25 Years

Twenty-five years ago, my love and I pledged to have and to hold, easily the best decision of my life. Precious and good things ensued, most especially our children. That was us in photographs taken at the passport office the week before we were married. Love of my life, here's to the next 25 with you! Amen.

The resolution isn't so great, but since I haven't yet had a moment to scan anything, I'm posting this image that my husband has on his iPhone and emailed to me.

Glow

We picked up my mom and my niece from the airport in the early hours of Sunday morning, and my mom walked into her treehouse studio when the dawn was just beginning to put the night on notice. I had put in flowers and left on soft lights, so the apartment would look glowing and welcoming. My mom went straight to her favorite chair and she sat there, looking around, noting everything as she left it. And she said, "Well isn't this something. I am here."

The Summer Before

I took these photographs of my family while we were visiting my mom in St. Lucia in August 2001. It was less than a month before 9/11 knocked us into a parallel reality, making these photographs seem especially poignant to me. My son was nine and my daughter was seven and their dad, who they liked to call Papa Bear, was a convenient pop prop as I snapped these pictures. He was in conversation across the table. I love the easy way my son is leaning into his dad but there is something solemn in my daughter's eyes. Truth is, she wore this expression a lot as a young child, which is such a counterpoint to her often laughing dancing countenance now. The year before I took this, she had drawn a picture of the Twin Towers being struck by lightening storms and she wrote an accompanying story about the towers falling over. She had a friend from whose roof she could see the towers clearly, and was always drawing pictures of them that year. Months after the planes hit, she told me she had dreamed the big fire, but she thought it would happen much later, when she was a teenager. I have the picture she drew. I plan to scan and post it in observance of the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, as a remembrance and a wish that my children, and all of us, will reshape the temper of our planet in the next ten years.

Lisa and Zoe

"Having Zoe saved my life. 
It was my wake-up call. 
There were so many things 
I didn't want to pass on to her." 

—Lisa Bonet

Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lisa and Lenny, is the new Hollywood royalty. She's on the verge of breaking big. I'm pitching a story on her because I'm rooting for her. There is something about her that reminds me of my daughter. And what her mother, the beautiful Lisa Bonet, said, I get that. If you're lucky, your children force you to find the high road. What you can do for no one else, you do for them.

The Pledge

What follows is an excerpt of what my good soul guru the Grady Doctor (that's her in all her awesomeness in the picture) had to say yesterday on the subject of hateful self-talk. At least two other blogs have already reposted her pledge, which I think makes this a movement. It should be a movement. Read on and join in. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to intend. Because don't we tired of having to shore ourselves up after tearing ourselves down? So I'm going to take this pledge, and when the harsh self-talk creeps in (as it might, because after all, I've been honing that skill for some time now) I will just do like the yogis and show it the door. Sometimes I might need to write that thought right out of my head, and I reserve the right to do that. What I'm aiming for here is not perfection, but heightened consciousness and the chance to practice being kind—including to me. For the whole deal, go right to the source.

From the Grady Doc:

There are scores and scores of us who have targeted ourselves for our most consistent insults. Almost like we have this need to preemptively strike against ourselves before someone else can. And to that I say Eeeeeeeehhhhnnnnnn! (*buzzer sound*) So as of today, I declare the rest of this month "No Hating on Myself Month." Here's how it will work, quite simple actually. The rules are that you can't say anything negative about yourself for the next two weeks. In other words, for the rest of August, you make a pledge to leave all hating to the professionals. Remember, they're much better at it.

The Pledge 

Place your right hand over your hip 
and let your backbone slip

I do solemnly pledge to allow no insults directed toward or about myself to leave my lips for the rest of the month. This includes but is not limited to references about the following:

butt size

hair length

baby weight

belly circumference

skin surface

crows' feet

height

complexion

salary

material possessions

marital status

relationship status

grades of any sort

comparisons to someone else

achievements of your children

size of your house

make of your car

mistakes from your past

compliments to others with reflexive insults to yourself
in same breath

Play Jill Scott's "Hate on Me" anthem and
shake what your mama gave you if you commit.

Dear Grady Doc, 
I commit.

Camp is ending

This weekend, camp will end for another summer, and my kids have that melancholy aspect that always attends their return to the real world from their summer commune. Their camp friends have become to them like family and now they all scatter to different parts of the world. On the camp website, the photos posted today are mostly of the scenic variety, suggesting things are already winding down. 

There was also a photo of my son's best friend. They grew up together and call each other brother, although surely brothers argue more than these twin souls ever have. They go to the same college now. They move in different circles there, but each knows the other is a text, a phone call, a quick run up the hill away. 

I get a kick out of this photo of E. lifeguarding. I remember back in high school, he and my son went to try out to become lifeguards for the city one summer. But they were too slow on the timed swim test. It was one of those misadventures they came home laughing about, a comedy of errors and very odd people administering the test and the two of them swimming out of their lanes. They kept swimming into the lane divides and having to course correct, which made them dissolve into embarrassed giggles, much to the irritation of a glowering city official. I can't quite remember all the details, just that they regaled us with stories that night. And now here they are, both of them having achieved the thing. Granted they're each about a foot taller than they were then, a lot more cognizant of the skills required, more sober about the whole endeavor, too.

It is a comfort to me to know these two have each other. Earlier this summer when my son was upset and out of reach, unable or unwilling to hear his parents, I called E. "Don't worry, I'll talk to him," he said. And he did talk his friend back to reason. I knew he would be there for his friend, as I know my son will be there for him. I am so glad he is in our lives. I call him my other son.

Thoughts this morning

My mom and my niece will arrive at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning.  I will be thrilled to have my mom back in New York, but scared, too. Her heart will be heavy when she sees her sister, who at almost 93, can no longer move a single limb of her body, and has to be hoisted by a medical contraption. My aunt can no longer speak most of the time, and yet last night, when the home attendant found her wide awake at 4 a.m., and tried to coax her back to sleep, she said clearly, "I want to be awake when Gloria gets here."

My mom is several days away from getting here. My aunt has her time frames confused. But when I heard this, I was pierced once more by the devotion of the sisters to one another. I am glad my mom is coming to see her big sister. But she's 89, and is also declining. It's more clear now than it used to be. She too is starting to be confused by time, and to not remember things. She gets anxious easily, because she is so used to being able to control what happens for herself, and now she can't.

I don't think she can stay alone in her little studio, although she is insisting that she can. I think she needs to stay in our home, sleeping here at night, with family life flowing around her, and then she can eat dinner with us and I can help her bathe before bed and make her breakfast in the morning before work. I can then walk her back to her apartment, which is in the same building as my aunt, and they can visit together while we are at work and school. I hope the home attendant will agree to give my mother lunch along with my aunt, as my mom can't manage that on her own anymore. I really scared about how she will manage this time. It's all mixed in with the excitement at seeing her in just five days.

My son will be home for a hot minute this Thursday. One of his best friends is having an end of summer barbeque and many members of their high school track team will be there, all of them now scattered to different colleges, so he's taking the train to New York just for the day to attend. We'll see him when he stops home to shower. And then maybe again that night, before he catches the train back for the last two days of camp. Then he and his girlfriend will arrive home from camp on Sunday and will be with us for most of next week. Meanwhile my husband and I will make the drive up to pick up our girl on Saturday. My daughter loves her brother's girlfriend. Loves her. She says whenever they see each other at camp they jump into each other's arms and twirl around.

Okay, got to get to work. I've been getting home well into the evening since our new managing editor arrived. Even thought the spirit of the place is much lighter than it has been the last five years, we're too few people left on staff. We need more hands to execute our new editor-in chief's vision. These late evenings can't continue. Last night I got home at 11 p.m. and then stayed up till 3 a.m. just to feel as if I had some part of the day that was mine. We close the current issue tomorrow and after that, I'm going to have to be a little more judicious about my workload. Especially with my mom here and my daughter needing to visit colleges and figure out exactly where she plans to apply.

The Fisher King

This man.

The one on the right.

He stars in the only film that ever comes to mind when someone asks me to name my favorite movie. It's Terry Gilliam's 1991 fable, The Fisher King. In it, he plays an emotionally distant radio shock jock, a self-absorbed jerk who ultimately finds redemption through the care shown to him by a homeless paranoid schizophrenic, played by Robin Williams, a sweet-natured soul whose circuits have been fried by tragedy, and whom the shock jock eventually feels compelled to protect, grasping that their fates are finally and eternally entwined.

The Fisher King is a love story. It's about being wounded in different ways and the power we have to heal one another. Every time I watch that movie, I am enthralled.

And last night, as Jeff Bridges was interviewed by the rather haughty Piers Morgan on CNN, I remembered why I can't turn away when he's onscreen, Bridges I mean, not the Brit. He's so authentic and humble, so aware of the graces that have eased his life, so devoid of false modesty. Even when asked that cliche of a question, "Was winning the Oscar the highlight of your life?" Bridges was pitch perfect. "Well, watching my children being born beat that," he said. Of course it did. And when Morgan pressed, asking, "Well, the highlight of your professional life," Bridges replied, "Not really, that would be the work. The highlight is doing the work." He said it gently, allowing his interviewer to save face, but he didn't get drawn in by the easy answer.

But what really, really slayed me was when he talked about his marriage of 36 years, to a townie he met while making a movie in Montana. He had been terrified of marriage. He shared that his wife hates when he says this, but he had thought of marriage as one step towards death, because now you were with the woman you would be with for the rest of your life, there would be no one else until death. Well. That sounds like a man who knew how to make a commitment. And then, when Morgan asked him the secret of his great marriage despite the Hollywood celebrity machine, Bridges got this goofy aw shucks look on his face and he mumbled shyly through his shaggy beard that that he was more in love with his wife now than ever. And then he said:

“It’s like that question, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. In marriage, what that means is when those tight times happen, when you feel, Oh, shit, this is terrible, I’m outta here, that's when you have to lean into it, you take it as an opportunity to learn more about each other, get closer, and enlarge your love. Then that precious feeling kind of pulls you together and encourages you in the next tough time.”

Lean into it, he said.

This man.

Sun Child

"I think laughter may be a form of courage. 

As humans we sometimes stand tall and look

 into the sun and laugh, and I think we are 

never more brave than when we do that."

—Linda Ellerbee

.

Duckie

  

  

What strikes me about this last photo of me on Bourbon Street is that I am really a funny looking little person with chubby nail-bitten child hands and feet that point outwards like Charlie Chaplin's and I say that today with a rush of affection for that duck-kneed middle aged woman whose husband took this photo with the kindest of sight, and even though I don't always stay in that consciousness I really do know in this moment that I am a lucky duck indeed.