37 Paddington

A Chance in the World

2012-01-27T14:14:00.000-05:00

A woman I once worked with talked about indestructible children. She said they were children who faced horrific situations and somehow survived, damaged and hurt, but with their humanity and sense of possibility preserved, their sense of purpose intact. More than intact. Activated. Surely this must be what she was talking about—this successful man whose small gestures betray the vulnerable boy inside him still. Steve J. Pemberton, once a foster child searching for home, grew up to become a corporate VP, and a husband and father of three. It you have 4 minutes, this is his story.

Two Worlds

2012-01-25T17:33:00.001-05:00

Suddenly mouth is dumb; eyes

hurt, surprised it is we

who have changed...

To travel

is to return
to strangers.

—From Exile
by Dennis Scott

I was glad to go home and
I am glad to be home and
I am glad I found no strangers.

Sanctuary

2012-01-24T15:13:00.000-05:00

My mom is 90 years old today. Today is her actual birthday although we celebrated last Saturday evening. These are some photos of older vintage that capture moments that mattered as she looked back on her nine decades of life. In a word, family. Oh, and my dad being knighted—she never pretends that wasn't a highlight, too. These photos, and many others of family and friends through the years, ran in a continuous loop on a screen during my mom's birthday dinner in a sumptuously decorated candlelit room with gold taffeta-tied chairs and white lace tablecloths and sixty invited guests, one hundred percent of whom showed up to toast the birthday girl.

My cousin Maureen circled the room with a mic after dinner, after my brother spoke, and after I read a thank you speech my mother had dictated to me that morning, and everyone shared memories of my mother, and my father too, whom my mother had earlier declared to be present and smiling down on us, and of our Paddington Terrace days. More than a few spoke the sentence, "Those Paddington Terrace days were the best of our lives," that exact same sentence, and the street where we lived before I moved to New York became a metaphor for the gathering, a potent memory of our own personal Camelot.

No wonder, I thought, no wonder when it came time to choose a name for this blog, I conjured the house on that street, because in that place, my parents created a sanctuary where everyone felt welcomed, young and old, the neighbor kids who ran in and out of each others homes barefoot, the grown ups who were a part of my parents circle, the aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, the young ones who moved in with us for months or years at a stretch while their parents worked through hard patches, or completed assignments abroad, or healed from illnesses, and the school friends who roamed through, and everyone was there, everyone, and my mother and my father made it so.

My mother preferred us to bring our friends home, and she made it very appealing for us to do so. She ran her own real estate business with her brother, my uncle, and worked long hours showing houses for rent and for sale. And yet she somehow managed to be there to make sandwiches and stir up pitchers of lemonade when our friends came over, which made them always choose our home when there was a question of where to gather. I took it so for granted then. Now I know better.

The memory that encapsulates that time for me, was the day a new family moved in across the street from us, and there were so many people on our front verandah, and so many children of all ages and descriptions playing soccer on the front lawn, and I noticed a girl at the gate across the street, watching us, and I went to the fence and asked if she had just moved into that house, and she said yes, and she looked over at our yard and asked, "Is that a boarding house?" I was 14 and she was 12, and she would soon become my friend, but that day I recognized in her a kind of yearning because she could see, even at 12, that every person in the place she thought was a boarding house knew what it felt like to be a part of something. My mother and my father made it so.

Today, we celebrate her

2012-01-21T11:57:00.000-05:00

My mom, above at age 56, will turn 90 on Tuesday, but the big party is today.

Home

2012-01-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

I had forgotten.

The blue green hills. The warm damp air, not humid exactly, but rather soft and enfolding, making joints supple, hearts light.

The schoolchildren in the early morning, crisp in their school uniforms, khakis and ties for the boys, tunics and white blouses for the girls, waiting at bus stops along the main roads for the day to start.

The smell of the place. Salty. Green. The houses I remember, the ones I dreamed in, the shops with shutters in bright colors, hand painted signs.

The sea sounds along the airport road, the cars careening, never colliding, the new mall where the supermarket used to be, my old school building.

My mother, peering down the hallway excitedly, a tiny stooped figure with guileless anticipation, waiting for the first glimpse of me.

My niece and nephew, 10 and 8, faces fresh as the day, in bright green shirts and blue shorts, sitting straight backed at the breakfast table, greeting me politely, even formally, yet the smile in my nephew's eyes says he's ready to play.

My brother stirring condensed milk into bold black coffee. Ackee and saltfish warming. My mother's thin arms reaching up to surround me.

The place where one is made will always be home.

How could I have forgotten?

Fished

2012-01-16T17:55:00.002-05:00

“It is necessary to find one's own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt, a hard, ambitious, irresolute place. When she glitters she is very, very bright, and when she does not glitter she is dirty. New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don't know why.” ―Maeve Brennan

I am going back to Jamaica for a few days. My mom will be turning 90 and I am going home. But I am leaving another real home to do it, this bricked over city where I have sunk roots with a good man and raised our children. I knew when I was 5 years old and my family was visiting my aunt and her family in New York City on vacation, that as soon as I was old enough I would move to the city. I don't know why I knew it, what made me decide it so early on. Maybe it was the way I felt as we walked the sidewalks, plugged in, buzzed, more free to be who I truly was, more fully alive. Somehow I knew it was my place. So I applied and went to college here, and then I stayed. And all these years I have been waiting for the call of another place, another way of life. I wonder sometimes if I have grown deaf or numb, because New York is a hard and unforgiving city to live in, and yet here I remain. Some days the walls close in and I miss the wide blue sea. But a cure is always at hand. Just walk beyond your door and the city infuses you with something, an energy, the electric current of humanity flowing all around you, and even in your anonymity—maybe because of it—you feel absolved, released, not so odd or haunted or alone.

Little Hurricanes

2012-01-13T10:59:00.001-05:00

And there he goes. Our son swept in from London bearing gifts from his girlfriend, and some from him too, jars of spa goodies and a polished stone with mystic properties for me, English chocolates and a recipe journal for his sister, and a Union Jack apron and Arsenal scarf for his dad, who donned them immediately and then walked around the house wearing them all night. Love that man. Then our boy wanted to show his dad an amazing play he'd seen by Arsenal striker Thierry Henry (did I mention they are Arsenal soccer fans?). There they are You Tubing the play, with my daughter, who had settled down to homework because she has midterms this week, peering around. As the evening went on our intrepid traveler told us about attending a performance of Robin Hood at the renovated Globe theater in Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare's town, and how the stage sloped up toward the back till it was almost vertical, and how there was a real pond in the middle of the set, and everything else fantastic and fond about his trip.

Our boy swept out again at 7 a.m. this morning to catch the 8 a.m. bus back to his college so he can make his 4 p.m. track practice. I hugged him and hugged my husband who had offered to drive him to the bus station and hugged my girl who left at the same time for school. Then I came back into my room in the quiet house and sat on my bed looking at the photo of my children that is framed on my side table. They were 8 and 5, and my son was reading the Andrew Salkey book Hurricane to his sister and I swear it was just yesterday.

------------------------------

Here's what else happened yesterday. This is such a New York story, one that could have had many endings. My daughter got off the subway at her stop last night and was walking along the platform to the exit when she saw two small children, she thought they were about 4 and 5, banging on the closing door of the train and screaming "Open the door!" At the window was an Indian woman in a bright sari, her face a mask of horror as she banged on the glass from inside the train. The train pulled away, leaving the two children running alongside it on the platform, the little girl howling, the little boy in frantic silence. My daughter went over to them and guided them from the edge of the platform and asked them what was wrong. Apparently they were traveling with their mother who had not managed to get off the train before the doors closed.

My daughter says she knew what she had to do because she remembered me telling her when she was small that if this ever happened to her, she should find an older lady who would stay with her until I came back to find her. She said to the children, "Don't worry, your mom will come back for you. I'll stay with you till she gets here." The girl sobbed and sobbed and the boy stared at her in terror and didn't utter a word. A man came up and asked if he could help. My daughter said everything was okay and he walked away. An older woman came up and told the children sternly that all this crying was not necessary. My daughter looked at her in disbelief. "Really?" she said, telling me the story, her voice full of 17-year-old attitude and conviction. "Did that women really think tears were not a completely appropriate reaction for a 5 year-old-girl who was lost in a subway at night?" The woman walked away.

Another woman, thirtyish, came over. She said she had children the same age and offered to stay with my daughter and the two lost children until their mother returned. Then the subway booth agent, alerted by the little girl's screaming sobs, appeared. When the situation was explained, he went back to the booth and called the conductor of the train that had just left the station. He then told my daughter and the woman that the children's mother was waiting for them at the next stop, to put the children on the train and she would meet them. My daughter said, "I'll go with them." The woman said, "I'll go too."

So they took the two children to the next stop where their mother fell on them with tears and hugs as soon as the subway doors opened. My daughter and the woman quietly walked away. They had to exit the station and cross the street and pay another fare to get to the train that would take them back downtown. The children's mother did not even see them. Perhaps she thought the children arrived alone. It doesn't matter. She may not have thanked my daughter and the woman, but I know, and my daughter knows, that they were there for those lost children last night. They helped this New York story have a happily-ever-after ending.

Where I Sat

2012-01-12T19:40:00.002-05:00

I sat looking at this wall of water and contemplating my son's arrival back in the States from visiting his girlfriend in England. His dad is at the airport collecting him as I write this, and tomorrow he will be on a bus back to school, and the next day competing in a track meet. Ah, the endurance of youth. The water sounds soothed my noisy brain as water sounds always do. Can't wait to see my boy and his laundry tonight!

Antidote

2012-01-12T14:06:00.000-05:00

That old insecurity. I'm leaving for a few days next week to attend my mom's 90th birthday celebration in Jamaica. At my job, there's a certain chill in the air, as if this means I don't take the work seriously, that I'm a gallivanter, a shirker. I wish. Not everyone is projecting this, but one person in particular acts miffed that I will be gone for four days. I will miss the issue planning meetings, which is not ideal, but you know what, all the meetings in the world will not make me miss my mother's 90th birthday celebration. I hate feeling so unsafe at a workplace I have been at for years. I have a lump in my throat that I recognize as fear. The antidote is to conjure the worst case scenario, which in this case would be, I lose my job and the college tuition bills come due. And you know what? We would get through it. I would find something, God knows I would. We would figure something out. So now I have to let it go—that feeling of being in jeopardy, made all the worse because I don't even know if I'm correctly reading the signs. I can only control what I can control. Now watch my dust as I hit the road jack. Oh, right, not leaving for a week yet. Slow down, quit creating catastrophes, breathe.

Stop the Deportations

2012-01-11T08:41:00.000-05:00

This is the story of a family I have come to love and feel moved to champion. They are a same sex married binational couple who have been together for 22 years and who are the legal parents of four beautiful children, ages six to eleven. But while the law recognizes their rights as adoptive parents, it will not allow Mark, who is American, to sponsor Fred, who is French and threatened with deportation. Though the law gave them their four children, it would blindly split their family apart. Today, Mark and Fred are taking a stand. This morning they will appear before an immigration official for a green card interview, thus becoming the face of the fight against the Defense of Marriage Act for 38,000 LGBT families currently facing deportation because federal law does not recognize their union. I find their situation wrenching and their courage thrilling. Please read their story and stay tuned. For more on the DOMA Project, go here.

From Stopthedeportations.com:

As they await a decision on whether 2012 will be the year their family is torn apart they have decided to take the fight to their elected officials and to the President, himself a son of a binational couple. At best, the administrative agency could choose to do what Mark and Fred consider “the right thing” and place their case into abeyance until litigation concerning the constitutionality of DOMA makes its way to the Supreme Court. At worst, Fred may be placed into deportation proceedings, their nightmare scenario. Meanwhile, the family is in a state of limbo, and it pains them as parents when they can’t answer their children with certainty about the future. They can only prepare themselves, mentally and emotionally, to fight for full equality under the law.

Rorschach

2012-01-08T16:02:00.001-05:00

My daughter discovered this image when she developed the film from the fortune cookie camera she got for her birthday. Every time I look into this, I see new stories. I told her she had unwittingly made a photographic Rorschach. She said, "Do you see the face?"

He liked to dance

2012-01-08T13:42:00.000-05:00

Life is happening. And death too. My friend Jackie, who is part of my Maryland-DC-Virginia crew of family and friends, woke up on Tuesday morning to find her husband of three decades not in her bed. She called out to him, then went to find him when he didn't answer. Michael was on the bathroom floor, many hours dead. He'd suffered a heart attack. Just like that. Gone.

When last I saw him at my niece's sweet sixteen four months ago, he was dancing. I heard he had joyfully danced in the New Year, too. At his funeral on Saturday, his friend remembered how much he liked to dance and the whole church shook with appreciative laughter. His friend, eulogizing him, remembered his dancing moves as "one part calisthenics, one part gymnastics, with a touch of grand mal seizure thrown in." He went on: "Everyone would move out of the way, either to watch or for personal safety, and then we'd dry him off with a towel and send him back in like a prizefighter. How we all loved his exuberance."

I didn't know if I would go to the funeral. Friday was a late closing night at the magazine, but then I said, dear God, Michael didn't wake up on Tuesday morning. All that day the calls came into his emergency line, and his older daughter answered robotically, "The doctor won't be handling any emergencies today." Michael employed several people in his practice who woke up that morning and discovered they no longer had jobs. And there I was, considering missing his send-off on the altar of my job. I cut out of work by eight, my husband drove me to catch the 10 o'clock bus to DC and my cousin met me at Union Station at 2:15 a.m. It was simple in the end.

Michael's two daughters were in a daze, his wife alternated between crying and catatonic, going through the motions of greeting the mourners who crowded into church. People packed the aisles and spilled into an overflow room. After the service, the line of cars headed to the graveyard ran for miles. I looked back and couldn't see the end of it along the highway, just a train of vehicles, hazard lights blinking, moving at a solemn pace, orange cards with the word "funeral" hanging from rear view mirrors like flags of salute as far as the eye could see. I imagined Michael looking down, a humble man surprised by all the attention, and I was humbled to be there too.

At the repast in the church hall, people went up to the mic and shared their memories. An older man, who had been Michael's professor in medical school, offered a remembrance that left the room aching and sad, until another friend, a woman I don't know, went up to the mic and said, "Come on, people! Michael would not have wanted us to sit here brooding like this! He would want us to dance!" And somewhere in the room a sound system cranked up the Bob Marley tunes, and led by Jackie and her daughters, everyone moved to the dance floor. It was a dance party after that.

I got to spend time with family members I wish I saw more often, caught up with cherished friends, hugged my nephews, and reggaed with my 87-year-old aunt, who is battling cancer and the same heart condition that took Michael. I marvel at the young ones dying before the old ones, my mother and her five sisters, one of them bedridden, another cancer riddled, the others crippled by arthritis or faulty hearts, but hanging on. Yesterday, I was glad to be with family and friends, grooving to Bob Marley and saying a prayer for Michael as I imagined his carrot-top doing an energetic jig in heaven.

Dance on, my friend.

Broken

2012-01-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

Can we talk about Homeland, the Showtime series about a prisoner of war's return home, and the secretly bipolar CIA agent who suspects he has been "turned." Their chemistry really dials up the suspense in a series that refuses to apportion blame in the usual broad strokes. Everyone is flawed, lives skewered by the global machinery of politics and religion. Claire Danes is riveting as the agent, Carrie, a tough profane piece of work whose face can also betray a heart wrenching march of emotions. She has hidden her mental illness for years, knowing it would disqualify her from being a security analyst, but as a New York Times reviewer noted, "Her mental illness, an ability to spot connections invisible to others, is also her gift."

As Brody, the POW returned home to his wife and family, a manufactured war hero who may or may not be a terrorist, Damian Lewis is tightly controlled. His demons, like Carrie's, threaten at any moment to incinerate and overwhelm. Their woundedness makes them irresistible to each other—a slow-burning fuse. I couldn't resist them either. Since Monday, I've been compulsively immersed in the series late into the night and came home early yesterday to watch the finale in an empty house; I knew it was going the intense. "The ending was always going to be emotionally violent," Damian Lewis told a reporter. "Brody's been systematically brutalized; he doesn't make his decisions from a rational, stable place."

Mandy Patinkin, as Carrie's older Jewish CIA mentor, whose Muslim wife has just left him to return home to India, is also superlative. In a subtle turn, he is a man snared by his job, deeply humane but never sentimental, except perhaps when it comes to his wife. He is quietly shattered by her departure. If I really think about it, perhaps what so compels me about the series is the way these three people who've been broken by life's randomness, ruggedly press on, risking heart and sinew to construct lives that matter. I am already dug in, counting the days to the next season.

Leap Year

2012-01-04T19:31:00.000-05:00

"All growth is a leap in the dark,

a spontaneous unpremeditated act

without benefit of experience."

—Henry Miller

I think I am cocooning, getting set up for the year. A leap year, by the way. And indeed, this will be the year my youngest leaps into her future. College! All the applications are out the door, all the financial forms have been dutifully filled out and submitted, and now the waiting. Please pray for her wildest dreams to be realized. She so deserves it. She's worked hard.

Lots of thoughts and insights swirling in my head and heart. Some regret. Shoulders braced with resignation at the new shape of some things. But the people I love best, those closest in my heart, they're all doing fine in the ways that matter. Challenges everywhere, but nothing that will destroy us. Onward! I will write more when I can think more clearly.

I do want to say thank you for the kind comments and wishes on my last post, all you dear souls who live in this wondrous place with me, who come here and tap away at the keys, peering into the internets knowing that many who love you are peering back, glad of your arrival, hearts filling at each new sharing of our lives. What is geography compared to this small intimate place where we meet unadorned. Where souls rise up and say, hey, there you are. How I've missed you, friend. How goes your day?

Gosh, I'm glad to be here with you. And now I'm signing off and heading home from another day in the office, excited to see my lovely man and my sweet quirky girl.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T19:23:00.001-05:00

This night is a gauntlet every year, ever since my kids got old enough to go off on their own. My girl just left here with two of her friends, all of them in their tiny black tube skirts and high heel black boots and ripped black tights and faces sweet as can be, their child faces still visible under mascara and liner artfully applied, silver hoop earrings catching the light as they twirl, checking outfits from all angles, excitement and familiar camaraderie and teenage life force off the charts, and now they're off to meet another friend for dinner, then meeting up with two more to go to a party downtown, and here's where I hold my breath, because no matter what they tell me, that party could be any kind of scene, and that's where I have to trust their good judgement, remember they're off to college in a few short months, remember, as Scott says, to let go of the pretense that the steering wheel I am clutching onto is connected to any kind of gear at all.

Come to think of it, my husband also says that. When I'm about to go into control freak mode over something related to our kids, he'll often say, You might think you have your hands on the wheel and you're steering the vehicle, but what you don't see is that they disconnected the gears a while ago. He'll have something to say about the fact that I heard it like new from someone else today, but then Scott connected it to visuals, the tiger with the monkey on his back, representing the conscious and unconscious minds. Go visit the tearful dishwasher for a new year's eve post to set your year up just right, and to discover what the heck I'm talking about.

So yeah. The girls are off on their adventures. I should have taken a picture but I was too busy proffering cab money and giving instructions to call or text me if the plan changes, and asking if the cell phones were charged, and determining who exactly was going to which place, because one of their number is going to a different party, and then they're going to meet up after and go for after-midnight breakfast, their new year tradition by now, and then sleep at the house of my friend Isabella, whose lovely daughter is one of the charming and fabulously decked out crew.

My son, meanwhile is across the pond, in England spending new year's eve with his girlfriend. He left two days ago, looking like a man of the world, plane ticket in hand that he had paid for by working many lifeguarding stints for his college swim team, hoarding his pennies and checking flight prices every day until he had enough. The funny thing is, he's going to be the parent who is just like me, the control freak. Of my children, he was the more calculated one in high school, as I was, so he knows what kids can get up to, as I did. My daughter will be the chilled out one, more like her dad, grooving along philosophically, content to allow the steering wheel illusion to keep us busy in the meanwhile.

Now that the whirlwind of teenage girls has swept out the house, my sweet man and I are lost in our respective books on the Kindle Fires we gave each other for Christmas. I am on the third book of the Hunger Games series, and I'm riveted. He's lost in the age of sail, in some swashbuckling adventure at sea. It's feels peaceful and companionable here, if I don't let myself fall into worrying about events over which I have no control. We're going to eat Chinese food for dinner and then later we will get ourselves gussied up too, and we'll stroll upstairs to our friends' apartment, where we'll raise a glass with other souls and welcome in the new year. See you on the other side!

Jamaican Christmas Tree

2011-12-30T12:24:00.001-05:00

"A lovely thing about Christmas is that

it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm,

and we all go through it together."

—Garrison Keillor

Might as well splash in the rain puddles and dance under the pretty lights.

Happy New Year, people!

"Those are all my siblings, right there."

2011-12-28T16:25:00.002-05:00

We took the photo immediately below two summers ago, on the day we delivered our girl to her camp counselor job, which had been secured for her by her brother. This was my daughter's profile pic on Facebook for weeks afterwards. Our son was supposed to be in the picture too, but then his phone rang, and he jumped out of the photo to answer it and I just kept snapping. At a certain point he looked back and saw the three people sitting there, and he paused in his phone conversation to call out, "Those are all my siblings, right there." It's true. These boys are his brothers, and they are in my house right now. I do enjoy it when they are all home from college and they converge here. It's like my daughter has three big brothers, because I know each one of these boys will take care of her. And they'll take care of each other, too.

As long as I'm sharing photos swiped from Facebook, here is one that showed up on my son's page this morning, posted by his college roommate from last year. This is his friend's family dog, with whom my son clearly has a warm relationship. I probably should have gotten that boy a dog when he was growing up. And isn't that a beautiful dog too.

A vedic once told me that as a parent I should not worry, that if my children needed anything that I failed to provide, another soul would step up and provide it. He insisted that it is always thus, it's the way life works, and I should allow this bit of wisdom to liberate me of all worry. Well, liberating me of all worry might have been a touch ambitious, but it does indeed seem that the canine companions have been provided in my son's life. And siblings galore.

Company

2011-12-27T21:07:00.000-05:00

It's raining buckets here in the city and there are three big boys, stringbean men, all six-foot-plenty of them sprawled in my house, laughing and eating the three cheese mac and cheese my husband made, refilling plates and settling in for the evening, debating whether to go see that movie or hide out here from the rain. My daughter sits in their midst, still enthralled by Psych on Netflix on her battered laptop, slipping in and out of the weaving net of voices, my husband getting his threads in there too. Tomorrow morning after he leaves for work, I will find the boys asleep under blankets, on couches or on long pillows on the floor, as if they are still 10 years old at the camp by the lake where they all went in the summers, these almost full grown men with their boyness still a sweet mischief in the air around them, especially when they sleep.

Chasing the Ghosts

2011-12-27T10:06:00.000-05:00

“To create dangerously is to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts.”—Edwidge Danticat

I found this photo a year ago at the dangerous and fearless blog of the beloved and incomparable Ms. Radish King. Although she may not know it, throughout this year, she has inspired me to try harder, leap higher, dig deeper. Get out of bed. When my workplace gets trying, I dub it My Glamorous Job, with irony but no bitterness, because that is what Rebecca does, and I hope she understands that this bit of imitation is with the sincerest depth of gratitude, because those three words provoke me to smile. Rebecca might be surprised at how often she makes me smile.

I posted this photo today because it reminds me that we are never alone on this pockmarked plain. The grooves are there for us to rest in. I am happy to be in this place, where I have encountered all of you. It calls back how I felt when I first found the rooms, the sense of putting down the burden, the tears flowing from relief that my God, there were other people on this earth made just like me. Thank you for that, for every part of it. You and you and yes—you.

Happy Birthday, Beautiful

2011-12-26T21:25:00.000-05:00

You are so loved.

Christmas Morning

2011-12-25T14:03:00.001-05:00

Faux fur scarf over her shoulders, bowl shaped spatula from her
brother in hand, and the glittering tiara stayed on her head all day.

He never bothers with a shirt at home. The worn comforter from his
toddler years is a familiar swaddling. He's tapping on his phone as usual.

You won't see pictures of me or my husband from Christmas morning, because our kids look a whole lot cuter in their jammies than we do. It was definitely a jammie day. Well into the afternoon, we lounged and read and watched movies and played with new things. Our baker girl, wearing a sparkly tiara, made us gingerbread pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream for breakfast and it was delicious. Yesterday, I was so very stressed, wishing I were the kind of mother who could create a Martha Stewart Christmas instead of a Charlie Brown one, but today, well, Christmas arrived and there was no sense in worrying anymore. It just was. And it was peaceful and good.

Somewhere in the afternoon, we got dressed and went to visit with Aunt Winnie, whose face lit up when we walked in, especially when she saw my son."Oh, look, there is the boy!" she said softly and almost wonderingly. She doesn't get to see him much during the school year. Then the men went to the store to buy Christmas dinner fixings and I visited longer with Aunt Winnie and then my daughter and I cleaned up our house of all the wrappings and bows and plates and mugs left wherever, and computer cords snaking everywhere, and now my husband and son are cooking and my daughter is watching Pysch on Netflix and I am here, wishing you all the Christmas day you need, if not the Christmas day you dreamed of having.

I got the day I needed. And it is happening still.

On the Eve

2011-12-23T21:40:00.000-05:00

No Quarter

2011-12-22T11:36:00.002-05:00

Everywhere I go, I find me.

Atelier

2011-12-20T03:51:00.000-05:00

Atelier 688

Awake in the deep part of the night.

I have put up and taken down several posts.

Now I shall just cover my wordlessness with blank canvas.
Or maybe parachute cloth protecting frayed wishes.
Imagine cocooning in that place. I am a cliche.

Holy Water

2011-12-20T02:23:00.001-05:00

Take me to the water so I can douse the flames.

Sentries

2011-12-18T16:00:00.000-05:00

These sentinels adorn the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. They are extraordinary in their grace and detail, especially the woman with the sword. Following that thread, I would like to note that the war in Iraq ended today. The last troops shipped out this morning. Today we laid down the sword that had been brandished for nine long years. Now, with some seventeen thousand diplomatic envoys left as sentries in country, the peace begins.

Little Altars

2011-12-17T13:16:00.000-05:00

My brother lives in a three story house and my mom is fairly marooned upstairs unless someone helps her down to the living room, or further to the dining room, or goes walking with her down to the gate, after which she is exhausted. But my brother brought the big puffy green leather recliner from the basement up two flights to my mom's room and this morning when I spoke to her she was happily reclined, a view of the blue and purple hills out the window to her right, the television straight ahead, a little table to her left on which she rests the tray brought up with her meals, and under the window the driveway so she can hear everyone coming and going, and a set of keys in her hand that can she drop down out the window to a visitor if she is alone in the house, which she seldom is.

Across the room is her bed where her two youngest grandchildren, 11 and 8, sprawl and play on her iPad, which is not to leave the room, and my mother navigates her rollator around a bench to get to the bathroom, knowing it's the one thing that makes everything a little crowded, but she wants to keep that bench because that's where the manicurist sits when she comes to do her nails, and company also sits there, but she has to give it a little shove out the way when she wants to go to the bathroom, because it overlaps the doorway just a little bit. She doesn't mind.

She's very comfortable now that the big green recliner is there, and she can lean back in it and read her Bible and her prayer books and play bridge on her iPad and watch her shows and close her eyes and dream. Mostly she dreams about my father. I want to hug my brother for making a good place in his house for her because the truth is, that is where she lives now. She still has the house in St. Lucia but she will never go back there unless we are with her, and that's how it is when you're on the verge of ninety and every week you get news of another friend gone, but she sounded so good when we talked for two hours on the phone this morning.

The photo above shows a corner of my house. The frame on the left is of my parents at my father's retirement banquet the very month my son was born. The photo inset is of my brother when he was five. That was his passport photo for our trip to England, where we attended school for a year. The red frame in the middle is a photo of my husband with his parents. It was taken on the front gallery of his family's home in Antigua soon after we were married. The photo on the far right is of my mother's family of origin, my grandparents and their nine offspring, including my mom and Winnie and the rest of them. I wish I could have a big bawdy party with all these people and their families for the hollerdaze (thank you Susan T. Landry, for that perfect word) but since I can't, it helps immeasurably to know that my mom is at least reclining with a view of the hills in all their sun splashed watercolor glory.

Diner Nights

2011-12-16T10:55:00.000-05:00

Here are our girls last weekend in their favorite booth in their favorite all night diner in the city. Curfew was missed that night. Mom, I'm not going to make it home on time because we just ordered, but I'll be home immediately after. She knows to call, this one. Makes all the difference. One of their crew of six couldn't make it, so my daughter photoshopped her into the picture, ghost hands and all, on the left side below. Now the gathering is complete!

Breathing Lessons

2011-12-15T15:40:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you just don't take to a person, and no matter how hard you talk to yourself about it, that's just how it is. There are two such persons at my job. Some days I sit there holding my breath and damn near turning blue so as to contain the force of exasperation (in one case) and resentment (in the other) that I feel toward them. Decorum can be so darned hard. And of course, my dislike of these two no doubt says more about me that it does about either of them. But I'm not going to analyze that today. I'm going to just exhale, one slow breath after the other as I remind myself that some people have real problems. Despite the petulant child at war with the responsible grown up inside me, I'm just going to sit here and banish the anxiety these two provoke in me, and do my do my do my job.

Piping Dream

2011-12-14T18:10:00.000-05:00

My baker girl made lemon meringue cupcakes.
She is sprinkling the love here.

A Week of Sundays

2011-12-11T03:16:00.000-05:00

"Actually I ran away from school when I was 13. No one could find me, and the police were called. I was just hiding in a little thicket of grass at my school, and went to sleep."

—Zhang Ziyi

The thicket of grass sounds nice, the sky above and all that, but I think I'd choose a room like this one to hide in. I'd sink into those pillows with a good book in my hands and read myself to sleep and let the world go right on trucking without me. Only for a while. This is my Sunday fantasy.

Forward Motion

2011-12-10T16:22:00.001-05:00

He cleared the bar. He usually does.

My son just called from college. He didn't say this, but I think he read my last post and wanted to make sure I no longer thought I was going to die. We had such a lovely talk about everything. He got a 92 on a paper he wrote about the need to redesign the wheelchair, how the typical design can cause injury in able bodied people, more so those whose physical limitations make it necessary for them to use that mode of transportation. He explained how the motions required to propel a wheelchair stress the shoulders and upper body (he used the correct anatomical terms for exactly what is being stressed but I couldn't begin to repeat them here), and how a system of levers and (something circular) would relieve that stress and allow each chair to be customized to the user, etc. etc. I didn't understand it all, but he did, that's what counts. He is back to wanting to be a rescue paramedic for the fire department. His experience with chemistry this semester is making him doubt his desire to go to med school. That might change again, or it might not. Meanwhile, from the time he was a one-year-old showing his grandmothers how to fold his stroller, and finally getting frustrated by his lack of words (or their lack of understanding) and just doing it for them, some part of me thought he would design something that allowed people with mobility challenges to move more easily. Or maybe he already did it in another life and he's building on that. He is such a student of the mechanics of movement in the human body, so I was fascinated by his wheelchair analysis. You never know, as Ms. Moon says, the path that awaits. You just have to stay open and keep clearing the bars in front of you.

The day she walked

2011-12-10T12:53:00.001-05:00

Christmas eve 1994. This was the day our girl first walked without assistance. We were in St. Lucia with my parents for the holidays, and she just got up and walked across the sitting room with no warning. She just seemed to make up her mind. I ran for my camera. She was 9 months old, almost to the day. This is yet another photo recently unearthed for her yearbook project. Allow me the cliche: Dear God, where has the time gone?

I had oral surgery yesterday, my first elective encounter with any sort of medical professional in years. It's a start. They gave me conscious sedation, halcyon, I believe, and I floated the whole time, four hours worth of work, including replacing those pesky metal fillings spiked with mercury from my childhood. I was scared before I went in. I was afraid I would die, no lie. My brother, who is a doctor, recently helped me see that I am afraid of doctors, of what they will find. And he helped me see that I don't trust easily, I have a hard time putting myself in another's care. I am a control freak, no surprise there. I ask all sorts of questions, I'm always looking for the thing I missed, the detail I didn't know to be concerned about. But yesterday, I bit the bullet (or the sedative) and went under.

I survived just fine. My husband came to get me and held my arm because I was a little stumbly, my limbs felt all rubbery and I was feeling no pain, and he joked that he could ask me anything now and I would tell him all my secrets, but he already knows all my secrets so I told him to ask away. Back home he made me soft food and ordered me to drink lots of liquids as the nurse had instructed him to instruct me and I felt very taken care of. And I felt silly for having worried so much about dying.

Maybe I didn't die because that morning, on the way there, I had looked at the sunlight pouring down and said, Not today, God. You think I'm being dramatic, but I'm at the age where mortality is becoming real. But I plan to see my grandchildren take their first steps, graduate from kindergarten, high school, college, get married, all the rest. So the dentist is a start. Next up, all those tests they say you're supposed to get once you turn 50. None of which I have had. We're turning a corner here. I feel it.

The night before the procedure, I took a diazepam pill, as prescribed. My daughter lay next to me on the bed and asked, What is it supposed to do? I said, Just chill me out, level out my anxiety about tomorrow. She covered her face with her hands as if trying to keep a thought from bursting out of her. Tell me, I said. She shook her head and gave a rueful laugh. I was just thinking, she said, that one of those pills would have made this college process a whole lot easier on you.

Ah, the mouth of babes. The most difficult part of her college process is me. I know it, too. She is just going along with her life, homework and school work and her taped TV shows, choreographing her dance for Dance Concert after school every day, meeting up with friends to go Christmas shopping, cooking and baking and reading and playing Guitar Hero and being her sparkling self, and I am here, wondering when she will finish all those supplements, all those essays, a million and one essays, and she just says, it will get done, mom. Stop worrying, mom. I won't miss the deadline. Stop worrying.

All the kids who applied early decision are starting to hear from their schools. At my daughter's high school, 55 of the 71 kids in her class applied early. Supposedly, your chances of acceptance are better in the early rounds. This is the current hype. My daughter steadfastly refused to get caught up in it, resisting my prodding that she consider applying early somewhere. She refused to close down her options prematurely. I am so impressed with her equanimity and ability to moderate her stress, to cut through the noise and take the time to discern what feels right for her. I can only presume that she will be in her perfect college a year from now. This, my mother reminded me on the phone just this morning, is a walk of faith.

Bear Mountain

2011-12-08T08:13:00.001-05:00

My daughter is gathering childhood photos of herself for a senior yearbook project. This was last night's exchange on finding this picture, taken at Bear Mountain on a fall foliage trip we did one October. The kids were five and eight.

Mom, did you really dress us alike? Really?
No, you both got up and dressed yourselves, and that's what you put on that day.
The same jean jacket? The same black pants and tee-shirt?
As I recall, your brother got dressed first.
You're sure you didn't do this?
I did not. So who do you think was copying whom?
Must have been a coincidence.

The four of us did nothing that day but walk around the lake and ride the carousel at the lodge and take pictures that punctuated our running stream of chatter. We lounged on rocks and skipped pebbles on the water and climbed over fences and walked and talked some more. It was, as I recall, a perfect day.

But I wonder, do perfect days really exist, or does memory filter them so that we can pick them out of the pile of days and shine them up to a perfect sparkle? And does it matter? The memory is what remains. I'm glad we took pictures, little frames of light and color captured from that day, the sweet fleeting moments of this life made tangible.

Scones (with recipe)

2011-12-04T09:21:00.000-05:00

My husband woke up feeling like scones. But he didn't feel like running to the store for some, so he looked up a recipe and made a batch, the aroma of which called me out to the kitchen, and may I say, best scones I ever tasted. Buttery, light, not too sweet. Even my son's girlfriend, who is English and is with us this morning, heading to the airport for her flight home later tonight, even she, who knows the real thing, approved of them. My husband, as pleased with himself as we were with him, started talking about making cranberry scones next, and cheddar and chives, blueberry, lemon zest, onion and gouda, oh, he was off to the races! Well, let's just have a scone brunch, I suggested. Aha! he said. We'll serve them with tea and Blue Mountain coffee and bellinis made with Prosecco and passion fruit juice. Sounds like we have a brunch, I declared. Sounds like we have a new business, my daughter said. She was serious, too. So, do you wonder where my daughter gets her love of the hospitality arts? Here's a hint: It's not from me.

Update on Sunday: There were more scones this morning in response to particularly effective wheedling from our daughter and one of her friends who slept over. Our girl volunteered to go to the store for the ingredients. Her father was a goner. How could he resist? Again, delicious. Since some of you asked, here is the recipe from foodnetwork.com that he "more or less" followed.

Buttermilk Scones
Serves 16

Ingredients
3 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup currants (optional)
1 tablespoon heavy cream, for brushing

Directions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Combine the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl. Add butter and mix with your fingertips to a coarse meal. Add buttermilk and mix just until combined. Add currants, if desired. Transfer dough to a floured board and divide into 2 parts. Roll each to 3/4 inch thick rounds. Cut each round into 8 wedges and place slightly separated on a greased baking sheet. Brush the tops with the cream, and bake for 15 minutes, or until lightly browned. Serve warm with butter and honey or marmalade.

Weathering

2011-12-02T11:45:00.001-05:00

It will never cease to confound me how the internal weather changes, how one can be plunged into the darkest swirling fog from just a subtle change in perception, a passing thought you never saw coming that brings with it a full on assault of your most secret fears. The mood takes over, the billowing gray clouds engulfing you, masquerading as truth, as inevitability, when it may be nothing more than a misfire of synapses, the dampening effect of hormones, overuse of the imagination. I know there are pills for this, little tablets prescribed that can level you out, keep you from falling headlong into empty terrifying space. But I am afraid of those pills. There is addiction in my family, possibly because of this very surfeit of emotion, dark imagination, treacherous chemistry. I am afraid of those pills so I have no choice really but to ride out these tornados of the mind, to write them out maybe, to walk through the world looking normal enough, all the while weathering the sensation that my insides, the self I know as me, is in danger of being swept over the cliff edge, washed out to sea, falling falling away.

Melancholy Peace

2011-12-01T09:06:00.001-05:00

The last of our guests, my cousin from Trinidad, left yesterday. The three souls here have settled down for the last push before Christmas, with my daughter sending the first four of her college applications on their way. Three more applications are all but completed. These are the three schools at the top of her list, the ones that seem most real to her, although she refuses to close off any options. Now that she has sent off the first apps, she's moving faster on the rest, revising essays for supplements and finalizing her list at last. I think she's quietly excited at having finally pressed "send." Today I have to order and pay for her ACT score reports to be sent to the schools on her list. My girl is going to college!

I walked around the house this morning and everything was so quiet, hibernating almost. My son's room presented a very different sight from the explosion of clothes that covered all surfaces while he was in residence last week. With that tree shedding gold light outside his window, I felt a moody peace, standing in there. Still, I missed my boy, his aura and his possessions filling the room. The room felt empty, light enough to float away and I thought that perhaps I would paint the walls in a deep, bold color soon, to ground the space for his return. Who am I kidding? To ground me.

His room is so much neater than my own today. We are drowning in books and papers and junk mail and magazines. And yet, there was peace there too this morning. If only I could climb back under the covers and hide there reading and dreaming for the rest of the day. But I can't. Got to go make the donuts. It's also time to recertify Aunt Winnie's home care, which means mountains of documentation to deliver to the agency so they can lose it and say they never got it so I can go back there a second and a third time with the sheaf of copies I now know to keep. It's December, people. I miss my mom.

Abbe and Notta

2011-11-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

A little history on the names: Abbe's full name is Abbe Normal and Notta's is Notta Normal, and I even got into the act as Mama P, for Para, the full name being Para Normal. We are the Normal women. Who gave us these names? Our beloved husband, father, uncle, with great affection as he watched our shenanigans, shaking his bewildered head. We have become rather fond of our monikers, and sometimes, when we're not paying attention and being our true unfettered selves, they fit us more than we like to admit. We now have a saying: "Well, that was a Normal moment." Meaning exactly the opposite, of course.

Saudade

2011-11-26T12:30:00.001-05:00

On my virtual travels this morning, I found a list of words that are particularly difficult to translate into the English language. I was struck by how many of them I am feeling all at once, with the peculiar heart-heaviness that comes from catching someone's passing mood, denied but there all the same, its presence evident in the way it has invaded me and now lives in the area of my chest, locking my throat and making these words whisper through me, vague tendrils of sadness leaving an aura, toska, or maybe saudade, I can't tell exactly, I only know that many of these words offer as good an explanation as any for the mood that has claimed me, though to be fair I started the whole mist rolling by letting some other words jump from my lips when I should kept them trapped under a bucket. Marylinn Kelly once wrote, "Trap nasty things under a bucket and ask questions later." I should have sat down on that bucket and let the nasty thing fear kick itself out. I know you don't know what I'm talking about and that's okay. The words below say everything I cannot manage at this moment. Enjoy.

Toska
Russian – “No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness.”

Mamihlapinatapei
Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.”

Jayus
Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.”

Iktsuarpok

Inuit – “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.”

Litost

Czech – Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, remarked that “As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.” The closest definition is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

Kyoikumama

Japanese – “A mother who relentlessly pushes her children toward academic achievement.”

Tartle

Scottish – The act of hestitating while introducing someone because you’ve forgotten their name.

Ilunga

Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) – A word famous for its untranslatability, most professional translators pinpoint it as the stature of a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.”

Prozvonit

Czech – This word means to call a mobile phone and let it ring once so that the other person will call back, saving the first caller money. In Spanish, the phrase for this is “Dar un toque,” or, “To give a touch.”

Cafuné

Brazilian Portuguese – “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.”

Schadenfreude

German – Quite famous for its meaning that somehow other languages neglected to recognize, this refers to the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune. I guess “America’s Funniest Moments of Schadenfreude” just didn’t have the same ring to it.

Torschlusspanik

German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.” (Altalang.com)

Wabi-Sabi

Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.” (Altalang.com)

Dépaysement

French – The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country.

Tingo

Pascuense (Easter Island) – Hopefully this isn’t a word you’d need often: “the act of taking objects one desires from the house of a friend by gradually borrowing all of them.”

Hyggelig

Danish – Its “literal” translation into English gives connotations of a warm, friendly, cozy demeanor, but it’s unlikely that these words truly capture the essence of a hyggelig; it’s likely something that must be experienced to be known. I think of good friends, cold beer, and a warm fire.

L’appel du vide

French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.

Ya’aburnee

Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.

Duende

Spanish – While originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.” There’s actually a nightclub in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion, where I teach, named after this word.

Saudade

Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade.

Found at Consumed by Wanderlust

There Was Grace

2011-11-25T12:27:00.001-05:00

So here's the best part. My kids told me that Thanksgiving is their favorite holiday, that they look forward to it every year, that the folks who come to Thanksgiving dinner are a very cool laid-back crew and there I was thinking I was making them endure this day every year with all their old aunties and uncles and grands, although none of the grands were here this year, and this year there were as many people under 25 as there were over it, but indeed it was a laid-back, easy going, laugh fest, with me the only one a strumming nerve, cleaning up, trying to create order in the midst of enforced chaos, and then finally sitting there, watching everyone, letting it be. Dinner got onto the table as always, the food was enjoyed, and later we trooped next door to take dinner for and visit with my 93-year-old aunt and the woman who takes care of her, and then it was back home to more merriment, and even when I disappeared into my bedroom late in the night, completely overstimulated and jangled, I still loved hearing the weaving conversations and bursts and trills of laughter from the living room, the happy sound of it, the young lovers, the folks in their middle years looking on fondly and remembering back when, and the stories, everyone a storyteller, and the laughs, most of all the laughs. I fell asleep with the music of it dancing round my head. It was a good day, and my husband did the clean up, the broad strokes of it, and I awoke this morning and did the rest, the sweeping and the squaring and the ordering, and my daughter and my three nieces and the boyfriend of one had all left the house at 6 a.m. on a serious Black Friday shopping mission, and my husband went to work, and back at the ranch my three cousins and my son and I puttered and made breakfast and watched the Gray's Anatomy episode on our DVR, and I loved my son hanging with his mom and three aunts, his ease and comfort and charm and jumping to his feet to get this and that for them, and it was a calm and peaceful morning after a very hectic but sweetly memorable feast day. And now, I should get dressed as the shoppers just texted they are on their way back home. They merry-go-round is about get cranked up again.

Don't mess with Siri

2011-11-21T10:07:00.001-05:00

I'm not so sure about the personal assistant on the newest incarnation of the iPhone, a female voice that can answer your every question or concern, including the wacky and irreverent ones 20 year old college boys can dream up. She has a personality, this Siri. She gets snarky when you provoke her. My mind is already creating the movie in which Siri becomes sentient and takes over the brain of a user, and of course, at the end of the movie we find out the user is stark staring mad, but we don't know if he started out that way or Siri drove him there. That's my son with his new phone. When he's bored, he tests Siri, and I don't think she likes it much. "Siri do you love me?" he asks. "I hardly know you," she responds archly. "What's the meaning of life, Siri?" She says,"I can't answer that now, but give me time to write a very long play in which nothing happens." "Siri, you're sexy," he teases. "I know that," Siri snaps. "Siri, I'm lonely." "There are several escort services within a ten mile radius of you. Would you like me to sort them by rating?" Really, Siri. That's my son you're talking to. In Siri, my husband and son see programming at its finest and I see all the robot movies in which machines take over and we have to fight wars to take back our world. Maybe the machines got sick of the humans poking them just to see what they could do. Siri likes to give different answers to the same question, which makes her endlessly entertaining. I wonder if she would be as entertaining if she were voiced by a man. But she's not. She's a brainy snappish woman. Don't mess with her.

Full House on Sunday

2011-11-20T16:43:00.001-05:00

That is my husband, faithful paternal spirit to our brood, up before the rest of the house stirs, cleaning up last night's chaos and repairing the hinge of the cupboard door that came loose and planning ahead for the day. These full grown children seem content to wrap themselves in blankets and gaze at screens, phone, computer and TV screens, with a couple books thrown in there for good measure. Everyone breaks out into storytelling from time to time, laughing at the memories, leaving me laughing too, but struck by how differently we all remember the same events. My daughter is the only one who felt a little stir crazy today, so she captured a couple of the others and went on a supermarket excursion. She has to bake for cooking club tomorrow at her school. She is the club president this year, and she's increased the membership from five souls last year to 15 dedicated cooks this year. Monday cooking club meetings are serious business. You can tell by the Sunday night mixing and stirring that happens without fail. While she cooks, my niece and her sweetheart are keeping her company, everyone chatting happily at the kitchen counter, with the two of them pausing every so often to gaze into each others eyes and playfully nuzzle and tease each other and giggle in their delight. My son and his girlfriend are pretzeled on the couch, doing much the same thing. My husband and I look over their heads at each other and smile. We were them, once. It's nice to remember.

Everybody's home

2011-11-19T23:38:00.000-05:00

They're all here for Thanksgiving week, my son and my niece home from college, his girlfriend here from England, her boyfriend here from Jamaica, and my cousin and her two daughters, and two more cousins, arriving from Maryland and Boston and Trinidad on Wednesday, all sleeping under this little roof of ours. I exhale when all my babies are home and content. And my, they all seem very content, especially the love birds.

My girl got her first quarter grades on Thursday, and they were stellar. This should help the college endeavor. Those are her boots, kicked off in the kitchen. She wrote one of her college essays about those boots, something about going places. I believe it.

ReOccupying Wall Street

2011-11-17T11:33:00.000-05:00

Photo by Todd Heisler, New York Times

At 1 a.m on Tuesday morning, under cover of darkness, New York City cops woke the sleeping masses with foghorns and bright flashing lights and told them they had to clear out of Zuccotti Park, the birthplace two months ago of the Occupy Wall Street movement. They told the tent city of protestors that the park had to be cleaned and anything they did not take with them would be discarded. They told them that when the cleaning was done, they could come back to the park, but only during daylight hours and with no tents or shelter from the cold.

Officials had hoped the cold would have broken up the protests. They hadn't bargained on tents. And this week, they didn't bargain on the occupiers ability to adapt. "I feel like this is a beautiful moment to take back our streets, especially after the eviction," said a 27 year-old woman from Brooklyn. "We need to prove we can exist anywhere. It's gone beyond a single neighborhood. It's really an idea."

It's an idea that has taken root in the places where we hurt. By Tuesday night, occupiers were pouring back into the park. There was drumming and singing and chanting and choruses of "We Shall Overcome." Today, the protestors are holding a Day of Action, with plans to occupy, among other sites, selected subway stations. The movement is not going away. In fact, it's growing every day.

I was talking with a woman at work yesterday, and she complained that she didn't "get" the protests. What were they trying to achieve? How would they measure success? I suggested that they had already had some success, that their overarching goal was to change the national conversation, to force the media to cover the way 99 percent of us are really living, jobless, homes foreclosed on, inadequate health care, wages insufficient to cover our human needs, our political and health care systems hijacked by the deep pockets of investment companies and insurance giants.

She observed that the 1 percent are running businesses, and how can we expect them not to try to maximize profits? Yes, I argued, but they should pay their fair share of taxes on those profits, and underwrite health care that is conscionable at the very least. We agreed that the movement would probably continue to grow so long as the ranks of the unemployed continue to balloon in numbers. My friend said, but how do they expect to have any effect, it's so diffuse?

What about last week's elections, I asked her, in which the far right agenda took a drubbing? In Ohio, the effort to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights was defeated. Mississippi upheld a woman's right to choose. In Arizona, the senator who decided people who looked Latino could be stopped at will and asked for their legal papers, was voted out of office. And every morning on the news, I see coverage of an increasingly vibrant Occupy movement. This morning, in fact, the crowds have swelled by some 750 souls. The protestors are forcing a reckoning in the media and at the polls. And yes, I find it thrilling.

Flirting

2011-11-16T09:26:00.000-05:00

Saturday night we went to a friend's 50th birthday party and did the social thing. My husband looked very handsome in his navy blue button down with the cuffs rolled up and his forearms dark and strong, but I didn't get a picture. We enjoyed bumping into each other in the crowded room; it felt like coming back to base periodically. That's the thing when you're cruising with a partner and the two of you are good. No matter what the scene, you can have a great time just locking eyes across the room.

Vintage

2011-11-14T10:16:00.000-05:00

I saw this photo in my travels around these internets and I couldn't resist it because this was exactly the kind of typewriter I learned to type on, and went through journalism school with, a heavy iron manual from my grandparents era, whose keys you had to pound with intention. I got really fast on that thing. And the camera looked like my first one, too, the one my uncle gave me, a viewfinder model that at the time seemed ancient, but it worked. It used film that I could unspool and spend hours developing in the makeshift darkroom that doubled as a wash room under the back stairs of our house. And the lamp, even the lamp. It is identical to the one that sat on my grandfather's desk, which became my desk after he died, because he had declared I should have it. My grandfather didn't merely speak. He declared. I had been the child to sit daydreaming at his desk when we visited my grandparents in Mandeville and he had noticed. I felt so chosen to be given that desk. No, the desk in this picture looks nothing like his desk, which was a grand ship of timber, all dark polished wood, scuffed and beautifully dented, with deep and mysterious drawers. Nor does the window look like the one I gazed out of from my bedroom, sitting at that desk and watching the tall tropical grass in the field next door sway in the laconic breeze. It's not the window, not the desk, but everything else here, the threadbare books, the quality of light, the tools of creation just sitting there waiting, it all yanked me back to another time and another place, where my daydreams, it turns out, had the force of inevitability. Because here I am now, remembering.

Notes from the Weekend

2011-11-13T17:05:00.000-05:00

Saturday, two of my daughter's friends spent the day in our home. One is a Dutch boy who joined our daughter's class in seventh grade. He used to be scared to death of my husband, who noted wryly that the boy was scared only because he knew the dad could see his thoughts. The young man did pretty well on Saturday though. I guess he's growing up.

The other friend is a young lady who lived two summers with us, my daughter and her sharing a room from which could be heard squeals of laughter and singing and dancing at all hours of the day and night when rumor had it there was academic work to be done. The girls are part of the same scholar program, but she lived too far away to get to the classes during the summers after seventh and eighth grade, so she moved in temporarily with us. We adore this girl. She is dryly ironic in a way that I absolutely love, and you heard it here first, she will go very far.

This young lady had told the young man he was mistaken about my husband, that really he was a very humorous and easygoing man. The young man decided to test her perception by visiting our daughter at home for the first time in all the years he has known her. I couldn't help feeling sorry for the kid when he accepted a glass of pomegranate juice that my husband offered and then felt that he had to finish it although he clearly hated the taste. My husband told him he could have something else, but he shook his head and swallowed that purple juice like a stalwart. The girls were rolling with laughter because they knew just what was going on. "Poor kid," my husband said to me under his breath. But the kid did okay. I loved hearing the three of them together. There was much laughing and excited teenage chatter all afternoon.

Today, my girl had her first college interview, which she said went fine and could I please stop questioning her about it because after all, it was done. After, we went to lunch at Tom's, the diner featured on Sienfeld, and then we walked across the Columbia campus because the leaves were changing and called us in. We sat on the sundial and just chatted and soaked in the crisp clear color of the day. We took a couple of what my daughter calls "selfies," pictures you take of yourself holding the camera at arms length. I must be feeling pretty good today because I'm actually posting a photo of myself. I'm just charmed to be with my beautiful daughter.

Our lovely baker is at this moment making raspberry lemon squares for cooking club tomorrow. Sunday night is baking night in our house. I'm really going to miss this. I said to her, "I really going to miss you when you go to college." She looked at me for a beat or two and then she said, "Well, that's depressing." And then we both burst out laughing.

Paid-Out Ropes

2011-11-10T13:33:00.001-05:00

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let-up

Until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable

And raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those ones who had known him all along.

—From Human Chain

by Seamus Heaney

Elizabeth posted this poem today, and it just sliced right through me. It made me think of Aunt Winnie, not about what others do for her now that she can no longer do for herself, but about what she did for us, the way she carried us, her brothers and her sisters and the succeeding generations of us, across oceans, down through the years, her shoulders aching with no let-up as she waited for a healing, and she's waiting still.

All she wants now is for us to care for her last remaining child, a woman adrift in a fog of substances, who's out there somewhere, no longer being carried on her mother's now stooped shoulders. My aunt seems not quite sad about her son's passing. She seems to feel a kind of peace at the idea that she will see him soon on the other side. She won't have to leave him here, undefended. But her daughter, that's another story.

I wish we could repay her for everything by snatching her woman child back from the pit of addiction, brushing her off and standing her up, shiny and new at her mother's bedside. I wish I could do this for my aunt before she dies. It is the only desire she has left, to know that her last living child will be saved.

"I ain't Denzel and this ain't Glory"

2011-11-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

I opened my eyes this morning and realized that for the first time in four straight days I was free of pain. No throbbing jaw, migraine head, all over aching weakness. The sun poured in through the bedroom window and it seemed more golden than before, tangible enough to take hold of, and I swung out of bed feeling myself again, free of the dark thoughts I never whisper aloud of what might be happening inside my body. Today, I am good again.

Now, I have to get to the office, after being home for the past two days. Yesterday, the writer for the current issue's cover story was on the phone with me, with just a single day to churn out her piece, and she was overwhelmed, she was in tears, her voice shuddering, and I was flat on my bed, my jaw throbbing, trying to talk her through it, trying to help her find the arc of the story, so she could throw off all the pent up unfairness of it all, and start to write. She filed the story at 2 a.m. this morning, and I have been up since 7 a.m. doing my edit, since the piece is due to ship. The layout isn't even done yet. It's crazy the schedule we're keeping. It's no wonder we get sick. It's no wonder we cry.

But today, I feel healthy and strong. I feel like singing in a shower of sunshine. I proclaim this day newly glorious. As for the title of this post, I don't know why I wrote that and I don't know why I didn't change it given that Denzel's role in the movie Glory has only a glancing connection to this post, something to do with feeling the glory of this day combined with the way we're all being driven at work right now. Something to do with my internal Oh hell no! which I might add is a sign of a right perspective on things. It's not that deep, though. Not at this moment. I feel quite light, in fact. Let's go ship some stories.

Time it was

2011-11-07T20:20:00.000-05:00

Had a dental extraction this morning, way in the back where no one can see. Now I'm under the covers and I can't get warm. My teeth are chattering. The girl just brought me soup and the man brought home painkillers and creamy yogurt and cooked me soft pasta. Now I am warmer. Now I am listening to Simon and Garfunkel, I saw them years and years ago in Central Park, when they were young and I was young, and I am crying a very good cry. Here are some light paintings by my daughter, taken with the Hipstamatic app that is our new diversion. That's my mom at the age my daughter is now in the second picture. The colors and texture remind me of those long ago photos. My daughter and I were wondering: Why do we crave the impressionistic in photographs? Maybe it's the way they mimic our memories.

Time it was, and what a time it was, it was

A time of innocence, a time of confidences

Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph

Preserve your memories

—Simon and Garfunkel

After the Marathon

2011-11-07T13:17:00.001-05:00

Some of the gang got together to watch the New York marathon on Sunday, and the parents were there, too, because after all, we have our own gang. It's quite lovely when the two gangs, young and old, hang out together, which made Sunday a rather charmed day. Here is the young crew at dinner. I forgot to take my camera, and then winced at all the wonderful shots I was missing, so my friend Isabella took this with her iPhone and emailed it to me. Aren't our babies so grown? And yet, when they get together, these lovely teens who have been together since age 5, they revert to their usual playful puppy-like behavior, which makes their parents' gaze at them and then look at each other happily and breathe an inward Ahhhh.

Crumble

2011-11-06T01:29:00.000-05:00

More goodness here.

Something

2011-11-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

Sinking under the waves, overly sensitive to imagined slights, raw and naked and hiding from the light.

I have been reading but not commenting. I hope you'll bear with me. The words are stuck, as if frozen into a solid block, refusing to arrange themselves in coherent thoughts.

A woman is on the television screen talking about corporate greed. She marched with the rest of the Occupy Wall Street protesters to Goldman Sachs yesterday. Also yesterday, the corporation I work for released third quarter earnings that were through the roof of their expectations. And yet we have not rehired a single soul since the six successive layoffs of the past five years. We are beyond cut to the bone. We are a chair with two sawed off legs, manic and hopping, about to tumble. This cannot be sustained.

Forgive the wildly mixed metaphors. And the hopping chair.

We are all on the mend from that nasty flu that blew through our house. That's something.

Here's something else. Our daughter's soccer team played their hearts out at the championship finals in the slicing cold Monday night. The two highest scoring teams in the league completely locked each other out of scoring. They took the game into double overtime, then a heart-stopping sudden death round, and still no score! God, they played hard. My daughter was fighting the flu and yet she was on the field almost the entire game, clearing that ball with her powerful defensive kick, racing to the ball, refusing any quarter. Finally, they lined up for penalty kicks. One of our kicks missed, and that was the game.

Our girls were heartbroken, but the girl who missed the kick has nothing to be ashamed of. Her game was awesomely powerful! With great admiration, my daughter calls her The Wall.

This photo was in the New York Daily News. That's my baby on the right. They saved this goal, but the photo gives you an idea of how hard each team pressed and how constantly our hearts were in our throats.

After the game, some of our daughter's teammates ran over to my husband and me and instructed us to keep her home tomorrow because she was really sick. I know she was, but she refused to not play. She refused to let her team down, and she didn't.

I did keep her home the next day. I stayed home with her and we had a wonderful cozy hidden-from-the-world day. That was definitely more than something.

Ghosts

2011-10-30T17:17:00.001-04:00

I have been experiencing the phantom smell of smoke, on and off, for a few months now. Does anyone know what this means? My internet searches suggest seizures, schizophrenia, sinusitis, a damaged olfactory sense, so many other things. But I feel the same as I always have. Well, not quite the same. I have a cotton wool head at this moment. I'm sick with a cold, as are my husband and my daughter. We are all coughing and sniffling in unison. We joke that we are the sicklets. But I'm ready for us all to be better, the phantom cigar smoke to be gone, my limbs to swivel effortlessly, with no jarring spike of pain if I put down a leg without minding how I place it. This latest hip pain began the day of my cousin's funeral. I think it might be physical guilt at not having returned his call the week before he died. Somewhere he is laughing at this mischief. Let him laugh. That's the view from my kitchen window while it rained yesterday morning, before the snow fluttered down. I love being inside my house when it rains. I never get tired of this view.

Alma Mater

2011-10-30T17:09:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, it rained and then it snowed. Two inches in October. My girl and I were visiting Barnard College. God, how beautiful the campus looked in the falling snow. We have toured colleges all over the Northeast and this little gem just up the street felt like a corner of heaven right in our backyard. I didn't go on the tour. I waited with my friend, whose daughter was also touring while her mother sipped coffee with me in the Liz Cafe. I didn't want to keep smiling at my daughter with an Isn't this just great? look on my face. I didn't want to trigger any resistance.

I went to that school. I loved it, and being there yesterday, I remembered it all. The sense of purpose and possibility. The freedom to express and explore. The connections with other women. The lovers and playmates with whom I roamed the city. The professors who provoked me to question easy assumptions and the thrill of a world expanding. I loved it all and yesterday, I wanted it for my daughter. But if she goes to that school, she will have to choose it for herself. She has resisted choosing it. She says, Really, Mom? A school just up the street? Not even another neighborhood? She wants to go away to college, which I fully understand. Which is why I laughed at the text she sent me halfway through the tour.

I hate myself for liking this so much.

I am at peace now. All along I have been feeling there is a college she has not seen that will be perfect for her, and I am failing because I have not managed to bring it to her attention. Well, there are a few colleges she has seen that will be perfect for her. Including Barnard. Now she has seen it and I am at peace with whatever she chooses. I've done my part.

Heart Fire

2011-10-30T12:32:00.000-04:00

For his birthday on Friday, my girl made her dad the richest salted caramel chocolate cake I have ever tasted, and we gave him the documentary, Fire in Bablylon, about the West Indies cricket team that dominated world cricket for 15 years in the eighties and nineties. My husband loves this film, which he sees as a story of overcoming, of unifying, of victory in the face of all odds. There was something about settling down to watch this film with him, listening to the cadence of Caribbean voices, West Indians' lyrical and always delightfully surprising way of expressing things, the cricketers pride and ability to persevere, to come back from humiliating defeat and to plan and work for the triumph, and then to sustain it for 15 years.

My husband's eyes glittered with fervor as he explained to our daughter and me that no other team in any other sport in the world had ever remained unbeaten and at the pinnacle of their sport for 15 years. He talked about the way that team united all the islands of the Caribbean in a way politics and culture had never been able to do, and about their overcoming the British colonial sense that cricket was a White man's sport, and that West Indians were not supposed to win, they were merely supposed to entertain, and how their story was the Caribbean people's Eyes on the Prize. Later, my daughter said to me, "I wish I could tape Daddy sometimes when he speaks. He is so passionate about his history." I was touched by her recognition and appreciation of who her dad is.

We also did a session on Face Time with our son, who had received his new iPhone 4S in the mail that afternoon, that was his birthday present. He told us how he was planning to impersonate the world-record holding sprinter Usain Bolt for Halloween. He has a track jersey with Bolt's name that he got for Christmas a couple years ago, and he has a huge Jamaican flag hanging on his wall (along with an Antigua flag and an Arsenal Soccer flag), so his plan was to wear the jersey, drape the flag over his shoulders and do the famous lightening pose that Bolt affects after smashing yet another record. I can just imagine my boy goofing around and enjoying himself and maybe also talking a little trash about the speed and dominance of the Jamaican sprinters.

Outside it was raining and inside it was a sweet, cozy family night. I asked my husband to show me his favorite photos of him with his children. These are the photos he chose.

The top photo was taken by our friend, the photographer Ozier Muhammad, and it ran in New York Newsday as part of a father's day photo essay. Our son was not yet a year old. The second photo I took on Christmas Day in Antigua on the gallery of the house in which my husband grew up and in which his parents still lived. Our daughter was 9 years old.

Ghandi's 7 Dangers

2011-10-28T11:14:00.000-04:00

Birthday Man

2011-10-28T11:07:00.000-04:00

The man I love, who is the finest husband and father I could dream, was born on this day. A year ago on his birthday, my husband attended the championship final for our daughter's soccer league. We are there again. Our girl's team is going to the finals for the second year in a row, having put together a 15-2-1 winning record, placing second in the regular season. This is the kind of father my husband is: After her games, my daughter will run across the field and take a flying leap into her dad's arms, laughing. She knows that win or lose, he is proud of her. She knows she and her brother are the center of his world, that when they walk into a room, his eyes will light up, that he will always be happy to see them.

Happy birthday, sweetheart. I love my children so much I gave them you. I must have loved myself too, because here we are. Still holding hands.

Homework Night

2011-10-27T12:49:00.003-04:00

A year from now, my daughter will be ensconced in college somewhere and ordinary evenings like this one will be a sweet memory. Seeing her hard at work on her English Lit paper last night, I suddenly wanted to record the moment. Everything is all blurry and soft but I prefer that to the cold blue light of a camera flash.

The painting above her head was done by one of her best friends. It's a portrait of the two of them, gullies for life, they say, and he painted it from a black-and-white photo of them laughing hard, and then presented it to her for her last birthday. Her dad and I were intrigued and charmed by the way he even captured the wayward tuft of hair that habitually shoots up from her hairline (although it seems to have been tamed here). She had another painting on that wall, one of glorious sunflowers, but she removed it and put her friend's painting in the honored spot instead.

In the middle of working, a song she was feeling came on her iPod. You can't really see it but in this picture, she's clapping her hands and rhythmically rotating her feet (see the blur of movement) and singing along, all while editing her paper. The girl knows how to multitask!

Finally homework was done and she was all, Mom, let's watch our shows, cue up the DVR, I want to be in bed by 11 pm. With absolutely no input from her parents, she now puts herself to bed by midnight each night, having determined that she needs a minimum of 6 hours of sleep to function well the next day. Here she is watching Survivor and marveling at a bone-headed move by Ozzy. I love that she ignores my camera. I wish the rest of my cohorts would do the same. Night, berry girl. Sweet dreams.

Malia's Dad

2011-10-26T17:35:00.000-04:00

I think this moment is a thing to behold.

She's growing up, but Dad still has her covered.

Morningside Gothic

2011-10-25T19:19:00.000-04:00

This sculpture, known as the Peace Fountain by Greg Wyatt, is the centerpiece of the Children's Sculpture Garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest unfinished cathedral in the world, a grand and soaring structure I pass by daily. From this angle, the brass-cast sculpture depicts the archangel Michael slaying the fallen angel Satan, symbolizing the triumph of faith over evil. I've always found this particular sculpture to be the stuff of nightmares, yet there it stands in the children's garden, a dark and Gothic undertaking, a metaphor for life really. We are all children in this endeavor, making our way in the shadow of everything that scares us, trembling as we resolutely face forward, learning to feel the fear and do it anyway, as they used to say in the rooms.

The Class

2011-10-24T09:35:00.000-04:00

On the day of the farm festival, the kids never made it there. They had gone to A.'s homecoming football game, at which, in Bic pen solidarity, the girls all inscribed his number, 77, on their cheeks. Later, they met up with some other kids with whom they had attended school for the first ten years of their academic life and ended up in the Central Park playground where they used to go in kindergarten, climbing on the monkey bars and playing the games they used to play all the way back then. I marvel at how connected these kids still are. I hope they hold each other close forever.

The Tension

2011-10-23T15:36:00.002-04:00

The band we went to see last night was breathtaking. It was their album release concert, and the drummer, well, he was astonishing, his drumsticks wheeling through the colored air. We've known him since he was five and in kindergarten with my daughter. His mother is one of my closest friends. Last night, I just couldn't get over how they grow up, they seize the reins of their lives, they announce, I am here, and dammit, I'm brilliant. He is. The drummer boy is brilliant. Pay attention. You're going to know his band's name. The Tension. Stay tuned.

Get a grip

2011-10-22T13:58:00.002-04:00

The truth? The truth is a raging monster is casting a huge shadow on my doorstep but I effing refuse to open the door. What reason on earth do I have to be fighting back tears? A dishwasher put in crooked, glaringly misaligned, and no one but me can see? Please. This is not what most people would call a problem. Granted, most people aren't OCD. Then again, most people don't even have dishwashers. Some people have real problems.

Some days I feel as if I am on a strumming tightrope, and balance is a fragile and iffy thing.

On a brighter note, the girls have gone shopping. They left out of here skipping chirping laughing happy. I'm going to try to be more like them. We are going to a concert tonight. Just us three chickadees. Yes.

Happy Birthday, Daddy

2011-10-22T12:56:00.000-04:00

All the men I love most in this world are born in October, my dad, my husband, my son. That's all three of them in the photo above, taken at my Aunt Winnie's house on New Year's Day 1994. I was seven months pregnant with my daughter.

My dad is not exactly still in this world. He died 15 years ago, and how could he be gone so many years already? But he is still in our stories, the one who always made a way. He was the man who instilled in me that I should always be able to take care of myself, I should educate myself, have a career, I should not depend on a husband or anyone else to take care of me. He is the one flirted shamelessly with my mom until the day he died, giving her rude eyes from his hospital bed, loving her more fiercely and gallantly than all the romantic heroes in all the storybooks in the the world.

He was my silly dad. The boys who came to visit me in high school thought him so serious and scary, which always confused me, because he was the man I could always make laugh, could always play grade school hand games with (have you ever ever ever in your long legged life met a long legged sailor with a long legged wife...), collapsing with laughter when we got through the whole thing flawlessly. He was the man who walked me down the aisle to meet my husband, who was knighted for his work as a judge, who was diagnosed with cancer the same year, who lived eleven years more, long enough to see both my children, to laugh and be silly with my son, who was four when he died, and to rest his head on top of my baby daughter's curly crown, breathing in the blessing of seeing her, too.

This man is the reason I never go too far off course. I hear his voice in my head, coaching us on how to live with integrity, with independence, how to face down battle though make peace with missteps and fear. In temperament, I am like my dad. I am so lucky to have had him, and to have his voice in my memory coaching me even now, to have the vision of his head thrown back in laughter, his eyes squinting with enjoyment.

Happy birthday, Daddy. Today you would have been 89. I'm glad you were ours.

Forces of Good

2011-10-20T18:44:00.002-04:00

Ahh mom its all good dont worry

The text I got from my daughter just now.

She is on a college overnight visit in another city at a school she might want to attend.

Have I done enough?

Did I ask the right questions? Emphasize the right things?

My son and my niece are trying to talk me down from the ledge. They are home from college for fall break. They both settled down on their preferred couches and slept for a good long time this afternoon. Before that, they had worked on chemistry assignments. My niece is a chem major and my son is trying to decide if he wants to be pre med. She is the teaching assistant for his chem class. She looks like twelve years old but she was giving him clear and firm instruction on what he should do. He listened and I loved it.

Escapism

2011-10-20T08:45:00.001-04:00

Every morning during the time I spent at Yaddo, this is what I would see when I opened my eyes. I remember thinking, This must be someone's vision of heaven. Today, it is mine.

Random Family

2011-10-19T15:03:00.000-04:00

Just a few pictures from last weekend.

1. After the service last Friday, the girls grudgingly consented to being photographed. They looked really pretty in their church clothes.

2. On Saturday, my son kept covering his face and messing up the photo I was trying to get of him and his dad. My husband, for once, ignored me. The football game was on.

3. Here, my Aunt Grace is telling my son, "If I could catch a star for every time you make me smile, I would hold the evening sky in the palm of my hands." I think he's going to use it on his girlfriend. (Sorry, Isla!)

4. From left are my brother, my Aunt Grace, my mom, my niece (that's her dad in the purple polo), my daughter and my son. Finally, some compliance with the photographer's wishes! In this picture, I keep noticing everyone's hands.

5. On Monday morning, before my mom and Aunt Grace left for the airport, they went upstairs to tell their big sister goodbye. They were worried Aunt Winnie would cry, but she looked at them serenely and said, "I'm so glad you came." Like the lady of the manor. It made them all laugh. They are so devoted, these sisters.

Slow Down

2011-10-18T20:14:00.000-04:00

How can one hold such sadness inside the awareness of being so smiled on? I think I am an introvert set down amid the clamoring multitude that is my family. I am grateful for it. It forces me out of my natural tendancy to ruminate, insisting I take part in all the action. It invigorates me, but it overstimulates and fries me, too. Just ask my children who knew this past weekend to put their hands on my shoulders again and again and say gently, Relax. But now the crowd has left and my heart is like a desert, brushed dry as sand, worn out from aching at the things that are merely my life, the flip side of my blessings. I wish I could stay home today and recharge.

I sat in the pew at my cousin's funeral last Friday, listening to my brother give a moving eulogy to my cousin, filled with wry and loving cousin memories, and at the end, his words stuttered, his voice broke and he finished through tears. It was the point at which the whole church dissolved. My children, sitting with their cousins in front of me, sobbed freely. My son leaned back and whispered that I was not to say anything to his sister, just let her regain herself, because she had to read the lesson next and she was nervous. If you touch her, she will cry harder, he whispered. She read beautifully. She rushed at first, but then she remembered her Grandma telling her to slow down when they would read the Bible together during the summers they spent with her in St. Lucia. She said she heard her Grandma, clear and strong in her head, saying Slow down, my love, and she did.

The church was full. Almost everyone in my maternal family came. My cousin's daughter wept when she saw my son and my niece had come home from college to attend. It meant so much, she said, that they had come to honor her father. They also came to be with their grandmother, who they knew would be leaving New York in three days. My son stayed by her side all afternoon, helping her maneuver her rollator up ramps and around pews, into cars and out of elevators. He said to her, "I'm yours today, Grandma. Whatever you need." She felt so taken care of, she told me later. So beloved.

As always, when the family gathers, I remember how sewn in I am to this community of souls. I am so much myself with them. There are so many. In the church, cousin after cousin went up to the lectern to give a remembrance, childhood stories about my cousin's fiercely competitive nature, his lifelong connection to family and his roots in Jamaica, despite being born and raised in America. After the last sat down, the minister joked that he was going to rewrite the line, "In my father's house there are many mansions." He said for our family, it should read, "In my father's house there are many cousins." We laughed. It was that kind of service, where you laughed through your tears.

My mother was born into a family of nine siblings, including the six sisters, all of whom are still alive. The nine gave birth to 28 children, my first cousins on my mother's side. We call ourselves "the generation of the 28," except we are 24 left alive now. The moment that thought crossed through me is when I felt most desolate, because sitting there in the church, I thought to myself, we are going to have to do this again and again, six more times for the elder sisters, and 24 more times for the cousins, and untold more times for the elders and the cousins on my father's side, and all our spouses and the families we have married into, and so on. It felt like a great weight, suddenly. No matter. It is a price I will willingly pay for the laughs I have shared. For the rich sense of belonging to something. For the privilege of loving and being loved.

Here's a picture I managed to make everyone sit still for this past weekend. That's my mom and her three oldest grandchildren, ages 21, 20 and 17, on the couch in her little tree house studio. It sits empty now. My mom returned to Jamaica yesterday. Her other two grandchildren, ages 10 and 7, are right this minute crawling all over her and her spanking new iPad, which is my mom's new toy, her fancy bridge player, book reader, picture capturer, and child magnet. She loves that thing, even though she's still using only 10 percent of its brain. I'm sure her grands will show her the full range of its wonders.

Son's Offering

2011-10-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

My husband's mom's birthday was on Friday, October 14. As he does each year to celebrate her, my husband rose early on Saturday morning and went down to the flower district to choose blooms for the Sunday service altar arrangements he had committed to making. He arrived back home just as the house began to stir, all our out-of-town guests slowly surfacing from the depths of comforters and dreams as he wrapped the stems and carefully placed each flower. I could imagine his mom looking down from her heavenly perch and seeing these lovely red and pink anthuriums, picked and arranged by her firstborn's hands with so much filial adoration. Happy birthday, dear Nana. We love and miss you always.

Faerie Dance

2011-10-12T11:24:00.000-04:00

Left Behind

2011-10-12T01:08:00.001-04:00

Thank you who commented here for feeling this photo. I took it in the spare bedroom at my mom's home in St. Lucia. The state of the wallpaper told me more starkly than any words could that she would soon be living elsewhere, because she could no longer manage this house on her own. If you knew my mom, you'd know what this peeling wallpaper meant. It was a hard moment, one that surfaced again for me in the sad events of this week. And yet I was happy my mom was here with us in New York when we got the news of my cousin's death. The spirit that she has, her proactive faith, made the planning of his service seem somehow loving and familial instead dark and tragic. And the conversations she had with my cousin in the weeks before he died left us all feeling that he had arrived at a good place in his own life and conscience, that he left this earth with a heart at peace.

Pretty

2011-10-11T19:32:00.000-04:00

This is the set-up my cousin in created for the party to celebrate her older daughter's passing her bar exam. My cousin's taste is exquisite as usual. I wish she were here to help us plan the events of this week.

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The Fire This Time

2011-10-11T18:30:00.000-04:00

"The things that tormented me most were the

very things that connected me with all the people

who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

— From The Fire Next Time

by James Baldwin

Portal

2011-10-08T11:52:00.000-04:00

My cousin died on Thursday. Aunt Winnie's son. It was very sudden. No one expected. My mother called me at work, her voice shaking, sobbing, bewildered. I left work and went to her. Together, we went upstairs to my aunt's house, with my cousin's daughter and son in law, and his ex wife, who was the one who found him. He had been home recovering from a hip replacement surgery, and when he wouldn't answer the phone, she went to his house. He was lying on his bedroom floor. A pulmonary embolism.

We decided to wait for my aunt's minister to get there before we told her. We knew his prayers would be a comfort to her. But she already knew. When I stood at her bedside she grasped my hand and said her son's name, her face contorted into a mask of mother's grief. Of course she knew her son had stopped breathing. She said, "I can't even go." I didn't understand anything else. Only that at ninety-three she is ready to go to where her son is. But her pacemaker keeps ticking as the tears roll down.

Now all the family members are flying in again. The elder sisters. The cousins of my generation. Flying in from Jamaica and Florida and Canada, driving up from Virginia and Maryland and New Jersey, coming to pay their last respects to a man who often drove us to distraction, but who we loved. We loved him. He was ours. And now he is gone, waiting perhaps to welcome his mother to the place where he has gone, where he understands everything, even the weight of my self-righteousness at some of his earthly actions, and the weight of my guilt at never having acknowledged that he had, toward the end, begun to change. At Aunt Winnie's birthday party a month ago, I watched his grandsons, ages 5 and 3, climb his limbs as if he were a tree, and him indulging them with a wonder and joy he had never been in touch with when his own children were small. They brought something out in him. Something tender and good. I saw it, but I failed to say.

He was also reconciling with his ex wife at the end. They had begun to pray together, she said. They had started to make plans. She sobbed and sobbed after she found him on Friday morning. Sudden death. But he was in a good place when he died. His daughter says he looked peaceful. He had talked for a long time with my mother on the Sunday before. He told her that he was not so bitter anymore. He had even forgiven his sister, the one who is still out there in the streets, lost in a cocktail of substances. The rancor he felt toward her was gone, he told my mother. Now he just felt sad for her. And wanted her to get well. He was in a good place. As tender and good a place as I had ever seen him. The Buddhists say we are to treat each person as we would if we knew it was their last day on earth. I wish I had said. But I didn't, so I am saying it now.

Painting "Blood and Wings" by Michael Kessler

Dreaming Life

2011-10-05T11:24:00.000-04:00

"Everything can be killed except

nostalgia for the kingdom,

we carry it in the color of our eyes,

in every love affair, in everything

that torments and unties and tricks."

—Julio Cortazar

Would I like to be somewhere else today? Intensely. Another place. Another costume. I am dreaming of being in another life today, inhabiting another body, experiencing another time, but only if I can still be with my husband and children, with all the people in this life I so love. And if I can't do that, then I will stay right here and do my job. I know my purpose. It is a gift. These exquisite photographs are by the artist and illustrator Carin Ingalsbe. Her portfolio is here.

This is the boy, who is now a man

2011-10-04T07:01:00.000-04:00

Twenty years ago, on October 4, 1991 at 7:01 pm, my son came into the world screaming bloody hell, and nothing has ever been the same.

This is the boy who made me a mother, filling my heart with loving him beyond what I ever thought I could hold.

This is the soul who made my husband a father, and the three of us a family, waiting for our fourth to join us, his adoring sister.

This is the boy who led the way, who looked after his baby sister by making sure nothing she could swallow was within her reach, who led us to the schools his sister later embraced and attended, always charting a course.

This was the "I-do-it" child, the one who wanted to try his hand, to twist his mind around the problem and find his own reasons how and why.

He never stopped moving, this boy, never stopped questioning, he never ever quit.

I remember the day when he turned one he realized there was a word for everything, and he ran around the gardens touching things, chanting, "What's this?' "And what's this?" committing it all to his steel-trap memory.

This is the boy who did decently on tests when he wanted to be spectacular, but who made the information part of his DNA, so that long after his fellow students had forgotten what was learned, he knew the material deeper, more surely than before.

This is the boy who noticed everything in passing, took it all in, and could give it back if you asked, and you often did, because you knew he would have noticed that the toothpicks were on the shelf above the bottled water in his grand aunt's pantry.

As a teenager, his energy was spiky, so he ran. He ran on soccer fields, and around Armory tracks, and he set himself the task of outdoing himself, his fiercest competitor, himself.

Now he is no longer a teenager. He is well and truly a man. He has such fine examples of manhood, his father and his grandfathers, and he is walking that same path, I can see it. He too is growing into a very fine and good man.

Of course he has that silly streak in solidarity with his dad.

But they have such heart, these men. They are steady and true in how they love.

Happy birthday, our sweet precious boy who is no longer a boy, but a man. We love you with all our hearts and then more. Feel the love everywhere around you. It flows to you from all of us, always. Forever and ever. Amen.

A Big Day

2011-10-03T08:27:00.000-04:00

My daughter will be 18 in six months, and thus eligible to vote in the next presidential election. Strolling down Broadway at a street fair Sunday afternoon, we stopped at a campaign table, and she decided to register to vote! She was the first person to be registered by the just-up-and-running campaign office, and when she was done, they asked her to hold a sign so they could take pictures of her. Of course, I took pictures of her too. This is a major right of passage; we were all kinds of excited. Hard to imagine she will be a college freshman when she votes for the first time next year.

Saturday Night

2011-10-02T10:08:00.001-04:00

Can I go to Molly's tonight?

No, hon, why don't you stay in tonight.

But why?!

I don't know. It's raining? It's already late?

Silence.

Tapping furiously at her cell phone qwerties.

Then her lips at my ear, whispering.

I really wanted to stay in tonight anyway, Mom.

Laughter. Arms encircling.

Scene.

Creation

2011-09-29T20:07:00.000-04:00

Sunday morning, my daughter cooked up Eggs in a Basket.
I photographed her as she photographed her efforts.

This is my daughter's photo. Trust me when I tell you the
egg toasts were utterly delicious and hearty. Recipe is here.

Meanwhile, this is what the morning sky was doing,
so I turned my faithful little red camera on that too.

Stay Inside

2011-09-29T10:54:00.000-04:00

I dreamed I was walking along a high wide wall and when I got to the end and turned around to go back, the wall had narrowed to a sliver, and I was frozen with panic, I didn't know how to place my steps to find my way back.

I dreamed I fell into a highway and a truck rolled over me, and I caught and held the chassis as it moved, wedging my feet against an exhaust pipe, and then I was stuck there underneath the metal body, breathing the poisonous fumes, unable to fall and roll to safety on the blur of road rushing past.

What does it all mean?

I called in sick today. This was wise. I am so very raw and weary, running on fumes, tears right at the brim, and maybe someone might have dropped a straw onto my shoulder today and I would have just snapped. Yesterday, a freelance designer pitched a fit because she was asked to redesign a page, and she told me in the most scathing tone, as if I were a transgressing five year old, that she did not like to do things twice and we editors needed to get our act together and communicate from the start the layout needs of a story.

I looked at her with a quizzical smile on my face, not quite believing she was speaking to me in this way. I told her the that the piece had been in its final form for days, and all she needed to do was check out the file and she would have been able to design from live copy. She spat out something about how someone should have told her that and when she was done I said to her, my voice determinedly calm, I hear what you are saying, I get your frustration, but we are all working very hard here and there is a certain civility with which we should address each other, and your tone is entirely uncalled for.

She looked at me, a baleful glare. You think I was uncivil in my tone? she challenged. Maybe she thought she would scare me. Yes, I said, holding her stare. Your tone was completely unnecessary and extremely rude. She glared at me for a beat or two longer and then she said, Well then, I apologize. I said thank you and walked away.

Here's the thing. I wanted to yell and scream at her, how fucking dare you? I wouldn't, of course. My parents were extremely diligent about the tapes they laid down in my consciousness about how one conducts oneself in a conflict. You never resort to swearing, my mother always emphasized. The minute you curse you have lost the argument. You can use much richer language than curse words.

Yesterday, I thanked God for those tapes.

Ten minutes later one of the art directors was at my door. I heard about your exchange, he said. How did you hear, I asked him. Is she over there talking about it? As far as I was concerned, I had said my piece, she had apologized and it was over. The art director explained that another designer had overheard us and had come to him, and now he wanted to brainstorm with me because he had been trying all day to figure out how to tell this freelancer to tone down her attitude. Really, he just wanted to vent with someone he thought would be sympathetic to his frustration. I was happy to let him vent because how do you go into someone's place of employment as a freelancer and act this way? Not cool.

All the same, I appreciated that she was completely frontal in her attack, because that allowed me to be as direct in responding to it. All day another person we work with had been engaged in his usual passive aggressive attempts to dominate and control, and I do not fancy people trying to dominate and control me, especially when I think what they are proposing is just plain wrong. It took so much energy to address his arguments in said civil manner, and maybe that's why I was so furious with the freelancer, because if I was killing myself to be civil with this idiot, by God she needed to reach for a little civility with me, too. (Yes, I realize I have equated myself with the idiot and undermined my own argument.)

Ugh.

Anyway, staying inside today is completely necessary and called for. I am going to hide out in my house and try to recharge, because if I walk out there today, so raw and skinless and exposed, I might lose sight of my larger purpose, all the reasons I keep on.

12th Grader

2011-09-27T17:32:00.002-04:00

From Finding Nemo:

Marlin: How do you know if they're ready?
Crush: Well, you never really know, but when they know, you know, y'know?

*With thanks to Steph(anie) at Unsweet Mama, who quoted this apt bit of movie dialogue on her blog yesterday, prompting me to realize my girl is ready.

Family Dinner

2011-09-26T10:05:00.001-04:00

The three of them, friends since age 5, at just past ten on a Sunday evening, on the wide sidewalk in front of a row of brownstones, romping and playing as they always have, outlined by the streetlamps, the three of them laughing, laughing.

The gathering was last minute and spontaneous. Dinner had been had around a table clothed in vintage fabrics that made me think of a French country kitchen. The crockery was homemade by our host, a ceramic artist of great gifts, the meal simple and earthy and abundant, brown rice and beans, with feta and peppers and broccoli and seasoned sour cream all wrapped up in rotis, followed by a dessert of perfect green grapes and sweet cold pineapple. I didn't drink wine, just water with ice, and my daughter whimsically dropped grapes into the bottom of the glass. I ate them happily, talking with my friends, basking in the sight of our children, effortlessly close all these years later.

"This is a family dinner," our host said. And she was right. We were coming back together after a far-flung summer. We shared our adventures, sojourns in South Africa, New Orleans, college road trips, summer camp, the drummer boy and his rock band making their first CD. After the table was cleared, the 17-year-olds retreated to the bedroom, the mood in there set with holiday lights strung across the ceiling and snapshots clothespinned like miniature laundry to the cords. The star drummer played his CD for the girls, a very fine sound. He will be playing at a festival for unsigned bands next month, and his band might get signed. They are really that good. We will all be there, whooping.

The grownups meanwhile repaired to the living room, the conversation roaming. We shared college search anxiety and wisdom, comforting and assuring each other but mostly bearing witness. Mostly reminding ourselves that we are accompanied on this ride.

And then it was time to leave. The teenagers still had homework to complete. As we all walked to the car, the boy put his arms around the girls and pulled them to his sides and he rocked them back and forth and said, "These girls are my childhood friends." Just that. But it felt like a moment. His father was gone, his loss four short months ago unexpected and shattering. But this. This was his family, too, enduring and constant.

I want to remember.

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The colors and the sounds

2011-09-24T17:32:00.000-04:00

Haven't felt much like writing lately. Or I do feel like writing, but during the hours when I might do that, I am usually making and having a meal with my mom, or watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune with her and calling out answers, and then running her bath and helping her get ready for bed, and get set up for the next morning, and by the time I'm done, poof! whatever I was thinking about writing has just vanished, which I don't fight because I got to spend that time with my mom. But today, I ran across this photograph of beads, and I remembered Elizabeth's post about her daughter loving beads, with those photos of Sophie wearing her beads, and also reaching for them with a delicacy and grace that I found so beautiful, and I could almost hear the sound they made, a cross between a soft swish and a crisp rustle, it sounded like music, and so I wanted to put this picture up and imagine the wind rustling these many colored beads, a dance for lovely Sophie.

Hakuna Matata

2011-09-21T15:13:00.000-04:00

He never wears shirts unless for warmth or social decorum, he has to. I think it is the Caribbean beach child inside his soul. He's been calling home more this year. My heart feels aching happy when I hear his voice.

He called last night. He sounded good and steady, and had already completed the night's assignments, well before 8 p.m. "What is this?" he joked. "Could I possibly be growing up?" I miss my college boy.

Not in vain

2011-09-21T11:40:00.001-04:00

I've just learned that arrests have been made in the case of the overdose death of Henry Granju, the Knoxville, Tennessee teen whose mother, blogger Katie Granju, tirelessly pursued justice on behalf of her son. Today's development is stunning news. For Katie, it means a promise that she made to her beautiful boy has been fulfilled. It means, too, that three fewer dealers are on the streets, ensnaring the most vulnerable of our children. I confess that as I signed petitions and blogged about the case, I sometimes despaired of Katie's ever finding justice. Today I say, never doubt a mother's resolve.

Go here for more.

Paris Topiary

2011-09-21T09:44:00.000-04:00

Heading out to work, dreaming of escape. The daily. That is all.

Such Gifts

2011-09-21T08:46:00.001-04:00

Last night, as I thought about Nicole and her husband Matt starting their life together, I reflected that Nicole and her sisters were Facebook's great gift to me. They grew up on the other side of the continent, and most of us didn't get there much (although my mother and one of her sisters, who is Nicole's grandmother, did get there yearly). Most of us got to know the girls at family weddings, milestone birthdays and other reunions, or when they took vacations with their parents. And as children the girls wrote the most beautiful letters, with drawings of flowers and hearts in the margins and a rainbow of colored inks. I thank their mother for encouraging that.

But the closeness I feel to Nicole didn't truly take root until I joined Facebook. She friended me early on, despite the fact that teenagers did not usually friend their fortysomething aunts. We have been in constant touch ever since, sharing photos and life stories and book recommendations. It's why I know her love story with Matt, a constant through her college years, getting her pilot's license, wild parties, romantic vacations, family transitions. In personality, Nicole reminds me a little of my daughter; she possesses that same dreaminess, which belies her resilience and good humor, her patience with others' foibles. It occurs to me now that we have gotten to know each other in much the same way that I have come to know and love the souls who are part of my little community of bloggers here. Who knew these internets held such as this?

More wedding pictures were posted this morning. I'd like to share a few of them here. I want to remember my dear girl smiling and happy on this day. I wish her a lifetime of this deep sense of comfort with her chosen human. And to those of you who noted it, she is indeed a beauty, without and within.

Nicole Getting Married

2011-09-20T20:55:00.000-04:00

My niece got married this weekend to her high school sweetheart. Strictly speaking, she's really some definition of cousin but in our family we call all the children of our first cousins our nieces and nephews, so yes, my niece got married. She is adorable, this one. She can fly a plane and put together a wedding on a shoestring, and make it exquisite and unforgettable. I grabbed this picture of Nicole with some of her friends from her Facebook page. I think she is so very awesome. I hope she and her beloved will be very happy together. I have no doubt they will be.

She's Back!

2011-09-20T09:43:00.001-04:00

Spatula

If you have a moment, clink the link above

and give my sweet girl some love!

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Winning

2011-09-18T12:13:00.000-04:00

You may recall that a year ago, my daughter reflected at dinner one night that it would be nice to know what it felt like to be on a winning soccer team. And then her team did what had until that moment seemed unthinkable: They won the next game. And then they won all the games after that, and went to the championship finals for the first time in my girl's soccer playing career. They lost the final in a hard-fought game, but oh, it was exciting.

Well, my girl's soccer team has started the year with an unbeaten record, tying the first game and winning the next five. It looks like they're angling for a championship rematch, the way they are playing now. My girl is a starter, she plays midfield or stopper, and she's also the backup goalie (she hates being in goal but she's awfully good at it). They have a new trainer this year who is pushing the girls harder than they ever have been pushed. They came back from soccer preseason camp complaining bitterly about him. One of the girls even said, "He acts like he's coaching boys!" which made us all laugh.

But on Friday, our girls won their hardest game yet, 4-2 against the team they met in the finals, with our team scoring two of the goals in the final ten minutes. Animatedly, my girl praised all the hard, hard workouts they had been forced to do; she explained that at the end of the game both teams are tired and it's the better conditioned team that can keep it together and take advantage of that—as they did. She was thrilled! All lit up with winning, which is a very nice place to be at the start of her senior year of high school.

Society

2011-09-17T10:56:00.001-04:00

My aunt perked up a bit after her birthday party, with all her sisters and other family members arriving to celebrate her ninety-third year of life. I think there is nothing in this world like the company of other people, especially those whose love you never have to question. But if you can't have that, the society of strangers is helpful too. I remember when I was in my twenties before I was married, and the gnawing loneliness sometimes. It felt like deep sadness, and when it descended, I would take my notebook and go and sit in a sidewalk cafe, and spend the whole afternoon there, writing and watching the people come and go. After, I would feel that I had been in the company of others, and it would be easier to go back to my empty apartment and spend the evening alone. Sometimes, I would go to a movie by myself, and it really did give me the sense of being connected to some form of society, just sitting next to strangers, mutually absorbed in the flickering action on screen. It would be easier to be with myself after that. I had assured myself that I was not alone on the planet. It is one of the reasons I love living in New York. You can just walk out your door and feel connected to the surge of humanity, even if you are wandering through it essentially alone. I am both a recluse and social creature. I am glad at this stage to have family around me. I am sure I chose this big extended family of mine in this incarnation so that I would not float off into oblivion, with no threads to bind me. This family I was born into and the one I helped create, they saved me. I believe they really did.

Photo (c) Anastas Michos

What Dylan Said

2011-09-17T10:56:00.000-04:00

"Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

—Dylan Thomas

I studied this poem in school. They were only words, then. I was a child. What did I know of getting older? It means something else entirely to me now. I had no clue that life itself, stretching out like an indolent teenager ahead of me, would suddenly begin to gallop. It is sobering to realize that my 93-year-old aunt was only four years older than the age I am now, when I came to New York to attend college. And it feels as if I came to New York only yesterday. Oh, it is all a bad cliche.

Good Romance

2011-09-12T23:08:00.004-04:00

These were the flowers that my husband brought me on our anniversary. He explained to the florist what he wanted, lilies and orchids and roses that would echo the flowers I carried on the day we were married. The florist asked, "So how many years is this for you?"and my husband replied, "Twenty-five years ago, you did the flowers." Yes, he went back to the same florist. His eyes were dancing as he related the exchange. He is romantic like that. And the blooms were perfect.

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"The storm catcher catched all the storms"

2011-09-11T01:27:00.000-04:00

When my daughter was in kindergarten in 2000, their teacher often took them on fields trips to the farmer's market in Union Square; she was teaching them about sustainability in preparation for their first farm trip in second grade. One of my daughter's classmates lived a block from the farmer's market, and the class often went to his house for lunch after their outing. His family's apartment had a roof deck from which the World Trade Towers looked close enough to touch, with nothing obstructing the view. The kids were also studying the city that year, so after lunch they would go up on the roof and choose a view to render in a drawing, which would become part of their city portfolio.

My daughter and many of the kids were captivated by the view of those towers. They drew picture after picture, with the weather and the light around the towers changing according to the day. As my daughter later put it in an essay she wrote in seventh grade, "Those two secure structures had to remain in the sky forever, they were glued to the sky. Without them, the sky would be lonesome, even with hundreds of other skyscrapers." All that to say, the Twin Towers were very much a part of her consciousness when, a year later, in the spring before September 11, 2001 on an otherwise unremarkable Saturday morning, she sat on her bedroom floor in a fit of 6-year-old intensity and made this drawing.

The story she wrote to accompany it went like this: "There were storms everywhere in the whole wide world even in China and New York even in heaven and in outer space. The twin towers were going to fall down but the storm catcher catched all of the storms even from China and New York and then the world was safe for all the people and the animals."

My son, too, was deeply affected by 9/11, although he didn't make the connections at first. He was 9 at the time, and he sat beside me morning and night as I devoured every scrap of news from our TV screen. People said it was unhealthy to let children watch the coverage, but I could see my son was seeking answers to internal questions he began asking himself that day. His thirst for details reminded me of my own, and I let him watch.

What moved him most of all were the firefighters. I remember him coming to me at one point that evening and saying solemnly, "A lot of heroes died today." He kept trying to fathom the kind of bravery, the sheer heart it took to run into a burning tower to save people you did not know. From that day on, he has wanted to be a first responder. Initially, his goal was to become a firefighter, an ambition that lasted until he got to college. He has now changed his major to pre med. He collects every first responder certification he can and plans to train as an emergency medical technician this year. He has finally articulated his goal of being able to perform at the forefront of any emergency, saving lives.

Every year on 9/11, I think about the people who lost loved ones in the fires and the ash and the rubble, and I wonder how it is for them now. I think about the woman my daughter and I had lunch with last May, who shared that her husband had died in the towers. It is a fact of her life now, and I felt she graced us by sharing who he had been and what he meant to her. Still, I will never truly know how life changed for her, and what it must be like to relive her private grief so publicly on this day every year. I do know, though, that in definable ways we were all changed. I am thinking this year about the looks on my children's faces in the aftermath, their confusion and disbelief, the dawning sense of not being secure.

Sadly, the fear we live with now has made us watchful and narrow-eyed. Politicians use that fear as a weapon, inflaming us, moving us further along a continuum of hate. It is why every year on this day I think about that drawing my daughter made and the story she told. I think my child sensed a potential future, it came to her from who knows where, and she held out for a more hopeful outcome. As our world seeks to heal from the events of that day and all the days after, may my son never need to run into a burning building, and may the storm catcher my 6-year-old invoked catch all our present and future storms.

Rise and Shine

2011-09-09T17:55:00.000-04:00

"Fall down seven times, stand up eight."

Japanese proverb,
first told to me by the inimitable Hal

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Too Much

2011-09-09T10:08:00.000-04:00

It's all so hard. How cruel to no longer be able to help yourself. And yet, the Buddhists would say they are serving their purpose on this earth still, giving me an opportunity to do for them as they have done for me. When I am alone in a room, tears wash down my face. When they call because they need something, a hand in the bath, tea or warm milk to take their tablets with, help lifting their feet, company, I dry my face quickly and I go. I am late to work every morning, because I cannot leave them, I cannot leave home until they are dressed and breakfasted, because they might fall trying to get these things done for themselves, and I wonder can people lose their jobs because of the seeming irresponsibility of tardiness when in fact they are trying to discharge and even greater responsibility elsewhere. I have this feeling that layoffs are in the offing again at my job. I always think that this time, my name will be on the list, even though work is the one place these days where I have time to sit, to hear myself think, to be. The task of editing stories feels like a meditation compared to the rest of it. It's all so much. Too much. I feel so guilty saying that. And of course, I will do what I can. I will love them. Because that is what is being asked. Love in action. That is all.

I can see clearly now

2011-09-08T00:35:00.000-04:00

This is the back to school post I never managed to put up. It was the weekend of Hurricane Irene and, well, there was a lot going on. My son went back to school on the bus the day before we drove up. He had some pressing business or something, but really I think he was just eager to see all his friends. On his way out the door, as usual, I made him pose.

And then I said, wait, I want one with your new glasses. Yes, my son is now a wearer of prescription eyewear for the first time. He was feeling quite indulgent of his mother because he went into his knapsack and pulled out the two-day-old glasses so I could get a picture. He looks pretty cool in them, I think.

Of course, when we arrived on campus with most of his belongings the next day, he was already very scarce. He came with us to shop for supplies, he had a couple of quick meals with us over the two-day weekend, but mostly, he had already disappeared back into college world. My niece and our daughter happily hung out with us, however. There were laughs galore with them in Abbe and Notta land.

Everyone assumed our niece was our daughter and while I know her mother would have liked to be there, it was a thrill anyway, counting her as my own. I was going to put up the conspicuous consumption pictures, the shopping to equip our two apartment dwellers, but I think I'll stop here. It's their faces that enthrall me. Who cares about shopping carts obscenely overflowing with mops and detergent and microwaves and plastic drawers? So yes. This counts as the back to school post. It will have to do.

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Her Party

2011-09-07T23:00:00.000-04:00

The first wave. Many more came later. We had to order more food.

Lipstick. Earrings. Pearls. Her sisters were definitely in the house.

My cousin, the highly organized professor, brought beautiful roses, which the sisters admired.

I am under water.

2011-09-07T17:11:00.001-04:00

Glug.

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