In their auntie era

This picture came up in my phone memories, and I noticed, as I hadn't before, that it captures a perfect moment in time from our trip to Dallas last May to celebrate little Harper turning two. This was in the afternoon after all the birthday party guests had left and only family members remained, and the vibe was entirely chill. That's my husband, my daughter, her husband, and Harper's mommy in the pool, the newly minted 2-year-old in the foreground, and libations, cabana towels, and pool toys scattered all around. I simply had to share.

My daughter (center) and two of my nieces happen to have been in Dallas again last week, having decamped for an aunties week with their niece, and pool time with their cousin and sister, and, as the pictures they sent me attest, some hot air balloon time as well. I told them I was going to crash one of their auntie weeks in the future, as I sat in New York feeling FOMO, but also really enjoying the idea that these four young women have each other, that they remain closer than ever in adulthood. Truly, they have taken the lesson of my mother and her eight siblings to heart, to foster familial closeness down through the generations. My mother's generation taught us to hold these bonds sacred. The lesson took root in my generation, and is now expressing itself beautifully in my children's. My cousin Karen and I often remark  that this sense of family bequeathed by "the nine" is our parents' greatest gift to us, as it was their parents greatest gift to them.

And guess who are on their way to New York City at this very moment. My Dallas niece and her husband, and their precious little ball of main character energy, will arrive at close to midnight tonight, and will be with us until Tuesday morning. My son will be picking them up from the airport and delivering them here—cousin bonds again. It's an unexpected trip. A relative of Harper's daddy who lived in Brooklyn passed away, and the funeral is on Monday. A sad reason, but I didn't know this person, so I'm not abashed to say that I am completely primed to enjoy my Dallas crew for the few days I will have them under my roof. 

Years from now, I will look at these pictures and see no hint of the other stories simultaneously unfolding in the world. Will I feel guilty about that, I wonder.

Rethinking The English Patient

Years, decades ago now, in 1996 to be exact, I went with my mom and a friend to see The English Patient at an art house theater in the city. I remember being underwhelmed, confused, unable to connect with the story, and realizing that I was missing layers of emotional resonance, as my mom and my girlfriend both rhapsodized over the film. The story of a terminally injured war attaché whose plane was shot down in the North African desert, being cared for by a young combat nurse at a bombed out abbey in Italy at the end of World War Two, the patient’s flashbacks reveal the tale of stolen passion that brought him there. The film went on to win a slew of Academy Awards including Best Picture, and my confusion deepened. It had seemed a bit like a chimera to me, the threads all frayed and dangling, nothing anchored, nothing I could sink into, nothing that slipped down into my psyche, nothing I could trust to stay with me, provoking meaningful insights, beyond the final frame. 

Tonight, on a whim, I watched the movie again and realized how much I was questing for the tangible and sure back then, but this was a war movie, the world it depicted was upside down, nothing could be relied upon, the moment was all anyone had, everything fleeting, insubstantial and changing before it could be fixed in thought or imagination, there was only the inexorable flow of events, slow and languid, then violently surging, unpredictable, exquisite in the small details of survival if one cared to notice them, and how much more fully I understand all this now, life is an insistent teacher, one might even argue that we are once again under the psychological siege of a world at war. 

What life season must I have been in back when I first saw this achingly tender yet wrenching story of secret passion and betrayal? I seem to have had no bandwidth for ambiguity. Also, the young mapmaker protagonist, Count Lazlo Almasy, played by a stunningly beautiful young Ralph Fiennes, is so very evidently and brilliantly autistic, though I’m sure everyone missed that back then.

All these years later, I get why my mother loved the movie so much. She was a nuanced soul. She had lived through a war and knew more of life uncertainties. She also had that unbound Aquarius sensibility while I was locked in my Taurus practicality and was a new wife and mother to boot, with a four and a two year old at home. I was trying to construct the world as something I could tame, its threads not swaying, now gently, now furiously, with the changing wind. Now I know that life’s story is always open ended, always resolving, and then reshaping itself into something new, the ebb and flow of it never truly complete, the margins always outside our view. 

In my late stage surrender, I enjoyed the movie so much more. I’ll probably never learn to meet life with as brave and blithe a spirit as the Juliette Binoche character of the nurse Hana, however. But this time, I was able to take in lines like these last words of the character of Katherine, the mapmaker’s married lover played by Kristin Scott Thomas: 

“We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered and swum up like rivers. Fears we've hidden in like this wretched cave. I want all this marked on my body. We are the real countries.” 

We are the real countries. 

I completely missed this poetry before. 

Apparently Count Lazlo Almasy is based on a real Hungarian cartographer who was involved in espionage and was stationed in the North African desert during the Second World War. Has anyone here read the far denser Michael Ondaatje novel The English Patient that is the source material for the film? How do the book and film compare, I wonder? I gather the mapmaker is greatly romanticized in the fictionalized retelling of his story. Maybe I’ll read the book next, and try to peer more deeply into what my mother knew. 

Love as a communal resource

My son and his wife are married three years today! On this day three years ago we were in the Connecticut woods, beside a beautiful lake, celebrating their union, and it was the most incredibly magical and love-infused day and evening. The family chat was filled with salutations for the happy couple this morning, including from little Harper, who even though we didn't yet know, was also at the wedding, a secret presence in her mommy's belly, waiting to announce herself a couple of weeks later. 

__________

The other story of the day is that my son sustained his first on-the-job injury when the handle of a sledgehammer being used by a fellow firefighter to break down a door so they could gain access to an apartment fire, slammed him in the eye. It was a small fire so he wasn't wearing a helmet, and blood poured from the wound but they didn't pause, they rushed on in and doused the flames, before immediately heading to a second fire, this one much bigger. For this one he did put on his helmet, as there was much more smoke. "Did you wipe away the blood first?" I asked him, stupidly as it happens. "No," he said. "Too much soot and dirt was already on my face, and we had a job to do." 

The firefighters put out the second fire, my son working with blood running down one side of his face under the helmet. Afterward, they took him straight to the ER where the doctor cleaned and patched the wound and pronounced him very lucky because the skin in the crease of the eyelid was cut but the handle of the hammer didn't touch his eyeball or fracture the bone of his eye socket and so the two sides of the cut could be neatly glued back together, earning him a week of medical leave in the same week as his anniversary, with possibly a second week depending on how healed he is when he's assessed again on Friday. He came by our house last night to work out in the gym with his dad. There was just the slightest black-and-blue bruise on the right eyelid under the patch of medical glue, otherwise he looks and seems fine. May he and his fellow firefighters be safe and protected always.

__________

I have choir this afternoon. I started not to go, because when I looked in the mirror first thing this morning I frightened myself. I had my hair trimmed on Monday, and yikes she cut it short, or maybe she did what she always does and my hair is just thinning. The upshot is I look scalped, tugging coils of hair this way and that to cover the spaces. I contemplated just staying inside until my hair grows in, and then I thought, maybe if I wear makeup it will distract from the hair, and then I just decided, fuck it, this is me, so now I've pulled on my clothes and am sitting here confessing my vanities/insecurities until it's time to call a car, including the fact that even though I seldom remember to put on my wedding rings when leaving the house, today I slipped them on because the thought darted through my brain that I wanted people to think there was someone in the world who had decided to love this creased and folded face, or at least, abide with it, dang, how pitiful that sounds. But I'm going to choir! It starts in half an hour so I better wrap this up and get going. 

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Here's something our choir director Bernadette shared last week. It was written by one of her fellow choir directors, Bobby Reuter. Though condensed a bit here, I think it captures our communal endeavor so beautifully. 

"There's more to singing in a choir than simply singing. You walk into a rehearsal space carrying the week with you: the errands, the deadlines, the headlines. You open your music, take a breath, and then, with people who moments ago may have been strangers, you begin to shape sound together. In that moment, the room changes, and so do you.

"Community is forged note by note, singing is a spiritual act, and the craft of making music with others builds skills that last far beyond the rehearsal room. Every voice matters—sopranos shimmering above, altos threading warmth through the middle, tenors lighting the core, basses laying the ground. Each section holds responsibility for its own line and for how that line supports the whole tapestry of sound. In a culture that often prizes individual achievement, choral singing invites us into mutual dependence. Rehearsals blossom into friendships, and when it's time to sing in a liturgy or a concert, the choir and wider community become co-creators in a musical and spiritual experience, breathing together, listening deeply, and connecting through sound.

"The act of singing is connection, helping us process both the turbulence of the world and the quiet complexity of our inner lives. When words alone feel thin, sung words carry, and breath becomes a communal resource."

__________

Happy anniversary, my darling children. Your love, too, is a healing, communal resource.

Within the glare

We went to Brooklyn on Sunday for a barbecue in the back yard of our daughter and her husband. The occasion was the thirtieth birthday of one of our nieces, my husband's goddaughter Lexi, who lives in Orlando, whose sister lives in the city. Lexi had long planned that she would spend her birthday week in the city with her sister, and she and the cousins, including my son and daughter and their loves, and another niece, plus Lexi's sister and the sister's roommate, would all go out and sing karaoke on Friday night, and then have the barbecue with the same crew plus us old folks, the man and me plus another pair of aunts, on Sunday. 

Lexi arrived in the city on Monday of her birthday week to stay with her sister in Astoria, but by Tuesday it was clear she was down with something, which turned out to be Covid. Her sister and her roommate had her wear a mask but beyond that they displayed great equanimity as hosts, making the best of everything. Poor Lexi. Friday night karaoke was cancelled, but we all figured that by Sunday she would be five days into Covid, therefore not very contagious anymore, and if she wore her mask and we all stayed mostly outdoors we'd be okay to go ahead with the barbecue, and we'd salvage at least that part of the birthday celebration. So that's what we did. We had a lovely family time together, and no one has gotten sick in the aftermath, so I'm thinking the plan worked out okay. 

There's so much else I could write about, but I'm out of practice, still working my way back in. I can't begin to process what's happening in the world. There's just so much. I feel a lot less scared of it all lately. What's the point of being scared? It's not as if I can really change anything that is unfolding. I told the young 'uns that I lie in bed at night a weave light around them to keep them safe and invisible to the forces of ill. They looked at me with indulgent smiles that said there goes my crazy aunt again. All but my daughter. She came over and put her arms around my neck and laid her head against my cheek. She gives the most delicious hugs. 

I guess I'll just throw up some pictures and let this post be lame. My soul feels actually tired. The sky's glare feels too bright. The world itself is overstimulating. But I'll be okay. Oh, good news, the day I sent the manuscript, I woke up at 4AM that night and there was an email from my subject, sent at 1:31 AM Los Angeles time. She had already finished reading through Part One of the manuscript, and she wrote that she was "genuinely moved by how clearly" I'd captured her voice. She was really happy with what she had read so far. That was such a relief to hear. Okay, pictures in no particular order. 

We sang happy birthday and the birthday girl, in red, blew out her candles with a hand fan.

Younger sister of the birthday girl, who moved to the city after college and ended up quarantined with us during Covid. She and her roommate now live in Astoria, near to my son and his wife. There are the Brooklyn cousins and the Astoria cousins.

The newly marrieds celebrated a year this summer. Their Brooklyn back yard is quickly becoming a favorite family gathering spot.

While everyone else dressed up and traveled to get to the party, the Brooklyn cousins had an enchanted air of rolling out of bed and into the back yard. 

My son in law made me a bouquet of flowers in some of my favorite colors to celebrate my finishing a first draft of my manuscript.

My son and I have been getting along quite harmoniously lately, because I consciously changed my way of relating to him. He noticed, and admitted it made him change his way of relating to me, too. His wife says he often tells her that he and I are the same. Not sure that's true, but we are both control freaks for sure. We're both now releasing that a bit where each other is concerned. This is good.

One of my brainy, beautiful nieces. She too lived with us for a bit after she graduated college, while she was looking for an apartment. My daughter says we two have the same anxiety profile. It is true that we have come to understand each other quite well. 

My daughter and son in law really lucked out with that urban back yard.

My daughter with merch from her husband's social media content.

The street corn they made was the most delicious I ever tasted.