Feeding the soul

As a Christmas gift I'm going to take my daughters, the one I birthed and the one my son married, to see Hell's Kitchen, a new musical currently at the Public Theater that is making its way to Broadway. Word is the show could get as big as Hamilton, so I thought we'd get in early, before tickets get sold out or priced out of reach. It's the story of Alicia Keys coming of age in New York's gritty, buzzy, artistic Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and the soundtrack, including new songs written for the show, is supposed to be glorious. 

I'm actively trying to feed my flagging spirit, to shore up my creative soul, as the stage of the work I'm doing is rather stressful, all the more so because I feel a great responsibility to get this right. There are so many moving parts, so many different people's comments to reconcile, fact checking changes to input, deeper layers of the story to access, all without bogging down the pace of the narrative, and may I be worthy. I worked all weekend, but I did take a break on Saturday evening to climb under a cozy comforter and lose myself in the movie The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I absolutely loved. I'd heard it was an enchanting piece, a historical drama and love story set in Guernsey Island right after the German occupation during the Second World War. Yet I kept passing it by; the name of the film made me think it might be corny, which it was not. It's a writer's story, really, and I particularly enjoyed that aspect of it, the recognition that writers write to make sense of the world, to set things right inside themselves, and it seems to me that we are, all of us gathered in this virtual place, engaged in exactly that task.

Tomorrow is my niece's birthday. This one grew up in Jamaica and moved to New York City last summer, right out of college. She asked me a month ago if we could have a family get together for her birthday. I misunderstood at first, and thought she was inviting us to her Brooklyn apartment to celebrate. "No," she said, "I thought we could do it here, because this is where the family gathers." She has no idea how that touched me, especially as this niece is not overtly demonstrative; her cousins tease her that she has a world class RBF (resting bitch face); the comment doesn't offend her, it makes her laugh. Her default expression may be famously unimpressed, but her heart is tender, and full of family feeling, as we have all come to know. So tomorrow evening we will blow out candles and eat cake, and we will trim our little tabletop tree, and my man will make hot mulled apple cider (are "hot" and "mulled" redundant?). And as we sing for our newest New Yorker, I will take joy in knowing that, as her mother told me when last she visited, my niece is relishing the chance to be close to her family here.