looked crestfallen, he didn't follow her around as she got dressed trying to make sure she understood the reasons why neither of us would be there. When I asked him, "Don't you wish you could go?" he answered, "Of course not. This is high school. Who wants their parents hanging around?"

And yet, my girl wants us.

Guilt. It feels like self-recrimination and sadness. Useless and maybe misguided. But there.

In the Weeds

Everything is ramping up at the magazine since we lost so many good people. Another person quit yesterday, in protest over the 18 people who were let go. You can do that in your twenties, quit your job in protest, because you don't yet have too many bills and no dependents other than yourself who count on your paycheck.

Anyway, the point of all that is that between long hours at work and being there for my mom and my aunt, 87 and 91, I feel like I barely have time to formulate a thought, much less a whole post. And then there is my 15-year-old daughter, who is not so happy about the way school is going right now. Which of course makes me worry (my default) and sends me into a tailspin wherein I try to figure out all the worst case scenarios so I can get busy preventing them. It's exhausting!

So please forgive the quoting of whole exchanges from my life. It's all I can do is record them. I have no mental space or emotional energy left over for the sort of analysis that helps me gain perspective. But thank God for good friends with similar overactive imaginations, who can contribute some analysis when you're lacking the ability to provide your own.

What follows is an email exchange from this morning between me and one of my friends, the brilliant mother of an academically gifted and socially ebullient 7-year old girl.

Me (responding to a question my friend posed that had absolutely nothing to do with my daughter's schooling): Jeannine, why am I so stressed at this moment waiting for my daughter's first quarter grades? I know she's not happy with them because she usually texts me them as soon as she gets out of the advisor conference. Why does this matter so much? Life is a long distance race and I keep getting caught in the weeds by the side of the road. So what if she didn't do that great? What am I making this mean? Sorry for going off on a tangent. I feel consumed with worry about how this might be the beginning of a downward spiral. A vivid imagination is not always a good friend.

Jeannine: What grade is she in again?

Me: Tenth.

Jeannine: If she's having a hard time then you can address it with a tutor or whatever. It's not the beginning of the end. The (potential) beginning of the end is if she's doing drugs, or pregnant, or suffering from depression. If she got bad grades one semester it's fixable. Even if she flunks out it's fixable. There is almost nothing that happens grade-wise in one year of high school that can't be addressed. I failed almost all my classes for three years of high school and ended up on the dean's list in university.

Maybe she senses your stress and it's stressing her out. I remember not showing my father my grades just because I thought he was too invested. I refused to show him my grades for my first two years of university (and I was doing well). Just something to consider.

But, I do understand. My kid's teacher wrote on her report card that she reads at "grade level," which is totally inaccurate and I am obsessed with how to show him the truth. I almost suggested she take The New York Times to school to pull out during quiet time.

I laughed so hard over that New York Times bit. I could totally picture her 7-year-old pulling the paper out and settling down to read. And then I took my friend's advice. I'm backing off with the worry. My daughter has such a well-honed sense of responsibility already, and she wants to do well so much she put herself on a Facebook diet for a week. It's true that Facebook is back interrupting homework again, but I think I will trust her to figure it out and just be there if she comes to me for help. The other part, of course, is that she is testing her chops socially right now, and as my friend pointed out when we talked on the phone later, it can be really hard to do the straight-A thing while trying to discover who you want to be socially.

I suspect my friend and I are members of a generation of nervous, overinvested parents. I think that we have bought into the baby boomer myth of scarce opportunities. And as parents of children of color we worry that the chances they get may be even more limited, and so they have to be super prepared. But the pathways to success are as creative and serendepitious and limitless and divine as individual definitions of success, and I don't know why I keep forgetting that.

Social Wise

Last Wednesday, at about four in the afternoon, my daughter sent this text message to me at work. "Oh mom school today was just horrible. Social wise was fine. Can I go out friday night?"

Me: "Why was it horrible?"

My girl: "Because school just sucks. It requires you to tolerate never sleeping and then working and I cannot tolerate that."

She has been sorely sleep deprived. The tenth graders have just been slammed with work this year. Their teachers weren't kidding last year when they said it would get hard. But what makes me worry is that my daughter might be starting not to like school, which until now has been a source of fun and mastery for her. I don't want her to let go of her "good and responsible student" self-image, one that she has held comfortably from kindergarten until now. That was why the phrase "school just sucks" was worrisome.

Then I looked at the first message again. "Social wise was fine."

She's not lost to high school yet.

What does personal integrity dictate?

To my friends in blogworld who are artists or anyone who may have an informed opinion on this:

Is it acceptable to make a drawing that fairly closely resembles a portion of someone else's original photo, and then display that artwork? Does one have to get permission from the photographer before using for one's own purposes (which happen to be in no way monetary) the drawing inspired by the photo, or does the art belong to the maker, no matter the source? Is it enough to credit the source of inspiration? What does personal integrity dictate? And if there is a legal answer to this, what might that be?

Scorched Earth 2

So last week Wednesday, 18 people at my job were given "The Talk" and an innocuous envelope that held their severance package. As it turns out, I am not among them. But I am devastated by some of the people who were, including the woman I work most closely with, my "work spouse" of sorts. I don't really understand them letting her go. She brings talents to the table that no one else has, a head for coverlines, a way of packaging stories, and an editing style that often irritates writers for its pickiness, but that inevitably makes you think of dimensions you'd overlooked, questions you'd neglected to nail down, and always makes the piece stronger.

I counted on her as a human being, too, her calm equanimity, her quick but never cruel wit, her refusal to give in to the free-floating fear and paranoia that is a constant in my workplace. I am still in shock and denial that she's leaving. We shared the same job title and backed each other up seamlessly. Which makes me also ponder the fact that they must have put us side by side and said, Okay, which one? I wonder if they chose her because I waived my medical insurance coverage with the company, going with my husband's instead. I wonder if it came down to the fact that I cost the company less.

I feel like we're all on a conveyor belt, except none of us knows how close we are at any given point to toppling off the end of it. We can't see what's ahead, we only know that conveyor belt just keeps on rolling, and we could get to the end at any time. There are so few of us left now, and so much work to get done. I'm not afraid of working hard and I love the nature of the work I do. But the losses we've sustained could break your heart.