Losing Frida

At the Outstanding in the Field dinner, everyone was asked to bring their own plate, and I took Frida. It was a gift from a friend, so I feel doubly bereft at having left it behind. I knew I shouldn't have risked it, because I am a winner at the art of losing. I can only console myself with the thought that maybe it was only meant to be mine for awhile and now someone else in some other city is sitting down to a sunset dinner and getting some Frida Love. My plate was the star of our table, because there is something about Frida that makes people go ahhh inside and out. Her image turns on a switch in our souls that controls pain, passion, texture, music, sex, death, wine, blood, lace, flowers, loss and the color red.  Wherever Frida is tonight, I predict she is turning up the volume.

Silver Lining Monday

The stock market dropped to an all-time historic low today. Mercury is in retrograde--again. Who knows if we'll all have jobs, houses, cars  or savings tomorrow or the next day or the next. And the Presidential race has become one long episode straight out of  "American Idol." The bad news is relentless, but I tend to forget how fragile, precarious and uncertain life in this world has always been. While I've been giving myself a high five for switching from plastic bags to cloth, other women have wondered if they will have enough to eat today, tomorrow, the next. While I worry about the value of my house, there are little girls in Haiti who are virtually household slaves, sold by their families into lives of servitude. No happy endings there. I can't control the stock market or Congress or global financial forces I don't even understand, but I'm trying to look for silver linings--and believe me, it's hard. I'm not naturally optimistic. But as long as I can, I'm going to put a check by every silver lining I can find every day. Mine are so simple-minded:  an unexpected chance to kayak this weekend; a sliver of Stilton found lurking in the back of the fridge; clean sheets straight from the dryer to the bed. What are you finding comfort in right now?

Birthday Wish

I look at myself in this photo and wish the adult me could be standing just out of camera range observing the girl that I was. The shadows cast by my parents across that lawn stretch across the years into my life today, a portent of the unhappiness that would darken their marriage and cast a chill on my growing-up years. And now there is no one left who can tell me stories about myself before that. My mother is gone, and my father is almost a stranger--a kindly older gentleman who likes to pretend he wasn't absent from my life for decades. When this photo was taken, they had no idea of what lay ahead of them. Their real life together was just beginning after my father's years away during the war. Maybe this was our last happy time together, but on my birthday, I'm just grateful they gave me life.  And a sense of style--look how I'm rocking that beret!

Little Heavens

One of my favorite books is Wind in the Willows, and even though I'm a nonswimmer who fears water, like Rat and Mole, I love messing about in a little boat. Yesterday after work, a friend and I launched kayaks into a tidal creek that runs behind her house and paddled out to the Intracoastal Waterway as the sun was going down. Being at eye level with the marsh grass, gliding across the silky surface, was meditation on the move. Coming back in against a strong muscular tide with the sunset leaving a neon red trail on the water behind us engaged every part of my body and mind. Almost home, I rested my paddle and rocked gently on the wavelets like a baby Moses adrift among the reeds. For a whole hour, I'd settled into my place in the physical world, surrendered to it, been cradled by it. For a whole hour, I wasn't just a big giant head thinking my way through the day. When we pulled the kayaks up on the bank, my friend pointed out a small brass plaque fixed to a nearby rock. It was in honor of a longtime resident of the island, placed there by his family after his death. It was engraved with his name and the line, "Because he loved this creek." I thought how blessed it would be to have your ashes scattered near your home, near all you cherished about being alive, leaving behind a simple, almost secret, love letter to the world.

A Different Light

Today is the autumnal equinox, and this weekend was a pause for me between the hibachi heat of summer and cashmere winter mornings. It was still, almost cool and a little bit sad,  as if our corner of the world was saying goodbye to the sun. The light is gradually thinning out, being pulled taut and clear and bright. I took a time-out from time this weekend...staying in bed all day with the two novels by Tana French (In the Woods and The Likeness) and not even turning on my computer once. She created a world it was hard for me to leave, a haunted one that perfectly matched my emotional weather. They're the kind of novels you think about at work and can't wait to get home to pick up where you left off. I left my bed to go to a magical dinner in the woods put on by Outstanding in the Field...a long winding row of tables, food served at sunset, interesting people from afar, weather that was made to order. The kind of dinner I often imagine but rarely experience in real life. I'm ready for fall now, ready to move into a new cycle, a different light.

Speed Racer

My life has been going over the speed limit for a long time...no rest stops or pullovers allowed. I refuel, but I never recharge. My daily map? Driveway to Starbucks to work to Whole Foods to driveway. Sometimes there's a detour to yoga but not nearly often enough. My car is me on wheels--full of dry cleaning that never gets dropped off, cds out of their sleeves, Goodwill donations piling up in the back, dried up pens on the floor--I'm surrounded by broken-ness and unfinished business every day. I hate to give anything up at work because people might notice I'm not indispensable, but I've been letting go lately. And that doesn't just mean giving up tasks I hate, but also a few that I really like. Because there are other things that I want to do that I love even more--or at least, that I hope I will. For instance, I've been writing a short daily email that gets sent out to readers of our magazine, and it meant I got to recommend all my favorite things--music, books, websites--to a wider audience every day. It was so much fun and an ego rush too, but it was not only distracting me from my real work but also starting to substitute for it. Crafting daily short blurbs relieved enough creative pressure to keep me from building up a head of steam to go deeper in my own writing. I love any excuse possible to avoid the hard work of writing, rewriting, editing, deleting, and starting over, but I want to flex those muscles again.  I want to draw more, take more pictures, notice more. That's why I keep coming back to this blog; it's my laboratory, my writer's workshop, my journal of possibilities. Maybe I'll find out that I'm destined to be a writer of paragraphs, not pages, but there's also a chance I'll string those paragraphs into pages someday and pages into chapters. I don't think it will matter to the world whether I Twitter or tell some stories, but it makes a world of difference to me.

"And so to bed"

I often think of this line from Samuel Pepys' diary when I go through the house late at night,  locking the doors, making sure the computer is off, the candles are blown out. I love bed and I hate bed. I love reading in bed and watching tv in bed and working on my laptop in bed--all no-nos as far as the sleep experts are concerned. And yes, sometimes I turn out the lights 

and roll from side to side and pound the four pillows I can't do without and grind my teeth and worry about my carbon footprint and get pissed off about why Jamie Leigh Curtis is doing those stupid commercials for constipation (or is it diarrhea?) and wonder if I should have taken one more Melatonin. I remember sins of omission and commission. I look at the clock. I turn on the light to make sure that wasn't a brown recluse spider on my foot. But then, I pick up my book and snuggle up to it and love being awake in the middle of the night, even though I know I'll pay for it tomorrow. When I was a teenager, I lay awake at night, listening to a dj playing Elvis and the Everly Brothers on the little radio on my bedside table, aching with unrelieved sexual and emotional tension for a bigger life. When my kids were little, the only time I had to myself was late at night after they went to sleep. That's when I got into bed with cup after cup of hot tea, stacks of books and a journal to pour my heart into. Still looking for a bigger life, still yearning for something that seems so very possible in the middle of the big vast freewheeling night. In my bed.

The Writing on the Wall

I have to give up the morning news because it's making me so depressed.  A chunk of Antarctica the size of Manhattan broke off and drifted away. Polar bear numbers are dwindling. Sarah Palin is set to take us back to the Dark Ages where kids will rely on a Promise Ring instead of a condom...and women are buying this bullshit. Bush is still an idiot. Journalists use the term "clean coal" without asking if it's an oxymoron. (Have they ever seen the top of an irreplaceable mountain removed by a mining company?) Oh yeah, and an atom smashing experiment tomorrow might turn the world inside out! How do I prepare for that?A flashlight and a can of Beanie Weenies? I just can't start my day this way any longer. I try to do my bit to be a good citizen of the world--sending money to Hillary and Obama, sponsoring a woman war survivor, pushing for women's rights through my work--but my challenge today is to turn off the tv, stop reading the political blogs, and write my own news story. A story about taking a chance to laugh whenever it presents itself, about not losing faith in the power of truth, about realizing my worrying won't stop atom-crushing scientists from creating a giant black hole on my street but hoping for happy endings anyway, because, after all, why not? 

 

A Smack of Orange

I had dinner at a friend's house this week, and as soon as I walked into her kitchen, I was shocked by the orange daylilies on her counter. Like Cher in Moonstruck slapping Nicholas Cage in the face and barking, "Snap out of it!" Lately I've been sleepwalking through work and coming home to put on my pajamas and shut the door on the world. In every way. Fine enough for a few days or even a couple of weeks, but I get used to indolence far too easily. I hate to admit it, but I think  some of my planetary stars must be aligned toward inertia and sloth--both physical and spiritual. These lilies were almost vibrating they were so alive -- as if orange was the blood in their veins and they had plenty to spare. I'll have a tranfusion, please, of orange fieryness, of orange ardor, of orange juice of life.