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. 

__________

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.

I think I lied

No, the lie isn't the words on that picture. It really has always been him. The lie was that I'd come up for air. Welp! Turns out I'm still very much in the trenches, y'all, reading and line editing the manuscript to get it ready to send to my subject this Friday, so still not feeling at liberty to start back really posting here. Complicating my timing is the fact that the magazine I edit for is currently closing its end of year double issue and those stories are rolling in to my InCopy queue at a regular clip and I have to pause in working on the book and get those moving as others in the editorial assembly line are waiting for them to move through the production process to closing. I'm dancing as fast as I can—remember that book from the 'eighties? Or was it the 'seventies? I'm dating myself. I'll be out from under all this soon, but I'm just not there yet, though the worst stress has lifted, now it's just process and diligence and pride of work, not gut-level fear of whether I will actually be able to do what is being asked of me, now we are at the stage of how well will I be able to polish this thing that is being asked of me, can I make it really shine?

Here are pictures of us from our anniversary dinner. That image up top is what I gave my husband as a gift, an impulse purchase I made while scrolling on Instagram in the middle of the night, from a website called Lime & Lou, where you upload a photo of you and viola, they turn it into that. He loved it, so I guess I did okay, though I do secretly think it's a bit cheesy. But who cares if he loves it. Okay, back to work. Looking forward to being back here in earnest. 

Made it to the finish line

My daughter and her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, and me and my daughter-in-law, all got together and went to see the Broadway revival of Gypsy before it closed on August 17. Audra McDonald was a powerhouse in the title role, which left us all musing on the tough-tender complexities of the mother daughter bond. Afterward we went for an early dinner and my niece joined us. And yes, I wore my carnival jacket again, as I did to the past two Broadway shows I attended, you saw the photos, I just pull the piece from my closet, thus avoiding decision fatigue about what to wear, this city doesn’t care, don't judge me. 

I have not written here in a while. I did not allow myself to open this page, as I needed to get down a full draft of the book, and I was having the odd experience of writing and writing yet the finish line wasn't getting any closer. But now I’ve finally reached it. I completed the final two chapters on Wednesday, and have spent the last two days trying to make them better, they were still pretty rough. This afternoon I printed out the full manuscript and will spend the next week reading and editing it, and then it will go to my subject. Phew! 

I think I've forgotten how to write here. I'll be around to catch up on everyone's blogs this weekend, but maybe not tomorrow, as it's our 39th wedding anniversary and the man is taking me somewhere. I told him I had no bandwidth to devise any plan to celebrate so could he just manage that. He could see that I was under water, working literally around the clock, and he said, I've got this. We’ll do dinner somewhere, I think. Something simple, just us. Thirty nine years just disappeared. I do feel their flight. I’ve secretly been feeling rather rickety, as if I need a soul power up. 

This isn't a real post. I'm just dipping in to say hey, I missed you all. Good to be back. I’m plumb out of words right now but will share more soon. 

Floral artist

My son in law, a big data brainiac who has both an engineering and business grad degrees to his name, has a flower venture of some sort in his future, mark my words. His cousin's girlfriend, a studio photographer, gave him a free photo shoot as a birthday gift, so that he'll be all set when he starts his floral art business, whatever form that takes, and needs head shots and other images for his website. This young man with an engineer's crisply logical mind turns out to have the soul of an artist when it comes to flowers, and his loved ones get to bask in the beauty of that. That shot is one of my favorites from the photo shoot.

July album

Here are some pictures from the past month of my son and his wife, in photos they sent me from their recent trip out west, first to a wedding in Grand Rapids, North Dakota (yes, they are continuing their impressive round of weddings, this was their fifth friend to get married this year, coming off of five weddings last year and seven the year before), followed by a few days of vacation in Seattle, then quick visit to friends in Portland, the ones whose wedding they attended in Milan, Italy last year. I love it when my beloveds go exploring and send me pictures along the way so I can see they're okay and happy and I can live vicariously through them and know that the world is theirs, too.

My 'seventies-souled nephew, Walking Eagle, is dropping new music soon, and I'm definitely vibing with this mood as a possible album cover.

And how could I not share this photo posted in the family chat of the coolest little mini Leisa on the planet. I'm told she doesn't play when it comes to her Minnie Mouse, and that she chose that flower herself to adorn her day. 

One year

That magical hour one year ago today when these two pledged to have and to hold, to love and to laugh, to be besties forever, amen. My heart is so full today, loving their love, loving them, my daughter and the bonus son she gave us, may light surround them always, as they grow and become and find the silver lining in every circumstance and experience the joys of every version of who they are meant to be, together. I love you my darlings. Always.

That's what I wrote on Instagram and Facebook today, copied for the record here, because I have no time to blog thoughtfully as I am trying to finish a first draft of the book. I was supposed to be done by the end of July, but the finish line keeps getting further away as I approach it, as I keep seeing places where I need to go deeper, more people I need to interview, connections I need to make, layers I need to explore. I'm at 97K words now, blew past my contracted 75K words a while back, and I'm still going. I will pass 100K words for sure, but hopefully not by much, and then I will finally get to go back to the beginning and start to read the completed manuscript and see how it hangs together, where I can streamline it for flow and momentum, punch things up, tame things down—the part of the process I most enjoy. I hope it's reads okay.

My daughter and her love went to a rustic spa upstate for the weekend. They stopped at a wildflower farm on the way and picked blooms and made arrangements as anniversary gifts for each other. My girl sent me that photo of their vases and challenged me to pick who made which one. I got it wrong. How wise to escape to nature together for their first anniversary. I'd have loved to have done something celebratory for them, but I lack the gene for staging grand events to mark special dates. I'm always at a loss as to what to do. My best idea is to just hang out and do nothing much with the ones I love best. See? I have no idea about any of it. Why on earth did the souls of my adventurous children pick boring me as their mother?

I do know how to open my front door and welcome people in, though. I have been hosting houseguests all week, my cousin, his wife, and their son from Jamaica. The son attends school in Austin, Texas and is a soccer talent, and a number of colleges are actively recruiting him, so he is here this week with his parents to meet with coaches for different schools and show his skills on the field. The tryouts are at Columbia University's football field, just up the road from me. Turns out I was wrong when I said my family would not visit us in New York this summer given what is happening in the country. Jamaicans are resourceful and defiant. They go where they choose, for their own reasons, and figure out the necessary workarounds. I should have remembered this about my family. 

My cousin’s wife, the mom, is consciously curating her social media in case their youngest gets in to a good school here, and because their second youngest, a daughter, is already in college in D.C. Their oldest, a son, graduated a few years ago and works remotely in tech or finance or something, I'm not quite sure. He shows up in our social media feeds everywhere, from Turkey to Greece to South Africa to Portugal, and we all shake our heads in awe as we watch this handsome young man live his best and most intrepid life. Their second oldest, a daughter, is just finishing her pediatric residency as a doctor in Jamaica. Her dream is to join doctors without borders. My cousin's wife has told her younger two that if things don't work out in America, there are options. I love her pragmatism and fierce mother fire. The family is a joy to host. They make their own breakfast, clean up after themselves, find their own way around the city once I give them directions and a house key, and they are wonderful conversationalists as well. I just need to provide dinner most days, which generally entails ordering in from whatever food venue the group has decided dinner should come from that night. Everyone is easy to please. They arrived a week ago today and leave on Monday. 

Then it will be back to my routine, writing in my corner, trying to keep my heart from crumbling out of my chest as a besieged people starve in plain view of us all. One day, the saying goes, we will have all been against this. We are against it now.

Some thoughts after the family cookout

We gathered upstate on Friday for a cookout to celebrate our son in law's birthday. His family does it up every year at the home of one of his aunts, as both he and another of his cousins are born on July fourth. This year, my son and his wife joined the party, and my Brooklyn niece also came, her third year being there, she declared herself a regular now. My daughter still finds it a bit like worlds colliding that her brother is now pals with all her husband's upstate cousins. 

My son is law is from a big family, his mother is one of eleven, and he arrived on this earth with a large group of male cousins born within a few years of him. Most of them went on his bachelor trip to Tulum last year. My son, my niece's husband in Dallas, and the groom-to-be's friends from high school, college, and grad school were also on the trip. In all there were twelve men from very different backgrounds and life experiences, with very different social presentations, and yet they all got on famously, and are all now great pals. It was fascinating to see how warmly they greeted each other at the wedding, and then again last Friday. My daughter's husband is a connector. So is my son. In fact, they had a few natural connectors in that group, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised they all bonded. 

Come to think of it, the thing all those young men have in common is a strong sense of family. Maybe learning to navigate all the different and quirky personalities within large, close, extended families is good preparation for navigating the different and quirky personalities one encounters in life? I do know that growing up within my particular family definitely gave me an appreciation for people's quirks. In fact, I find I'm more drawn to people who let their freak flags fly. Here are a couple more cookout pics of my own beautifully idiosyncratic family.