Terribly Moving

Brandi Carlile visiting women at the Washington Corrections Center as part of her Looking Out Foundation, performing her utterly real and beautiful poem, "The Mother." The women in the audience laugh at the line, "the first thing that she took from me were selfishness and sleep" and again, at the line about her daughter trashing her car, but the poignancy of these mothers separated by the state from their children is palpable. 




These are Carlile's lines that slay me, every time:

And they've still got their morning paper and their coffee and their time
And they still enjoy their evenings with the skeptics and the wine
Oh, but all the wonders I have seen, I will see a second time
From inside of the ages through your eyes



Bill Hader having dinner with Tobias Wolff and George Saunders. "I was so nervous I don't think I ever stopped talking, sabotaging myself by flooding the conversation." The New Yorker profile of Hader goes on to note that George Saunders had a different recollection of the night: "I woke up that night thinking I was having a heart attack, but it was only a back cramp, caused by having laughed so much at dinner."



Jordan Baker, taking her leave of Nick Carroway in the denouement of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:

"Do you remember...a conversation we had once about driving a car?"
"Why--not exactly."
"You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I?"

Yes, she's privileged and white and selfish and careless but the girl has feelings and she nails Nick, nails him to the wall. He's no innocent either.

George Does It Again

"She thought of her mother, and while thinking of her mother she seemed to hear her mother's voice, saying: Honey if you need help, ask for help, you're not alone in the world, you sweet little goof."

Of Cold Fries

You know that moment when you rediscover the french fry that you lost an hour ago in the car while driving the little 'un to an appointment because you've got to feed the kids every day, right? Even though you're sure you fed them yesterday? And when you have finished the meeting and are standing to go and that dear little lost fry decides to take that perfect moment to take leave out of some cozy corner of your scarf or some scenic byway of your coat and fly out and land onto the conference table before you? And in that moment when the kind new acquaintances with whom you are meeting decide not to acknowledge your reunion, do you dare admit to yourself the impulse to put that fry into your mouth? No, no, you do not, that would be gross and ridiculous, so you grab it and put it, where? where? in your POCKET and finish the paperwork and thank the kind pair who are still looking you right in the eye and have said nothing although sometimes I am the sort to cry out to my daughter's chagrin, "Oh look! My fry!" But not tonight.

2019 Plans

Bunco night for the Ronald McDonald House with Aimee
Anderson Japanese Garden with Christina the last week of May
Take Mia for college visits to Madison, Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Champaign
Bake a caramel cake
Host a Mah Jong party
End of the year department cocktails party in our new kitchen
Run
Raise our girls to honorable womanhood
Resist
Reduce
Reuse
Recycle
Read all the books.
Review another book for Literary Mama.
Tulum!
Evan Hanson!
Book groups for Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility and The Guide for White Women who Teach Black Boys
See Julie and Bobby at Martyr's
Embroidery

Cycles upon Cycles

Over lunch with Uncle Sid earlier in the fall, such a relief to be able to talk about Aunt Ruth and how hard my visit was in September. He said he had been talking with his son about the whole situation and my cousin said, rightly, "What a disaster."

And Uncle Sid told him, "No, son, it's not a disaster, it's just life. And there's stuff to do."

A shifting of perception that has carried me through so much. Non-judgmental, detached and concrete.

On nights where sleep did not return, I called back to those words, and also those of my friend Kerry consoling me gently, but insistent, "There are some problems that are unsolveable." The words help.

To sleep I also tried breathing out longer than I breath in, counting up to four as I do so, or counting backwards by seven from a random three digit number, or picturing myself in a small cave or in a more comfortable bed, picturing a long walk down a gentle stair or hill or wooded path, breathing slowly through the syllables "Om. Man. Ee. Pad. Me. Hum," picturing a giant light switch that I turn off, letting go of words and letting only pictures unspool in my head.

My doctor laughed as I reeled off this list. She offered magnesium, calcium, vitamin D, shots of b12 and okayed my St. John's Wort idea. Sure, they may be helping, can't hurt, right? and I'm a strong believer in the benefits of placebos.

I have done what I can do. That does not mean I cannot do more, and I will, but I have done what I can do. Ruth has some help now and my brother Ron has some help and I'm sleeping at night.



There's still so much to sing and dance about here. Dear Mia caught the three of us girls on her phone on a typical night this tough fall: Post Modern Jukebox's version of "The Heart Will Go On" had hooked me up in the beat and the sweet balm of "you are safe in my heart and my heart will go on" and even though the house was at sixes and sevens for the kitchen reno/first floor painting/asbestos remediation, plastic sheeting everywhere, I still had to jump out of my seat and shimmy because my heart will go on and on and I still get some time with these two amazing girl people. We were all chewing carrots and they were playing on their phones; Nora, thirteen and unimpressed with my moves, says, "I am moving out of this house."



Hope springs eternal and late December (yay, Christmas is done!) and fresh snow and early January (yay! friendly kale and glistening grapefruit!) and the prospect of spring all conspire to nurture that persevering light. Happy New Year and best of luck, dear reader, thanks for being here.

Just one more thing: On Christmas Eve, we went over to Mike and Christina's, peppermint fudge, candied sweet potatoes, arugula-pomagranate-goat cheese salad (it's red, green and white, you see), and Pavlova in tow. Mike complimented the last with, "This is like the kind of dessert they would serve at a Renaissance table" and Steve chimed in, "With peacocks on the table," and I was so pleased though in Midwest fashion, you must admit the flaws and I had to tell how the egg whites mysteriously took an hour to whip to stiff peaks rather than the 8-10 minutes predicted by the recipe and how I had slow-baked the meringue to a gorgeous white snowbank but then I forgot it was in the oven where it had dried overnight and when I turned on the heat for the sweet potatoes, the snowbank cracked and browned a bit, like a toasted marshmallow. But that was just modesty because the cranberry curd was a dream, the whipped cream held on the way over to their house and the blood orange supremes were so pretty. No gooseberries like in the picture, but some halved kumquats might have been cool. Next time.

Christina and I laughed and laughed over the last time we had been together at their house Thanksgiving weekend. Serena and Brent were still here and the three of us women were in a chatting cluster while Serena told us about her plans to work with people in Seattle, helping and counseling and doing energy work and Christina and I nodded and then looked at each other and I replied "But Trump Trump Trump Trump!" in a flurry of outrage and frustration and Christina replied, "And Trump Trump Trump Trump!" in a neighboring match of anxiety, two Americans trying to explain the state of America to the placid Mexico. Much funnier a few weeks later, when we retold it to Randy and Mike.

I was so grateful for Serena and Brent's visit, I was, although we have all changed and I do feel the need to keep apologizing for my bitchiness over our last visit but I don't and then there's more bitchiness I don't apologize for but they stayed, Brent and Serena chose to stay here with us, nestled in our cluster of the couches, next to our plywood island, even though we had got the condo for them, they would rather have been with us and our mess. That made me happy and made me feel forgiven. I showed them how my extroverted introversion makes me feel after a few hours with people, and I fell to the floor and squeezed between the ottoman and the couch, tucking in my head as a rabbit in its hole may, if the shy and exhausted rabbit were moved and able to protect its neck duck-and-cover style.

And now it's the long break with days of baking and movies and working out and then long nights of rest. Nora is working hours at Kinko's making photocopies of a journalist's journals and Mia plays videogames until I cajole her to read a few more pages of The Help and The Color Purple. She'll take three days of drawing and painting at the Evanston Art Center later this week while Nora tries some tennis. Each day flies by but there is still that great pleasure at seeing how many are left. I am keeping this Christmas break feeling for the years ahead, too. It's precious, these few years we have left together before the girls go off to school. And these precious few years of work left, too. Look at what fun we've had! And look what riches we have left before us to enjoy!

Losing It

Depression can cause confusion and confusion is depressing but the which of the two that leads the way makes all the difference. I can overcome the November dive, spring always proves it. But a more permanent decline? Ah, that one is not monthly, hormonal nor seasonal. That one stays. "Some are very happy," said the woman I met Saturday at the Dean's post-turkey Mexican feast. The woman who works at a residential center for memory care told me her merry grandmother would say, "You people are so sweet, I wish you were my family."

"Memory can be stone," said Serena at one of our Thanksgiving weekend gatherings, quoting another. "Or sand. Or water." And we moaned at our sloshing and pointed at the rock hard detail person in the room.

Sunday morning I put thirty hyacinths in the ground under a steady cold sleet. The first bulb was the hardest to put in, bound up in my layers and made awkward by the plastic rain poncho from that time we were caught in a storm at Disney. The ground at the side of the house under the boxwood is part clay and my special digging tool quickly developed constipation and was abandoned for a good old hand spade that turned over some worms, yay! and made the job possible, strangely, (for this is my point) in a fever dream of flow that had me looking in the bags for missing bulbs. Where did half of them go? How did they get in the ground so fast? Mud clogging my shoes, mud on my hat, my gloves caked in wet mud as thick as the waffle batter Nora made this morning but all that spring joy and potential got buried faster than I could comprehend.