Worth the Pilgrimage

I have, this morning, been going through the photos my husband took this summer. I found a lot I want to steal, um, share, including these photographs of my heart children grabbing a quick burger last May just before we drove our son to the airport so he could catch his flight to England, where he was scheduled to gallivant with friends for two weeks. Five Guys does a roaring business, situated as it is right next to Columbia and Barnard, inviting college students to stumble in at all hours for its burgers with their endless array of free toppings. Our college kids pictured here (that would be all of them except my daughter), who happen to go to the same school upstate, had long extolled this staple in their college town and so were quite happy to have one open in our neighborhood this spring. Gee, I sound like an ad, when all I wanted with this post was to was put my children's faces where I could see them. 

Coming Attractions

These beautiful women will be arriving back in New York soon. My mom and my niece will fly here from Jamaica the very same evening my two children and their friends arrive home from their long weeks at camp (well, it was long for me). After serene summer evenings of just my husband and me, who are just now mastering the art of being footloose and carefree, the house will be jam packed again. But just for a week. Then the college kids go off to school as we settle in for our daughter's final year of high school and college visits and applications this fall. My husband and I are going to enjoy the excessive liberty of this last week before the hordes arrive because very soon, we will be busy. Not complaining.

Meanwhile back at camp

This was taken the night of the Mardi Gras Banquet, and these are all the junior counselors from my daughter's unit, hamming it up on the pier. I gather that floating 2011 dino sculpture behind them was from Jurassic Zombie Day and was set aflame once night fell. These young ladies look like they're having the time of their lives. Meanwhile I have one eye on the calendar and a quiet comfort in the knowledge that in less than two weeks, my son and daughter will be coming home. And I'm also wondering, why are there no grown-up versions of summer camp? The closest thing to it I've ever experienced was a month at an artist's colony. I think working stiffs should be forced to find their own versions of summer camp for one month each year. At the very least. Imagine how much more productive and civil our society would be.

Shadowbox

On Saturday night in New Orleans, we went to see the play Hugging the Shoulder, which asks the question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" as it follows a man's desperate effort to rescue his brother from the sinkhole of heroin addiction. The never published play, written by Jerrod Bogard, was masterfully directed by our own Glenn Meche, aka fellow blogger Bigezbear.

Glenn recognized my husband and me as soon he saw us. He was standing outside the theater as our cab pulled up, and as soon as we got out, he said, "I know you! You're from New York!" I so loved meeting him. You can just kind of tell he wears his heart on his sleeve and I can't resist that. I had this immediate urge to hug him but I didn't want to spook him. He was worried about what we'd think of the show. I hadn't meant to put him on the spot. I had thought to slip into the theater and tell him after, because I knew from his blog that he was nervous about the opening. On his blog, he wrote "I'm ransacked," and I certainly know that feeling. But how could I not go to his show, after reading his posts about directing it, and understanding that for him, this work was a labor of love.

Then when I saw the show was opening the very weekend we would be in New Orleans, I knew we would be in the audience. I just hadn't worked out how public we would be. But it was a small black box theater, an intimate place, there was nowhere to hide, and then I was glad of that, because afterward I got to hug Glenn and tell him how much I loved his play, how he need never have worried. I got to tell him how blown away we both were and he could see for himself that we were. His actors gave such heartrendingly nuanced performances my husband and I haven't stopped talking about them since. Glenn, my friend, this play is a brilliant piece of theater. It sticks to you, stays with you, climbs inside you and works all its angles raw inside you long after the theater goes dark.

The photographs here are by Glenn M. They show scenes from the play. The actors are Joe Siebert, Eli Grove and Liz Mills. Their talent is huge. The world should know their names.

The Big Easy

The afternoon we got there, the skies opened. That didn't stop us. We set down our bags and headed out right away, strolling the wet streets of the French Quarter, catching raindrops with our bare heads and brushing shoulders with throngs of out-of-towners who had the same idea. We stopped for a meal at a restaurant called Desire, where I snapped pictures through frosted panes of glass of life going by on Bourbon Street.

The next day dawned sunny and hot, and what seemed to draw my camera most were the buildings in the Quarter, the colors and the old world architecture, the wrought iron balconies and the greenery spilling from the air. 

We did and saw a lot that I didn't think to photograph, jazz musicians on outdoor stages, in bluesy clubs, the two of us eating beignets in Legends Park because the line was too long at Cafe du Monde, streetcar rides into the Garden district, mysterious bookstores and trinket shops, food adventures, the art around Jackson Square, the painted performance artists on streetcorners, chatting with the ticket booth lady who told us the real deal, brunch at the Ritz with a very loved friend who just happened to be in town for a conference, and the other highlight, a performance of Hugging the Shoulder, a play directed by my new friend Glenn Meche, who kindly offered to drive us back to our hotel after. We stayed in the Quarter, right on Bourbon Street, which many people had warned us could be a little sketchy. But we had no complaints. As Glenn pointed out, New Orleans is a theater town, everything is theater, and it's at full tilt day and night on Bourbon Street. And just steps from the mayhem, the hotel had a secret courtyard with a romantic fountain that I had been gazing at in photographs for weeks. I finally got to take my own pictures of it.

Our room didn't look down on the courtyard, much as I had hoped it would. Instead we looked out toward the Mississippi, as the front desk clerk told us when we checked in. I didn't ask if we could actually see the river, since the hotel was full and so the point was moot. It turned out our view was of the back of antique stores on Royal Street, and a corner of the Courthouse, which has been undergoing renovations for years, and appears in every John Grisham movie ever made. My husband and I were fascinated by a little house that had been completely surrounded on all sides by buildings, orphaned.

The room itself was perfectly lovely. It had everything we needed, including air conditioning and a dreamy bed. There is my love of 25 years, getting himself organized. And the last picture is of me and my little red Canon, hiding in a gilded mirror.

Gone Fishing

On the phone last night, my daughter told me with great excitement that the theme of the banquet at camp tonight will be mardi gras. "Isn't that awesome synchronicity, Mom," she said. "I was like, are you kidding me?" And she told me that in honor of Harry Potter she was making a wand in the art shop, that she had found the perfect stick in the woods and was busy cleaning and sanding and carving it. Did I mention she is a Harry Potter fan? On postsecret.com, we once saw a postcard that someone had sent that said, "I didn't do drugs because I didn't think Harry Potter would approve," and she said, "Yes! Somebody understands!" Last night she also said, when I mentioned something about college visits this fall, "Oh Mom, I have no idea how I am going to go back to school and all that. I am so deeply a summer person. This might be the best summer of my life." Lord, we love when our babies are happy, and they are. I'm in a happy mood this morning too. I'm with my love of 25 years, off on a grand adventure.

From the depths of me, I want to thank each of you for the wise and thought-provoking and ultimately equilibrium-restoring comments on my last post. This place can be like group therapy of the most generous sort, and I am grateful and humbled. I'm sending big carnival floats of love.

How It Is

Funny how they grow, how they disappear into their lives full of friends and activities and the first flutter of romance and they barely ever glance over their shoulder, so occupied are they in becoming. And the parents, the ones made like me, we stand here, feeling the loss of them even though we know this is how it works, how it is supposed to work, we can't hold on much as we might wish to. Perhaps sons leave more completely, I don't know. Or perhaps they leave only for a while, and when they are fully who they are, when we have stopped needing and expecting and wishing, they can come around again, they can forge something new.

I am struggling to accept what is. You'd think I'd have come to terms by now. Lord, I am a slow one. It's just that when he comes home from working all summer, he will have just one week before school starts, and his girlfriend and another friend will be staying here, too, and I will go to work and leave them all sleeping each morning, and come home and find them all gone, or if I find them home they will be occupied fully with one another and their friends, and then he will take the bus up to his college on the Friday of that week while we are at work. We will drive up the next day with our daughter and our niece, who attends the same school, carting his stuff and hers, but by then he will have disappeared into his life at school, indeed he is going up early because he and his friends are all attending a concert that afternoon, and I am sitting here thinking how little they know, how much they cannot fathom what it would mean to simply share that five hour drive north, to hear the stories from summer spill out easily the way they can on a road trip, to have him for just that little bit of time, before releasing him again to his life.

It is 4 a.m. and I am awake in the most emotional part of the night. This is when the tears fall. When I held him as a baby already squirming to discover everything around him, I never knew our time would go so fast or that this releasing would be so hard. I think there is such a thing as feeling too much. I think I'm missing the switch that other people have that lets them modulate. Or maybe this is just how it is for some of us. We swallow the ache. We smile and do. We pretend as hard as we can to let them go. And dear God, don't I sound pitiful. I should get some sleep. Maybe I'll delete this post in the morning.

Another Place

"Something incredible

is waiting to be known."

—Carl Sagan

Sharing the Moon

Today, I am aware of the blessing of able-bodied children. I am so keenly aware that I feel guilt mixed with the gratitude that I should be so blessed, when others have such challenges. And yet I suspect my guilt is only more evidence of how little I understand.

I read Elizabeth's post today about Ian Brown's book The Boy in the Moon. She wrote about finishing the book on a cross country flight, then locking herself in the plane's bathroom and weeping. She said the book had changed her life. It was such a powerful piece of writing, this one paragraph post of Elizabeth's, that I immediately ordered the book. But impatient soul that I am, I also searched for a review, so I could learn what the book was about. It is a memoir by the father of a disabled boy, born with a rare disorder that renders him unable to speak or fend for himself in the most basic ways. It is a memoir of devotion and hardship and sacrifice that explores how the need to care for a loved one with a disability can finally deepen us and make us more ethical, more forbearing, more fully loving and committed souls.

Before reading Elizabeth's post, I had put up a list of all the things my daughter had learned how to do at the farm, the one she went to several times a year with her classmates from second grade through eighth. I put the list up because I marveled that my child could do things like milk a cow and weave textiles and wade in a frog pond and build a dam made of sticks in a river and play manhunt in the dark country night, hiding under a farmhouse with no fear of critters. I was thinking how I cannot do any of these things, and I was sitting here missing my children and relishing the ways in which they have grown into themselves, even as they branch outward. There is nothing wrong with the sense of wonder my children evoke in me. There is nothing wrong with admiring the way my son flies over hurdles on a running track and moves through space with the unconscious sinew and grace of a dancer. I know it is natural to enjoy the particular things that my children have learned how to do. There is nothing wrong with a mother's gratitude. Indeed the sin would be not to appreciate the gifts bestowed. And yet.

After reading Elizabeth's post, the list I had put up felt unseemly, so shallow, so lacking in awareness of the immeasurable challenges that other people face. Elizabeth asked me two nights ago how did I think the experience of her sons' leaving for college would be different for her than it was for me, since her daughter Sophie, who has a seizure disorder, would be home with her always. I felt humbled. I realized how much I live in my own small world, entertaining my own small truths. I felt so self-absorbed, and yes, apologetic, because I cannot know how it is for Elizabeth, or for Ian Brown, the father of the boy in the moon, or for any person whose life is dedicated to caring for a loved one who is disabled. And yet I am thankful, too, because Elizabeth's question then and her post today and her joy as she headed home to Sophie helped me glimpse for an instant the vastness of what I don't know. It is only a single bloom of awareness, but it is more than before.

At the farm

This showed up on my daughter's Facebook page today. One of her friends posted this photo from five years ago, taken during Farm Camp in the summer before my daughter entered seventh grade. No doubt you can guess which one is my girl. The group was about to set off on a three-day camping trip, and they paused for the traditional picture in front of the farm house where so many of the best memories of their childhood were made. My daughter is 12 years old in this picture, and next to her are two of her very best friends in the whole world. I can't resist these pictures from back in the day. They provoke such memories. My girl looks happy, doesn't she? She was always happy at the farm. In truth, her disposition bends toward the sunny end of the spectrum, which for a mother like me is the very definition of a blessing.