Nine more days

 

Two more weeks and a birthday

Were he alive, my dad would have turned 101 years old today. When I hold my memories of him up to the light, I see so plainly the ways he tried to make the world better, easier, kinder for those near him or far. He started out as a prosecutor, like the little girl above, before he became a judge and eventually chief justice. Today, honoring his memory with unalloyed hope, I pray we'll be able to say the little girl in the picture, whose own birthday was three days ago, grew up to be not just a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a senator, and a vice president, but also president of the United States. 

Whatever you may think about Kamala Harris's candidacy, she is a far superior option to the felon in orange make-up who is running against her. Vote Harris/Walz, and then vote blue all the way down the ticket, too, because only then will you have a chance to fight like hell for the battles crying out to be fought in the weeks, months, and years ahead. Vote for the other guy—who is really only a feeble and demented propped up Trojan Horse meant to usher in the real Project 2025 implementer Vance—and the centuries old, admittedly imperfect, yet still stubbornly hopeful American democratic project, not to mention Trump's openly threatened "enemies within," will be dead. 

Nicole Wallace said on TV last night that girl dads might be the secret sauce in a Harris/Walz win, that they don't want to see their daughters suffering under the Republicans' outlawing and criminalizing of life-saving reproductive health care that has already caused hundreds of thousands of women and their families untold pain. I hope she's right. I suppose it's too much to extend that hope to the idea that every man or woman who loves a woman or girl will do the right thing at the polls on or before November 5—but whatever, collective thought is a powerful driver, and hope is free.

In celebration of my dad's birthday, here he is in May 1946. He was 23 years old and working as a clerk of the courts in Spanish Town, Jamaica. This photo was taken the year he met a young postmistress who would one day become my mother and three years before they would wed and leave our little island for London, England, so that my dad could study law. Till the day she died in 2015, almost twenty years after my dad left us, my mom kept this photo of him between the tattered pages of her bible.

Four Days in LA

My week in LA that went as well as I could have hoped. My new subject and I forged a warm connection in person and made a good strong start on the book. Little by little the narrative arc is coming into view. I think I have decided on a first chapter, centered on an event that chronologically occurs in the middle of her story, but it brings together all the threads of the book, so perhaps I can start there and hopefully engage the reader, then return to the beginning, working my way back to that climactic moment, then moving beyond it. I do worry about stealing a narrative high point that could help pace the middle section of the story, but there's a lot that happens in my subject's life after this event that will be equally as compelling, if told right. I just have to figure out how to tell it right. I started this post on my phone while at the airport in LA. I'm back home now, listening to tapes to get my subject's voice in my head and reflecting on the work we've begun. I have many more interviews to do, but now my subject and I have identified the people I need to talk to, who can help to widen her story's lens.

The first morning, she was very apologetically running late from an early meeting. While waiting for her on a bench outside her office building, I snapped the selfie above at the same moment that my daughter texted me. 

My subject arrived soon after, and we went inside and set up for our morning session. Later, when we were heading out to have lunch, I laughingly shared what I'd told my daughter and confessed my abject avoidance of stairs. "The irony of you and me together," I said lightly while climbing gracelessly into her car. "What do you mean?" she said, looking at me sincerely. "I'm an athlete. I definitely understand injury." By then, I had already seen that she was as kind and considerate a human as she'd appeared to be back in July when we first met on Zoom. And how lucky am I, because now I am working with yet another subject whose energy I will enjoy channeling in the coming year.

__________

A big part of why I wasn't nervous on the morning I was to meet my new book subject was because the night before, I had been enfolded in the most generous and non-judgmental atmosphere. I'd arrived in LA on Monday afternoon, and faced with a free evening, I texted my friend Elizabeth Aquino, mother of beautiful Sophie and her princely brothers, Henry and Oliver. Elizabeth and I first connected in this virtual community in 2009, when she was blogging at “A Moon, Worn As If It Had Been A Shell.” These days you can find Elizabeth's exquisite writing about life’s vicissitudes here. She and I met in person a few years ago when she was in New York with her youngest Oliver, and the three of us went to breakfast at Sarabeth's on Amsterdam Avenue. Our connection was immediately easy. We bare our souls here in ways we don't often speak, and so when we meet in the non-virtual world, we discover that we already know each other in a deep way. The moment I hugged Elizabeth and Oliver back then, I realized I already loved them.

Still, I wasn't sure Elizabeth would be able to meet up given the last minute nature of my text, and the fact that I didn't know how far away from her my hotel was. She's in LA proper and I was in Valencia, and I had no mental map of the distance between us. But Elizabeth texted me back right away, eager to meet up, which made me eager too. I quickly assessed that getting to her would be akin to getting from Harlem to Brooklyn to see my daughter, so I jumped into an Uber and was on my way to her home. I was thrilled that I would get to meet Sophie, and I would also see Oliver, as we’d made a plan to have dinner at the restaurant where he works. "Oliver was excited to hear you were in town," Elizabeth said, and she can have no idea how much that touched my heart. I also met Carl, Elizabeth's partner, who is just the gentlest and kindest of men. Elizabeth, Carl, and I sat and talked around her green mosaic table that I've seen in pictures on her blog. Elizabeth also gave me a tour of her home, an artistically nurturing space, filled with visual and literary treasures. 

When Sophie got home from her evening stroll around the neighborhood with her lovely caregivers, I was able to hug her gently, moved by her great presence, her dark eyes taking me in, allowing me. Soon after, Elizabeth, Carl and I went to dinner, where the servers treated us as if we were special guests, and Oliver kept checking on us, and the chef and everyone else came by to talk to us and tell us how much they love Oliver. How could anyone not love Oliver! 

Oliver and Elizabeth drove me back to my hotel after he got off shift. I loved hearing him talk about the dreams he holds, and I would bet on that kid every day of the week. All these people are the reason I woke up the next morning feeling as if the world is a munificent place, where the only harsh judgment of me is my own. As an unwitting antidote, Elizabeth and her beloveds gave me a gift heading into my first interview with a new subject. I felt grounded. Filled up with love.

 

Conditioning

My husband did flowers for church today. They are in celebration of the tenth anniversary of our beloved rector, who we call Mother Mary, taking the helm of our little activist community. The sun was on the blooms as they rested in a bucket of water yesterday, being conditioned, and I snapped the picture. I love the colors. 

Speaking of being conditioned, the candidates on the right are promising us fascism if they win, and a bloody siege if they don’t. They are promising purges of government personnel and military round ups and concentration camps and deportations and executions of enemies—yes, they’ve used these actual words—and yet the race is still deadlocked. How can this be? Now Trump is planning a huge Madison Square Garden rally in New York City to echo the  Nazi rally of February 20, 1939 that took place there. The man is telling us everything we need to know about what’s coming if he wins.  It will be enough of a hellscape if he doesn’t win but at least then we’ll have a fighting chance to slay this beast of evil at last. 

I’m traveling to Los Angeles this week to start work on a new book project. I’m as anxious as can be at the mere prospect of packing, during which I will have to contemplate every occasion of showing up. I have only vague clues as to what strands of my history converged and tangled themselves such that I should feel this way. I confessed to a friend yesterday that it feels like a mental illness how excruciating it is just to make myself appear. She understood completely. I hate that she also struggles with this conflicted sense of being but in that moment, she reached out a hand to me, graciously and without judgment, and I felt comforted, seen. 

Restoration

My friend Janice drove into the city and we met up at the Arthouse Bar to sip margaritas in the balmy New York night and catch up on our lives. That was our sidewalk view. We had the best time, dissecting recent happenings and internal evolutions of self, talking as mothers do about our children, and enjoying the whimsy and soul baring made possible by going on three decades of friendship. We did bemoan the fact that our little circle of friends who found one another when our kids attended the same grade school, did not survive the covid years entirely intact. Though we still text one another in frequent bursts, we gather as a group hardly at all now. Some of the mothers still get together one on one, or in threes or fours, but seldom the whole posse anymore. One friend in particular has drifted farthest away. Her first grandchild was born on the day in March 2020 that covid lockdowns went into effect, and to the rest of us, it seems she has fully disappeared into that enchanted country. 

I see Janice much less often, too. During covid, she retired from her job as an art teacher and moved upstate to make her beautiful ceramic sculptures full time. Another one of the group, Isabella, bought a country house upstate with her husband, and now spends her weekends there. She usually comes back to the city on Mondays for her therapy practice, and we occasionally meet for dinner on a weekday evening. Some weeks she stays upstate, as the covid years normalized talk therapy via Zoom. Isabella still prefers to see clients in person at least some of the time, but she now has options that allow her to enjoy the changing colors of the trees in beautiful New Paltz, a bustling college town with al fresco cafes, wine bars, farmers markets, and a lively student vibe. We've visited her and her husband there, and grilled lunch on their patio while looking out at the woods. It was charmed. Another of our group still has not quite come back from covid quarantines; she is nervous in crowds now, so it was an act of love when she attended my daughter's wedding unmasked. 

For my part, work has sometimes been all consuming, though I do look up from my screen and allow myself to touch the nostalgia, the ache I feel for the greater connectedness of our pre-covid days. Maybe I'm just imagining that it was so. Or maybe we all just got used to being at home more, to being in a little bubble with immediate family. Maybe we discovered the joys of being still, not having to show up anywhere, of unstructured time to fill as we chose. And yet, I miss my friends. I miss the gathering of women, sometimes with our husbands and children, the pot lucks with mismatched hand-made crockery, the rooftop evenings basking in the pink orange glow of the setting sun. I miss the New Years eve nights around tables laden with food, watching the ball drop on TV, then texting our children and other beloveds in the minutes after. I realize we're all in a new stage now, and life may simply be asking me to practice acceptance of our respective journeys.

Still, Janice and I agreed that we two Taurus women together, old friends meeting up to share hearts in the New York City night, was a kind of spiritual restoration.

Happy birthday to our firstborn

We love you so much, sweet boy, forever and ever. That photo is from his wedding day. I woke up this morning remembering when he was 3 years old, and used to say to me, "Am I a sweet boy, Mommy?" His face was so earnest. It touched my heart that he wanted to be seen thus, by me, and I told him, "You are the sweetest boy, my love." And he was, and is. 

Here's one of my favorite throwback pictures of my three: my son, my daughter and their cousin/big sister Leisa. They were five, seven, and nine in this photo. My niece, who grew up in Jamaica, spent every July with us in New York, and all three kids decamped to St. Lucia with their grandmother in August. It's why they are like siblings today. I sent this photo to the family group chat yesterday. My son noted that the number on his shirt is the age he is turning this year. Until he said it, I hadn't even noticed that, but that makes this summer of 1998 photo worth reposting today.

Light worker

This girl. I mean. I love this photo of her, taken by her husband in August during their honeymoon in Greece, two weeks after they were married. That radiant smile is all for him; he definitely sees her light. We all bask in my daughter’s light. At my cousin’s memorial service on Saturday, I whispered to her, “Sit next to me, sweetheart. I’m sorry it’s you, I know it’s a lot to be the one whose energy people find most calming, but right in this moment, I’d welcome that superpower.” She didn’t say a word, just turned that high beam smile on me and hugged me. Then took the seat beside me. 

Now she is free

Yesterday we laid our cousin Pearl to rest. Those of you who have been here for a while might remember Pearl, my Aunt Winnie's daughter, who struggled her whole teenage and adult life with addiction. Pearl isn't her real name. She breathed her last breath this past summer, having never escaped the snare of drugs and alcohol. Her health and mobility got really bad toward the end, so that when the hospital called to say she was gone, my sadness was leavened with relief. I thought, Now she is free.

The Virginia cousins, including Pearl’s son, now a decorated military man, arrived Friday night for Saturday’s service. Pearl's ashes sat on a table at the front of the church in a beautiful urn our cousin Winsome picked out. Pearl's son was raised with his aunt and uncle and their two boys in Fairfax, Virginia, and now he was back in the city of his birth to say farewell to his mother. All the New York cousins were there, too, for the service at our little country church in Harlem. We held the repast afterward in a community room where we live, and we all sensed that wherever she was, Pearl could feel our love, simpler now than it had been in life, pure. We all celebrated that she had been here with us, never mind that her years had been so troubled, that she sorely tested some of us sometimes. She was still ours. And now she has shuffled off this mortal coil, having had the experiences and learned the lessons she likely came here to master, what do we know of this, after all, and now—I feel this deeply—she is at peace. 

My son and daughter were with their cousin, Pearl's son, above center, and with others of the younger generation of cousins, below.

Last night, when everyone else had gone home, and our Virginia family were on the road back to Fairfax, our daughter said to her dad and me, "The only problem with having a big family, and loving lots and lots of people, is that it means there's a lot of loss in your future." I remember when this realization came to me, too, some years ago. It's still better to love, I decided then, and that’s what I told my girl. As for loss, I added, I just get there when I get there, and I don't keep score.

Random Friday

I'm yearning to go here, to my Jamaican homeland, to the waters I grew up in, and today, I am booking flights for the man and I to do just that shortly after Christmas. My Aunt Grace used to say, don't wait to plan a trip and book your flights and accommodations, because the anticipation of it can be just as delicious as being there, and it lasts longer.

I wanted to repost this tweet from Senator Mazie Hirono a while back, but I was pledged to keep the fact that I was collaborating with the new Justice confidential until her book came out. Now I can finally archive this post that made my heart sing back when Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono first tweeted it. Mazie Hirono is a member of the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, and so she met one-on-one with our Justice in the run up to her confirmation hearings, which is when this photo was taken. How lucky am I, to have had the chance to work with two such extraordinary women on writing their memoirs. The power and the goodness and the glory in that room!

Is this not a beautiful street of brownstones? It's in Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood teeming with literary folk who call New York City home. My daughter and her love will soon be moving there. I know so many people from my magazine and book worlds who live near to their new place. This one is a block in one direction, that one lives three blocks in another direction, another one is two blocks south. To welcome the newlyweds to the neighborhood, my Park Slope comrades have been texting me recommendations for hole-in-the-wall eateries with sublime food, nearby farmer's markets, and other cool stuff that I'm supposed to share with them. I think the young uns landed well, and I'm just thankful the owners of the brownstone they're moving into were less focused on what they could get for their rental apartment, and more concerned with who they might get to live there. I think they chose well, too.

Back in my own hood, my living room rug has just about given up the ghost, with visible spills and stains on the light colored carpet where people habitually sit. I've been perusing rug sites for a new floor layer, and I keep coming back to that carpet there. It's from Ruggable, ergo washable, and something about the pink and the blue and the nod to old elegance charms me. What do you think of it? Don't spare me. Tell me true. As my daughter likes to say "I'd appreciate your perspective, even though I might not listen to you."

That's my son when he was here on Monday evening to go to the gym with his dad. I was on FaceTime with my daughter and he was energetically waving hello to his new brother in law while teasingly ignoring his sister. Oh, siblings. 

I was a fat child

In case you think I'm speaking in hyperbole, there I am, with my brother and our baby cousin back in the day. This rotund image of myself has never left me, even in my twenties, when, according to photos from that time, I appeared to be "normal" sized. Then I had my kids and ballooned up again, and bless my darling husband, he never seemed fazed by any of it, he always just saw me. Now I am trying to make peace with another difficult self-conception, my aging face and penguin like gait—it's all kicking up afresh for me because in two weeks I will fly to Los Angeles to begin interviews for my next book. My subject is a young woman in her thirties, in peak physical condition, born that way really, with the speed and power of an elite athlete, and yet she chose me to be her collaborator. I need to remind myself of that. She didn't choose me based on my physical appearance, disagreeable as I seem to find it. She chose me based on an indefinable rapport we were able to tap into when we met over Zoom, based on an instinct that we could work together with mutual trust, that she could feel safe baring her heart and I would hold it gently, carefully, and I will. So why am I so very focused on the showing up aspect of my upcoming trip, the moment I walk in and imagine her thinking how fat I am, how old, how ungainly in movement, and her wondering if she made the right choice after all. Oh, I know this is supremely silly and self-absorbed of me. Besides, we have a contract, so she'll have to persevere through that moment, and I know we will get past it to do the work, and maybe after a while, like my husband, she will only see me. I need to remember that there is true human connection beyond the physical self, and may my new subject and I find the grace of that on this journey we are about to embark on together.