One by one, they arrive

Our girl is home! She arrived by bus last night and asked her brother to pick her up from the station. We all went to meet her and got royally snarled in Lincoln tunnel traffic while she waited on a street corner outside Papaya King juice bar on 42nd and Ninth for almost an hour.  I got more and more riled up at the gridlock while my son (who was not driving) deejayed music from his iPhone and tried to get me to just be in the moment as he and his sister exchanged wildly outrageous off-color texts—which they later shared with me. Then when we finally got to the corner our college girl threw her bags in the car and jumped in quickly while we held up honking traffic. By then her brother and I were arguing about whether I was going to the gym with him when we got home, he was insisting, bulldozing, really, which always makes me resist, and we went back and forth, the two of us so much the same, while my husband and daughter rolled their eyes and shook their heads and laughed and stayed out of it altogether until my son said, "Okay, don't go to the gym for you! Go for me. Because if you don't you're going to eventually be in a wheelchair and then I will really be able to push you around." He was going for humor, but I heard him, and so I stopped resisting and said, "Okay, we'll go to the gym."

When we got home my girl and her dad settled in to watch the Knicks game while I laced up my new sneakers. My son was wonderful. That cranky boy became so gentle with me, guiding my workout, pushing me to do one more set, ten more minutes, talking with me about his life the whole time, which will always take my mind off the pain of working out, and I did a half hour on the treadmill and the bike and then did some weight machines and I love being able to mindlessly just follow instructions, to not have to figure out the machines because he figured them out for me and assessed the right weight, and of course, he also showed how to use them for when he goes back to school. I do like lifting weights. I enjoy it so much more than cardio. I think my boy was pleasantly surprised by how cooperative I was once we got to the gym, and how capably I followed instructions and he was also quite pleased that my resting heart rate is actually quite good, much better than he had feared, and I'm strong and stubborn when it comes to the weights too. He can be awfully bossy, this boy (where, oh where did he learn that?) but also so very tender and able to make you feel cared for and taken care of and loved.

So it's the four of us, together again. Talking, laughing, being us. So comfortable and right. Both kids remarked on it, as if was something special to each of them. But we also remarked on how much we missed my niece Leisa, who is doing her masters in Florida and not able to travel, and how it just won't be the same without her this year.

Early this morning there were more arrivals. At 6:00 a.m. my cousin from Trinidad rang the doorbell. And this afternoon, my other cousin and her two daughters will arrive from Maryland, and we'll sleep everywhere in this house, on every bed and every couch, and tomorrow, more family and friends will join s and we will have a party. Actually the party starts tonight with the shopping and the food preparation and the stories. Always, there are the stories. And on Friday some college friends of my son's will arrive for the weekend, and my daughter will be catching up with her friends who have all arrived back in the city, and no doubt her young man will also be in the mix, and it will be nice to see him, too, and hopefully we'll get to watch a Knicks game with him, like old times. Happy thanksgiving, y'all.

Home

Apparently it's no-shave November at his school, but he's going to break the trust and shave for Thanksgiving day. "It's time," he says, scratching under his chin. (And if you wonder why I have so many photos of my son looking at his phone, it's because only then does he ignore my camera.)

He took me to get work out sneakers tonight, took me to a running store where I could be properly fitted. It was the sort of place I would never have walked into without him. The sales people would have looked at me like, what is she doing here? But with my son, my fit athletic boy, I felt right at home. He approached the sales guy, arm around my shoulder and said, "We're looking for work out shoes for her." I wandered around the store while he consulted with the salesperson, until he called me over and said, "What do you think of these?" I was very compliant, trying on shoes, giving my opinion of the fit, letting my feet be poked and prodded through the sneakers. I chose a steel gray pair that hugs my feet like little pillows. I realized I am not used to my feet not hurting in shoes. Maybe I will wear those sneakers to the office tomorrow. And every day after that.

My heart son, E., is also here tonight. He and my boy and my husband are watching  the football game and being very loquacious, all of them. I love hearing these animated men in the background of my life. The house is full again. And my sweet girl arrives tomorrow.

Writing Life

Sometimes a real world friend who is aware of my blog might observe conversationally, "Your blog is very personal, isn't it?" and I hear implied criticism, as if I am putting myself out there in an unseemly way, and it stings somehow. So then I come home and impulsively close my blog for all of—what?—twelve hours. And then I say Fuck It and open it up again, resigned once more to the fact that this is what it means to have a writing life: To overshare, to explore what happens in emotional terms, to say this is what it feels like to be alive in my skin, to be afraid, to be imperfect, to love.

So my blog is open again. I feel the weight of it sometimes, all I have revealed, all the stories that can be read between the lines, if anyone cares. Fortunately, hardly anyone cares, and so I will keep going, pretending that despite being public, this space is actually quite intimate, a sharing that takes place between me and a handful of souls who visit regularly, and leave their calling cards in the comments box, and are always so generous of spirit and deeply kind.

Thank you, friends who visit me here. My son is home for the week. And it is heaven.

Mojo

I don't know where my mojo went. I just haven't felt like blogging. Well, it was a busy time at the magazine, with several huge fact dense stories closing all at once, thanks to the week we lost to Hurricane Sandy. There were many late nights hunched over copy, trying to ignore the screeching from the extreme political right about the election outcome. I didn't want to add to the noise, so I refrained from responding to it all, but I confess to being flummoxed by the tone of it all, the bile, the vitriol. Enough said about that.

A story I edited won a big award this week, which meant I had to find an outfit that was passably black tie to attend the award gala. My coworkers pull this off without effort. Our editor in chief is a straight up fashionista, tall and lean and able to master any look she pleases, especially her signature polished Boho. The writer of the winning piece, who I work with a lot, she's actually my favorite writer to work with and we have won a lot of awards together, is a petite athletic woman who wore a red satin dress that hugged everything tight, with heels up to here, and a fluffy scalloped clutch that said, "I attend a lot of black tie events and I am always prepared." I would always be prepared too if I had her figure. I'd just go into any store I wanted and buy the cutest dress on the rack, and the flyest heels, and I'd be set. The other editor  in our group is a big girl like me. But she manages better than I do. She wore a sophisticated black dress with a cropped jacket, and accessorized with fire-engine red lipstick, a red clutch, and towering red heels that I would never have been able to walk in.

Me? Well, that morning I found in my closet a black jacket with sequins and silver and gold stitching on it, and crystal dots. I had ordered from a catalog some months ago, but when it arrived, I was mildly horrified at how shiny it was, and I shoved it in the closet and left it there, forgotten. Finding it again and desperate for a black tie option, I decided it at least had the virtue of never having been seen by my coworkers. And the color black always works in publishing circles, so I put it on over black pants and black silk blouse, added some big jewelry and black suede boots and off I went to get our big award.

I wish I liked the public schmoozing more. I used to think it was my size that made me reticent, but one of the other editors is my size, and she pulls off the whole schmooze fest with sophisticated ease. Truth is, once I'm there I do perfectly well. I just take a deep breath and dive into the whole scene, chatting with folk, smiling and conversing and mixing and mingling for as long as it takes before I can escape back to the sanctuary of my home. I appear to be appropriately socialized, able to hold my own. But I don't love it, and I am always so happy when I've discharged my obligation and can say my goodbyes.

On the other hand, I love getting together with good friends, as my husband and I did last night at an Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, to celebrate our friend Isabella's birthday. There was wine and there were stories and laughs, and socially that sort of thing is just my speed.

Now, it's Saturday again, and my love is watching Premier League Soccer on TV and settling in for his day of rest. As I made coffee a few moments ago, he said, "You know how I love Thanksgiving and always look forward to it, but somehow, this year, I am looking forward to the kids being home more than ever. I'm counting the days till our boy comes home tomorrow and our girl on Tuesday. I can hardly wait to see them."

"Well, they've never both been gone before," I said. "You miss them."

"I suppose that's it," he said. "And I'm also marveling that my son just turned 21, and how did that little baby we brought home not so long ago get to be a grown man? When did our daydreaming girl get to be a college freshman?"

We just looked at each other and smiled ruefully and shook our heads. I remembered my friend saying last night that when you're divorced, you always have to share your children and that it sucked, because she wants all her daughter's time when she gets home from college next week. And I felt so fortunate to be with the only person in the whole world who shares the depths of what I feel about these two endlessly fascinating-to-me humans, our boy and our girl.

Ages 5 and 8

Cloud Atlas

I saw Cloud Atlas last night. My friend and I braved the throngs of humans in Times Square and traveled six steep escalators up to the theater in the sky to see it. I'm not sure what I think of the movie, which was really several parallel movies in one, from period piece to age of sail to comedy to action thriller to sci fi, a confusing riot of cinematic lifetimes that definitely kept my attention, even when I didn't quite understand what the heck was going on. But then, I love that reincarnation stuff, the idea that our actions in one life set in motion the events of our future lives, that we are always reaping and paying karma, that the ledgers of our souls matter infinitely.

I decided when I was eighteen and flirted with Buddhism that this belief system was as good as any, and was in contradiction with none. It very nicely kept me conscious of the cause and effect of my every action, and it was elastic enough to explain the unexplainable, the great inequities of life, through the idea that souls carefully designed their circumstances before birth, chose their parents and their location and their bodies, to trigger an unfolding in that life that would allow specific lessons to be learned, karma to expiated, loved ones to be in proximity again and again.

It's a very forgiving but also exacting belief system, in that lessons that remain unlearned will simply recur. Better to learn our lessons now, rather that wait for them to ramp up in urgency. Besides, we earn karmic brownie points for the good we do in each life, and the challenges we meet with courage, and we rack up the promise of cosmic payback for the ill we do as well. According to this interpretation, we choose our lessons for each life; we choose the time when we will suck it up and learn them. That doesn't mean things that aren't in the script don't befall us once we're here in this imperfect earthly laboratory. All manner of unplanned events can derail us, because despite our careful planning before each new incarnation, we are born mostly forgetting it all. We're wandering sightless on the plain, depending on instinct and intuition and tossed about by fear and reaching always from an innate desire to love and be loved, the experience of which transcends all.

But of course, in the end, this is all story. I'm really just spinning stories here, because how can we know any of this for sure. But the sorts of stories it is possible to tell myself can help me sleep at night: For example, my cousin Pearl chose this wrecked addicted experience of a life in agreement with her mother, my beloved, now bedridden aunt, who perhaps had set herself the lesson of remaining devoted to a soul she has loved through many lifetimes, even tested to the bitterest end.

Oracle

“Where's my bed?!" Dairine shrieked.

"It's on Pluto," Nita said. "Somewhere nice and dark and quiet, where you won't find it if you look all day, which you're not going to have time to do, because you'll be in school.” 

—Diane Duane, A Wizard Alone

*

This planet of ours is a school room and we need to learn to play nice. I just want to climb into that bed and burrow there until all the post-election raging dies down. Wake me when the noise is over.

Channeling

That's my cousin, who is an attorney. 

This is how she went to work today. She said, 

"I'm channeling my inner President Obama."

So happy

I am so happy this morning. I am so gratified that the forces of decency prevailed. I believe that Barack Obama won a second term because there are more Americans who value truth and integrity and guts and sheer human decency in a candidate than were co-opted by untruths and hate speech. Obama won the popular vote, he won the women's vote by eighteen points, he won the youth vote as robustly as he did four years ago, he won virtually all the Black vote (no surprise there), he won the Latino vote by seventy percent, the Asian-American vote by seventy-three percent, and he did better than expected with the White vote, winning forty percent, especially in Midwest battleground states where they respected what he did with the auto bailout. And he won decisively, a sure march across the map, getting to the all important 270 electoral college votes without Ohio, Virginia and Florida! The country voted and the mandate is clear. Obama is the next president of this nation.

I loved his speech at almost 2 a.m. this morning. It was a soaring call to action, an invitation to heal the bitter divide, and it truly is bitter. But I felt so gratified that the majority of the electorate was not mired in the hate. My children voted in this election, and we were texting all night. And when Obama won, we called one another. I could hear screaming and celebration in the background. My son was watching the returns at the 21st birthday celebration of one of his friends; my daughter watched with other students in the lounge of her dorm. Together, we whooped and cheered.

I was also on the phone non stop with my cousin Karen in Virginia and my friend Leslie across town. I could have attended a viewing party staged by my job at a restaurant downtown, or joined other friends to raise a glass as we watched the returns come in. But somehow, I just wanted to dig in at home. I didn't know the night would go as well as it did, and I remembered how barren I felt eight years ago when Bush won a second term. The night didn't feel particularly social to my husband either. He lost himself in a book and visited me in the living room occasionally for updates. But he was sitting next to me at the moment CNN announced that Barack Obama had been re-elected, and he stayed through the back and forth that followed, with Romney refusing to concede Ohio, the state that was projected to put Obama over the top. When Colorado was finally counted, giving Obama comfortably more than 270 votes without the big three battleground states, my husband put down the remote and went to bed.

Of course, I stayed till the very end, until Ohio and then Virginia were more surely decided. I wanted to see the concession speech and the victory speech. Karen and Leslie kept me company, a round robin of phone calls, our elation and relief palpable. Okay, I'm not stupid enough to pretend that there are not bitter comments scrolling up a lot of people's Facebook walls and Twitter feeds today. Some of them will chill you right quick. But you know what, these sentiments did not, after all, carry the day and that is worth celebrating.

They Won!

President Obama's camp tweeted this photo at the moment he discovered he had won. It has become the most tweeted and Facebook-liked photo of all time. What does it say about the man and what he most values that this was the first photo his camp sent out? I, for one, am really glad that Michelle is the one with whom he shares his heart at the end of the day.  

The day is finally here.

President Obama went back to Iowa for his final campaign speech last night. He went back to the state where it all started, and his voice caught with emotion. I remember I was in my tax accountant's living room the night Obama won the Iowa caucus in 2008. I was getting my taxes done early so we could complete the FAFSA and apply for scholarships for my son for college. In the midst of the paper shuffle, I looked up at the TV and the results coming in said Obama had won. It was the moment I realized he was a viable candidate, that people other than me believed in him, and I have been in his corner ever since. I am also remembering that four years ago, on the day before the election, his beloved grandmother died. I was in the office when the news came in, and we all stopped the frenzy of election coverage for a few minutes and took in the sadness that the woman who had helped raise this fine man would not be alive to see him make history. Secretly I thought, Perhaps she can do more for him from the other side. That night in Virginia in the rain, tears rolled down the candidate's face as he remembered his grandmother. There are so many hidden sociopaths in positions of power in business and politics. Obama is not one of them. He is disciplined and civil and tough and cerebral, but he also feels very deeply. He possesses empathy. Give me that. I'm off to vote for my president.