A Good Collision

Partly because I am still a relatively new parent, and partly because of who I am, I still grapple almost daily with the infinite, emotionally (and sometimes physically) exhausting task of reconciling my former, non-parent self with the current version. To be honest, I still have moments when I am with both girls, feeding one and arguing with the other, getting one dressed while being serenaded by the other, when I look at them--take them both in at the same time--and think: How in god's name did this happen?

In other words, the reconciling has its good and bad days, and then there are the days when I force a head-on collision and embrace the ramifications; those days, those moments, I think are worth recording for posterity.

Last night, for example, began as a parody of the harried working mom. I had a big, important meeting at a fancy venue. I was wearing a modicum of lipstick, and I had even given myself a once-over with the lint roller. The meeting went well, better than I had expected it to, and it ran long. I had childcare until 6; I pushed open the door, having sprinted halfway home, at 6:10, made my apologies, and sank into a chair, exhausted.

But only for about 5 seconds because, of course, Annika was hungry and needed to be fed. Lily, in her nightgown but unbathed, reminded me about the birthday party we were going to the next morning, at which point I realized that I had forgotten to pick up a present. Or rather two presents. Twins. I shoveled some pureed carrots and beets into Annika, while bribing Lily to put on clothes and wash her face, a battle I won halfway. I strapped Annika--beet-stained face and all--into the stroller in her pajamas, grabbed Lily's hand while trying to ignore the fact that she was wearing a pink dressy dress and turquoise crocs and barrettes sticking out all over her head--and plunged out into the humid evening in search of gift.

While we were waiting in a line the length of the Holland Tunnel and being talked at by a surely partly crazy Israeli woman who was buying about 25 purple bras, I got a message that Ben had missed his plane home, meaning that I would have to cancel my plans for later in the evening, as I had made no alternate plans for the girls.

My plan--and believe me, it was rare that I had one--was to head down to the Lower East Side to hear the new girlfriend of an old friend sing with her new band. Have you ever met someone and found yourself thinking: Boy, would my life have been enriched by meeting this person about twenty years ago? That's how I felt when I first had dinner with my friend's new girlfriend, who also happens to have an absolutely incredible singing voice. Plus, my old friend is one of those people my life has already been enriched by knowing; we make each other crazy sometimes, but he is on a short list of people I know will always show up for me, in the most expansive definition of those words.

So in short, I really wanted to go to this show. As we plunged back out into the heavy summery air, I looked at Lily, who was in an upbeat frame of mind, having talked me into an ice cream cone from the truck on the corner, and at Annika, who was wide awake and babbling cheerfully. Almost on its own, my arm reached out, and I hailed a cab. It was quarter to 8.

As the cab pulled to a stop in front of the coffeehouse/bar, I saw a couple of really close friends standing out on the sidewalk, where the excess crowd had spilled, and I heard the sound of my new friend's rich, mellow voice over the talking and laughing, and I pushed Lily toward a familiar face and struggled to get the stroller out of the trunk while holding Annika. I met the eyes of one friend, who mouthed: You're crazy, but he was smiling, and holding out his arms, and as I set up Annika and wheeled up to the open windows, another friend slung an arm around my shoulders and placed a cold beer in my hand.

And for about an hour, I stood on the street corner in a part of town I haven't been to in years, and listened to my new friend sing, as magnetic Lily danced and glittered at the feet of the band, and mellow Annika waved and clapped and laughed from her stroller, and the sky turned from hazy dusk to sparkly twilight, and people passed in all directions and turned when they heard the music and stopped to hear more, and I felt like a best version of my former self: a person who loves live music and a cold, good beer, a person whose old friends are her best defense against her own insecurities, a person who never turns down a chance for a new experience, a person who likes to think she can be both selves all at once and have the sum be even greater than the parts somehow, a person who once in a while--way past bedtime on a hot night in May--actually proves herself right.

A Demain

Unprecedented falling asleep in desk chair. Until tomorrow.

The Wilensky News

Several times over the past few months, while sitting down to write a blog entry, I have remembered The Wilensky News. The Wilensky News was also a self-published enterprise, although it was issued far less frequently and served a totally different purpose for a partly similar audience: my family.

I can't remember why or when I started The Wilensky News, but I think I was probably nine or ten, maybe even a little bit younger. Even then, I knew--had known for a while--that I wanted to be a writer, that I would be a writer, and a newspaper seemed like a natural training ground. As a born busybody in a family with some excellent specimens of the genre, the reporting went pretty smoothly. I solicited "tips" from a few key sources; I suspect most of my relatives on my mom's side of the family would be able to imagine my most reliable ones. I did all of the interviews, writing, editing, layout and printing myself, although my dad pitched in for the xeroxing.

It's funny; when I think about the work I did to put out an issue of The Wilensky News now, I can still recall the feeling of excitement and accomplishment that accompanied the flood of activity leading up to press time, as well as the anticipation I experienced waiting for the reactions from the readers, some of whom--in the gossip column, say--were predictably displeased.

I am trying to remember some of the stories: there was an interview with my dad about his love for the Boston Celtics, there was a tawdry write-up about one of my cousin's hidden love letters, there was a (very biased) report on a cousin's tendency to consume portions of his edible holiday gifts before presenting them to the recipient. As this is one of my favorite stories about one of my favorite people, who can take gentle teasing, I will be more specific: We are talking about packages of Mentos, purchased in discount three-packs, opened, a few removed and (presumably) consumed from one end, and then wrapped. Merry Christmas! An almost complete pack of Mentos!

Anyway. I think the reason writing the blog conjures up periodic Wilensky News flashbacks is because of the fact of "the audience," an entity it is impossible to ignore if you are a writer, an entity you woo--comfortably and openly or less so--if you are a writer. I have always craved being read, not so much a reaction from readers, as the knowledge that they are engaged with what I write. The Wilensky News, and Seven Hundred and Fifty Words are part of the overall picture, path, for me, and both have been useful to me in terms of thinking about how and why I cultivate a readership, even the smallest, most intimate one.

I must say, writing this has given me a perhaps uncontrollable urge to issue an anniversary edition of The Wilensky News; if I do so, I promise--even (and there is little doubt) it renders me ridiculous--I will give you a link. And then you may mock me (for nostalgia or immaturity), or criticize me (for wasting time on a non-productive endeavor), or even flatter me (for making you laugh or consider), and I will take it all head-on, secure in the knowledge that you have actually read, that my words do not appear in a vacuum.

News Flash:

Sketching it Out

Hmm. I need another day or two to process the comments on yesterday's post. I am a little perplexed, to be honest, both by the fact that this particular post drew the most comments I've received so far, as well as by the nature of some of the comments. I will address properly after I've thought about my reactions a little more.

But because I am now feeling self-conscious about being judged "lazy" I will rein myself in and try to be focused and directed in this one post, anyway; Anonymi: this one's for you.

I guess it's time to start pulling together some of the writing I have done here, along with some of the research and writing I have done off-blog, for my book proposal on Personal Space. Before I begin actually organizing, though, I want to talk a little more about the idea and how I anticipate a book on this subject taking shape. Or maybe just throw out some of the themes that are shaping up as I think it through.

I think the book would start on the level of the individual as part of a family: how we form our sense of self in space, in the space of our formative "group" and in our first home. It would get larger in scope as it went on, moving out to the community--the communities we become a part of, even in terms of nationality--and then beyond, to the individual as part of the human family and the ways in which technology and the modern world affect and are affected by the concept of personal space.

Argh. Terribly put. I know what I mean in my head; I really need to come up with some less vague and amorphous ways of talking about this. Let me get a little more specific.

I am interested in the constant push and pull we have between privacy and intimacy, solitude and community. And the way we carve it out in our own homes, with our children, with our spouses, with our parents, with our friends and colleagues, in every relationship that matters. And the trend toward urban living and the "modern day village" and college dormitories and the real and documented gender differences in the way we monitor and occupy space.

I see this as a subject that needs to be assessed from a variety of angles and given historical context. America was founded, in a way, on the idea of personal space, and the transcendentalists were consumed by it too. Is our personal space being eroded by technology or are we simply finding new and different ways to carve it out thanks to technology? How does a human being achieve the necessary balance: we are born alone, we die alone, but we spend every single moment of every single day living in a world full to the bursting point with other people.

This is all very general; I recognize that. But I was very open about the fact that I intend to use this blog as a way of hammering out my work for myself. That is what I am doing here.

Faltering

So I guess it's to be expected: a little crisis of faith. It's been 128 days, I think, and although there have been some smooth patches, and some useful entries, and I'm not going to stop, I'm not feeling the way I wish I were about this blog right now.

For one, it's just so hard to keep on track. It's so easy, when I'm tired, or overwhelmed in my actual (not virtual) life, or preoccupied, or ill, to want to write about something that I know will basically just take up space, and isn't useful to my writing life in any way, and isn't even the kind of writing about my personal life that I know is useful in a less obvious way. I know that I have said, and believe, that writing every day--just writing--regardless of the subject matter, is important for me, but on those days when I feel as though I'm really grasping, I also feel as though I am wasting time.

For another, I am often torn about my intentions here, or rather it can be hard to resist the temptation to write about my day, or something that is happening to me, because it would be wonderful to have a record of my days, the diary I've never been able to keep, a log of Lily and Annika at various stages of growth. But I know that this is not the kind of blog I want to write for a million reasons, and after reading the article in the New York Times magazine this past weekend about people who do keep that kind of blog, I fear that on occasion I have veered too far in that direction.

In spite of this fear, though, I try so hard not to simply vent about personal matters that it sometimes feels dishonest--the way I will sit here writing about something as a writer while something else is happening to me as a person that I cannot, will not write about. Or maybe not dishonest but exhausting. And then I always think about every bad experience I have ever had trying to convey my subject to my audience: the graduate seminar in which my classmates all agreed that the picture I painted of my childhood was unrealistically idyllic whenever I wrote about my sister and my cousins, and the book I wrote about tics and compulsions that paints a one-sided picture of a girl who is nothing like me, and the book I wrote in which I thought I was paying homage to my sister, who was later justifiably resentful of this co-opting of her persona in print. It's so impossible to capture everything, and so essential to try, that sometimes it just makes me want to scream.

What I'm getting at is that I can't help asking myself, almost every day, why I am doing this and what picture am I painting in a larger sense for someone who is reading this every day, and how even the sum of the entries--all 128 of them--is such a tiny, one-sided sliver of who I am and what I write, or want to. And there is no answer, no solution: if I want to keep writing every day, which I do, I have no choice; it is the sliver or nothing at all, because I would not do this if I were not doing it for you, although I know I am also doing it for myself.

Wow. I am glad I am not grading this particular entry, which will I guess show for posterity my rambling, amorphous sense of blogging anxiety if nothing else--no coy hints at my non blog existence, although I wonder how much, if anything, can be read between the lines.

In one of my first entries I resisted the temptation to delete something embarrassing; I can't even remember what it was. And now, I can't remember why--if this is a writing blog, then I should be allowed to edit, when I have the time or inclination; there is no inherent value in rawness of that kind. But I will resist the temptation now, as well, and to be honest, I'm not even sure why.

I will end with a quote that I have at my desk, so I can read it each day, that is relevant here, as always for me. Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose words have guided me through many a day, wrote, "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Tomorrow: no nonsense. I promise. Ha!

Universal Signal

I have written some about this in the past, but I am fascinated by the various families we form outside of our birth family over the course of our lives. Late this afternoon, as I drove up the Merritt Parkway, I noticed a car on the other side of the divider flashing its headlights over and over again. It was still daylight, there was no traffic, and there was nothing amiss on either side of the road.

This, of course, is the universal signal for: Speed trap ahead. Slow down immediately. I slowed. No ticket.

I can't remember when I learned this signal, which I use often myself, both as the driver doing and receiving (benefiting from) the signal, but I suspect it was as I was learning to drive, if not before. Actually, as I was writing just now I had a vague recollection of asking my father why he was flashing his lights one day well before driver's ed kicked in; regardless, once I was licensed to be behind the wheel, I knew what it meant.

The signal is not intended to prevent accidents or to keep the signaller safe from speeders who might prove otherwise negligent on the road. Rather, it is a means of protection: from a speeding ticket. The signaller herself receives no benefit whatsoever from the act but for the hope that the next time the signallee sees a cop lurking around a corner waiting to pounce, he will also sound the alarm--flash those headlights--in one of the few genuine selfless acts of human camaraderie I can think of off the top of my head.

Am I the first person who has ever wondered how this signalling system began? Who started it and how did he convey his intent to his fellow drivers? Is it as old as automobiles, highway traffic? How on earth did it spread? Why, when human beings are so selfish in so many ways, do they so often take the trouble to say, in this way, "Hey. Speeding tickets are unpleasant, expensive, and annoying to deal with. Let's align ourselves against the highway patrol and help each other avoid them."

We have many ways we signal to each other; the baseball cap my father gave me with the words "Bush's Last Day" emblazoned on it signals unequivocally that I am not a fan of the current administration. I also think it says that I am likely a Democrat, that I am a woman who wears baseball caps, that I am not particularly vain about my appearance, that I have more than a passing interest in politics. Those who respond to the cap, its message, will either agree or disagree with my take on Bush et al, but an alignment on that matter means nothing in terms of the other attributes I mentioned. In other words, a fellow Bush administration hater could also be a Republican, a man who loathes baseball caps, an egomaniac, an apolitical person who simply hates GWB.

However, a person who uses the flashing lights signal, this universal means of saving each other from the expense and hassle of a speeding ticket, is a member of a much larger, much more universal and diverse and all-encompassing group than the anti-Bush crowd (although that one hovers around 70% from what I understand). If you signal--or react to a signal--about a speed trap, you are A Driver. Period. You may be female, male, black, white, Catholic, Jewish, old, young, American, foreign, rich, poor--all we know about you is that you drive a car, and that you understand what flashing lights mean when there is no other reason for headlights to be flashing.

I find this fascinating.

Anybody else?

When Too Much is Just Right

If your sister is a chef, and a passionate and inventive one, you will one day find ordinary meals with her a thing of the past. She will arrive for a twenty-four hour visit apologizing for having brought "not a thing," which you will find means frozen pate brisee, toasted pine nuts, a cheese generally found only in Sweden, a salad made with corn scraped off the cob, tiny roasted plum tomatoes and tarragon and three condiments in professional squeeze bottles, one of which is a grapefruit and mint aioli, which somehow isn't revolting.

This is off the cuff; this is on the highway at 6 a.m. to make a ferry boat; this is in the carry-on luggage; this is in the bag slung over one shoulder as the other arm's presence is fully required to carry the pink--yes, pink--cat carrier, in which an eleven week old kitten named Elvis (female) is patiently waiting to meet his (human) cousins.

Actually that last paragraph is more about this particular chef than about the meals she provides or revises, when what I want to write about is how a person can think she is settling on a simple lobster salad for dinner and end up seated at a table on which is placed a spinach and parmesan tarte with a crimped crust and a deceptively quickly-made filling, miniature rosti, green beans that were somehow transformed into uniform pieces with beveled ends with a few tricks of a knife, another tart, sweet instead of savory, with bananas and real caramel, a cupcake covered with the most real looking icing violets you have ever seen and a four-inch-high actual flower pot filled with chocolate mousse, cookie crumbs, and another realistic icing flower--a daisy this time--in honor of the four-year-old who also received a carton of cookies embellished with her own image.

The conversation at this meal, at which the simple lobster salad is simply lost, part of the woodwork, is about another meal, of course, at which beef tenderloin was served, "with baby veg," inspiring the chef's father, a man who previous to his younger daughter's career thought all sandwiches came pre-made, to ask--as an aside--"with what reduction?" to be told "wild mushroom," as though this were all a matter of course.

Which it is, actually. And although I know enough not to "look a gift horse in the mouth," as I was told this evening when I suggested that the photo cookies were perhaps a wee bit over the top, when I part company with said chef, the best cook I have ever, or will ever meet, it must be said, I will want nothing more for dinner than a piece of toast. The following morning, I will have a cup of coffee, still recovering, but by the evening, when I am missing the chef's companionship, passionate admonishments, inventiveness, generosity, tiny kitten, and tendency to sprinkle toasted pine nuts on pretty much everything, I will sit in front of my dinner (which will look a little flat, taste a little dry) and think: If only this had a reduction.

For C

Well, we're not exactly going to be able to conduct my experiment. Although I did indeed go to bed last night at 9:04 (posted here at 9:03), the stars did not align, meaning that the, ahem, smaller members of the household did not feel like sleeping continuously or much past 5 in the morning, so it is 10 p.m. now, and although there is still the second half of the Celtics playoff game to come, which I can watch with my dad--a rare treat these days--my eyelids are propped up with toothpicks. Or should be.

But partly in response to what I am going to write about, I am going to write anyway, for at least (if not much more than) 750 words. Last night, when I was possibly more tired than I can remember being in recent years, which is saying a lot considering how much you know I have written here about my near-permanent state of exhaustion, I wrote about two lines, basically so I could tell myself that at least I had posted, and went to sleep about 5 hours earlier than I usually do.

Today, when I logged on to my email account, I saw that only one person (where have you gone, blog commenters? away for an extended Memorial Day vacation?) had posted yesterday. And that person had written something to the effect of, "Hey. That wasn't 750 words."

Touche, anonymous. I'm blushing. Or at least I was. And I also felt a funny mixture of shame and annoyance, amusement and respect. And then I remembered that a very old friend, whom I will call C only so I can pay homage to Gossip Girl, as did Janet Malcolm (speaking of critics) in a recent New Yorker, recently made my first and only blog "request," as though I were a popular radio show.

"Write about how everyone's a critic," she said, and although I did not when she asked, only because I was not sure what to say, tonight I do have a few thoughts, I think, on the subject.

First of all, this is a cliche for a reason, and although I know she made the request in irritation herself at the way most criticism is so inane, I don't think it's inherently a bad thing; it just is.

I can see critical faculties developing in front of my eyes with Annika, who is eight months old. If I give her something she does not like, such as pureed green beans, she squints up her eyes, puckers her mouth, spits out the mouthful all over the sweater I am wearing, oblivious to the fact that I have a meeting and no alternate sweater and really no time to change. But I digress; what I am getting at is that already, in infancy, she is a critic; that is to say she knows on some level anyway what she likes and what she doesn't like, and can express both the preference and the rejection.

And really, we do this from birth, prefer and reject, in almost every arena of life, and our ability to take in information and prefer it or reject it increases exponentially until sometimes it seems like all we are is our likes and dislikes, and we judge each other thusly, as well as ourselves.

But the saving grace with criticism is that we are free to choose both the criticism we give and that which we take to heart, that which we use, and thank god for that. Have you ever know someone who seemingly had no critical faculties? Not the person who is criticizing constantly but in his or her head--that is a bird of a different color, and a sort of scary bird with hidden talons and a mean, pecking beak behind a rounded facade. I mean someone who seems to take everything in and neither prefer nor reject it? I have only known one or two in my life so far, and believe me, it makes for a person you wouldn't want to be stuck beside on the bus for more than about a half a block.

But a good critic? Someone whose word you genuinely value, someone whose preference or rejection means something profound to you, based on your own criticism of this person's taste, aesthetic, knowledge, values or other ineffable category we can call "essential self"? This is an invaluable person to have in your pocket as concerns your work, your very life; this kind of criticism can mean the difference between your own success and failure, this is a critic to keep, even when the criticism is harsh and directed at you.

I am realizing, writing this, that the proper response to C's request is actually a graduate dissertation, not the 750 words I owe my anonymous critic. But in closing, I will recount an exchange I had recently with one of my favorite students, a 14 year old with excellent critical faculties of his own. One of his weakest teachers (critic: me) is fond of a technique called "peer editing," which I believe she uses to avoid having to actually read her students' work, which she gives no evidence of doing. In spite of the fact that my young friend is an A student, and one of her favorites, he finds her utter lack of criticism endlessly frustrating, as he should, and has come to feel that another A+ from her is meaningless, which she has indeed rendered it.

But the peer edits--they can be even worse than no criticism at all. The last paper he wrote, the peer assigned his paper made a number of edits that were flat-out wrong. He changed words that were spelled correctly to incorrect spellings, wrote "don't get this" by the strongest sentence in the essay and on and on. My young friend was at a loss for how to respond, knew he couldn't make bad changes, but felt he needed to respect and honor the "peer edits" per the assignment.

When showed the paper, I thought about my response for--well, actually I answered instantaneously. "Is this a student whose opinion you admire and respect?" I asked. "Intellectually speaking, I mean. Not in terms of his ipod list."

"Not at all," he answered just as quickly. "I actually think he's kind of a dimwit."

"Then you have your answer," I said. "You're not going to make changes to your paper you know will make it worse." I could sense his relief.

The thing, everyone is a critic, whether asked to be, as in this example (or as a blog commenter, by definition, I suppose), or not, but not all criticism is equal. I am reminded of Orwell, in another context of course; forgive me, George, but in my humble opinion some criticism, some critics, are more equal than others. Actually, I have no doubt he'd concur.

And as for my friend C, she is the kind of critic, it is safe to say, who could tell me that a dress I was trying on was not quite right, and I would immediately start unzipping it to hand it back to the salesperson. In fact, you couldn't pay me to take it home with me after that. More relevantly, she is also the kind of critic who, if she tells me if something I write is good, I believe it.

C, who is--like many extremely talented people--her own harshest critic, knows everything I have written here already, although sometimes she forgets. But I do think it's useful to think about who our most valuable critics are, and why, and to force ourselves to listen to what they say, even when we really don't want to hear it.

I am going to give myself a B- for this entry. It's all over the place and not particularly insightful. But I am also going to give myself an A for effort, because I really, really didn't want to write at all tonight, and I took the gentle criticism and did it anyway. Anonymous: A+.

A Scientific Experiment

Tomorrow we will see how my writing is affected by my getting more than 5 hours of sleep. I hope.

Good night.

Interlude

Tomorrow, after a choppy, restless week, I will pack both girls and way too much stuff into the car and drive to my favorite place in the world for almost four whole days. The drive itself will be long. Check your watch: I will be tired. I will need to stop, often, for coffee, and each time I stop I will have to unload two car seats, take all of us to the bathroom, fend off candy requests, and pray that nobody's carsick.

But when I get to where I'm going, a ferry dock in a little coastal town, onto the ferry itself, and off the ferry into another, more bustling little coastal town, I will be on an island that has never once failed to have a restorative effect on me, a place that is in every sense of the word, a haven.

It will, I hope, remind me that at every stage in life it is important to step away sometimes, quite literally to take a step away--over a body of water is nice, for me, but not required--in order to come back with renewed clarity. I am looking forward: to the people I will see, the spray on my face from the ferry deck, Lily at the water's edge selecting stones, the table I know Annika will practice walking around, lying in the grass with my hands under my head just looking up at the sky.

And this is strange, and unexpected; such is life. I am looking forward to coming home, stepping back in, too.

Sheep Sleep

As a parent of two very young children, I must confess to breathing a tremendous sigh of relief each night when I close the second bedroom door, indicating that both girls are finally asleep, or on the verge. I am a little worried that I am jinxing myself by saying that I have been lucky in this department; Lily was an excellent sleeper from very early on, happy to go to sleep and sleeping through the night consistently from the time she was a few months old. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times she has woken up between the hours of 8 at night and 6 in the morning. At 8 months, Annika appears to be following in her footsteps. When set down in her crib for a nap or at bedtime, she rolls onto her side, covers her eyes with the corner of a blanket or soft toy, and is asleep within minutes, pretty much every night.

I know this is good fortune, and I don't take it for granted; rather, I capitalize on the hours I have after those doors are closed. But I have become accustomed to the routine, which is why I jumped in my seat when this evening at about 8 I suddenly felt a presence at my elbow.

"I cannot sleep, Mama," the presence, who had been put to bed a half an hour previous in a completely different bedtime outfit, proclaimed in a small, pitiful voice in which a thread of hope could be detected. "I want to stay up late with you."

Reader, I was unmoved. I took her hand and walked her back to bed, tucked her in, kissed her forehead, and told her to close her eyes and think about beautiful places she has been, which is what my mother always said to me when I could not fall asleep. As I walked out of her room, though, those words resonated in my head, along with an image of another small girl, in an equally odd sleeping get-up, coming out of her room again and again and again.

I shook off the thought; I had been older during that period. I sat back at my desk and resumed my work. Ten minutes passed, and then the padding of little feet. Same girl, different outfit, same plaintive voice, pathetic grimace. Same march back to bed. I ignored the puzzle and stack of books also in the bed, told her she needed to stay in the bed, that she would fall asleep eventually.

The third time, I was truly surprised. I could not remember another time it had taken her this long to fall asleep, including her recent bout with pneumonia, the night before her birthday, ever. Yes, it was highly possible she was willing herself to stay awake, a tactic I know well, but it seemed hard to believe she was physically capable of it after a long and active day, a big dinner, warm bath, long story, typical routine.

I was on the phone this time, and I got off, told Lily I was going to teach her about counting sheep. This perked her up; I can't even imagine what she thought this meant, as when we walked into her room she turned to me, arms outstretched, and said, "I'm ready. How do we do it?"

We got in the bed together, and again I tucked her in. I told her to close her eyes and picture a fence, a low one, low enough for sheep to leap over. I instructed her to imagine a woolly sheep ("An itchy one?") running toward and leaping over the fence, followed by another sheep and then another sheep, and that if she did this for long enough she would fall asleep before she even knew it. I looked at her small face, smooth brow, perfect crescent eyebrows. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her lips moving. She was counting. I kissed her again and tiptoed out of the room.

By the time I picked up the phone again, sat back down, which is to say approximately 6 seconds later, I heard the voice, from the bedroom this time.

"I have counted fifty-seven sheep, and I. Am. Not. Asleep!"

It never worked for me either.

A Little Night Navel-Gazing

I went to a very liberal high school where students were allowed to choose many of their own courses within the framework of the various departments. It was more like college than most high schools in the depth and breadth of the offerings; after freshman year there were dozens of offerings for, say, English, which brings me to my topic for today.

It was the summer before my junior year, and I was engaged in the engaging exercise of choosing my courses for the upcoming fall. I was on Martha's Vineyard, with my family, and in retrospect should have had some kind of a job, as I was too old to have so much time on my hands to devote to a task that should have occupied about 30 minutes, 45 tops.

It was one choice in particular that I agonized over. For at least a week I lay awake each night staring up at the ceiling and willing not God but some omniscient high school counselor/higher power (maybe a little like Frankie Avalon in Grease?) to send me the answer to my question. Which was: Romanticism and Revolution or Baroque Wit and Wisdom. I'm not kidding.

Both were taught by the best English teacher at the school, or rather the most intimidating; both struck me as ineffably intellectual. Romanticism or wit--it almost wasn't fair to offer such a choice to poetry-writing junior-grade satirists such as myself. I couldn't do it; I couldn't make up my mind.

I would think I had, wake up one morning having decided that Baroque Wit and Wisdom was the way to go, and then I'd take out the form, hold my pencil poised over the appropriate box and find myself paralyzed with indecision all over again.

I tried to get my mother to make the decision, a couple of friends, but shockingly, nobody else seemed to comprehend the magnitude. For some reason or reasons I had decided that my fate rested on this decision, my grade in English, my happiness junior year, my ability to get into college, and then, of course, the failure or success of the rest of my life. I sort of knew it was ridiculous, and I can't explain it even now, but I do remember the ferocity with which I debated myself, the actual pros and cons lists I wrote painstakingly in one of my gazillion notebooks.

Where am I going with this. I'm asking myself more than you, I suppose, and I think the answer--finally, an answer!--is this. I actually cannot remember which class I selected. I think it was Baroque Wit and Wisdom, but I wouldn't bet on it. And in spite of the intensity, the very real anxiety surrounding this seemingly trivial decision, it had--as far as I can see--zero effect on any of the aspects of my life I feared it would. It has become an anecdote about my inability to make decisions, but more, and more relevantly to me now, it is a cautionary tale.

Surrender your illusions of control. Quit thinking what you do, in the moment or on a larger scale, is necessarily so important or irrevocable. Make a choice. Make your choice work. Be open to what it might lead to. I'm well aware that you may already know all this. I needed a little refresher course.

A Wisp, or Maybe Not

I remembered something tonight as I was filling the dishwasher, one of those memories that pops up periodically, that you have in a recurring way but usually with years in between the occurrences.

The memory is this: I am in my childhood bedroom, kneeling at the window that looks out the front of the house onto the field. It is summer; I know this because there are haystacks in the field, not the loose piles of hay that appear in children's books, but tightly packed, cylindrical haystacks that we used to climb and play on until they were taken away and the grass allowed to grow again.

It is summer, and it is just dusk, the sky still the sky of the late afternoon as though viewed through a veil, barely darker, a little less crisp. I am alone in my room, which is small and square; it contains a full-size bed, which I consider very sophisticated for sleepovers and in general, a white desk made by my grandfather, a dresser painted by my grandmother, and a closet full of books, which are mostly soft-covered paperbacks I have read a dozen times each and occasionally organize into categories.

I am kneeling by the window because I am watching out the window, which frames the entire gravel-covered driveway. From my room, a person could still be the first person in the house to see a car turn the corner, make a right onto the driveway, descend, and pull up in front of the garage.

I am waiting for my mother to come home.

She has gone out to dinner with The Girls. Although my mother has always had quite a number of friends from different parts of her life, The Girls were the only cohesive group, remain so, really. When I was growing up, they used to come over once a week, year round, to drink wine, eat cheese and crackers and laugh so loudly the house seemed to shake as I lay in my bed at the top of the stairs. I can hear them still, laughing, my Aunt Bev's throaty deeper laugh, Mrs. Pisinki's higher, more giggly one. They made being a grown-up seem like so much fun; they made my mother seem like a stranger to me, but in a way that was glamorous, covetable.

On occasion, when it was one of their birthdays, for example, The Girls would go out to dinner. Sometimes they met at somebody else's house for some reason. I have no recollection of why my mother had been out with The Girls on this particular evening, just that she was, and that it was still light out, and that I was kneeling on my floor at the window waiting, pretty patiently but intently, for her return.

It is important to note that I was not a small child in this memory. We moved to this house when I was seven, and I feel like this happened a few years later, although it's impossible to be sure. But it was around the time I had a pale blue silky nightgown with a scoop neck and little bell sleeves that made me feel beautiful and a little grown-up, and I want to say I was at least eight or nine, maybe ten.

And so I waited; in this memory, I wait. I am not anxious; I have nothing in particular to tell my mother; I am not ill. And my mother went out fairly regularly, and I was not a clingy, needy child. In fact, I have no other memory of waiting like this for her to come home from an ordinary evening out.

But the feeling, I remember, and it is this feeling, I think, that keeps me from letting go of this memory, makes it pop into my head every few years, makes me now feel like a child.

I know my father and sister, cat and dog, were all home. I would not have been lonely, did not need to be alone. It wasn't bedtime. But in that moment, that pre-evening hour as the sky darkened imperceptibly outside my window, my mother was not home. I don't remember her getting home, which bothers me. There is no ending embrace to this memory. But I remember the waiting, the absence of action, of motion, of doing, so rare now in this life, as it may well have been for her then, and in the patient waiting the unfailing knowledge that when her car pulled in, when she walked in the front door, that all would be well.

They've Still Got It...And So Do I

By "they" I mean the Boston Celtics, and by "got it" I mean the ability to advance past the first round in the playoffs. Obviously that's not what I mean in terms of myself.

But before I elaborate, let me just say that I got my hardcore, down-and-dirty, soil-in-the-nail-bed, back-aching gardening day--with Lily, for much of it, and I planted all the tomato seedlings, and two kinds of squash, and cucumbers, and eggplant, and peppers, and almost all of the herb garden. And Lily planted the extra little square off the main square almost all on her own: corn, cantaloupe, and watermelon. She wrote the names of what she had planted on little metal labels attached to metal sticks to be plunged into the ground as identification. She too was covered in dirt and basking in the good kind of exhaustion at the end of the day. Will we reap what we sow? Time will tell. I think so, though.

So the only part of the day not spent with my hands in dirt was spent on the couch, with Lily (and sort of Annika, before she fell asleep) watching the Boston Celtics beat the Cleveland Cavaliers. I had forgotten how this feels: the seventh game in a playoff series, a game the Celtics had a chance to win, and although I watched the previous six games, I hadn't expected to feel watching this one, well, so much like I used to.

For much of my life, starting from the time I was about Lily's age until well into my thirties, the Celtics were an accepted, everyday part of my life. Basketball was a language I spoke, a world I was comfortable in from very early on, due to the fact that my father--a now forty year season ticket holder--indoctrinated me into it. And when I was old enough, I fell in love on my own: I've written about this before, this love of this team, so I won't rehash old territory now.

But today, with Lily firing questions at me unceasingly, I got caught up again in the drama, the intensity, the romance of it all, and I realized for the first time that it is not just playing basketball that requires a surrender to a rhythm, watching it in the right way does too. I also wrote here that I have never experienced the so-called "runner's high" (or maybe once, but I think I blocked it out of my mind so as not to encourage further running). I have, however, experienced a kind of watcher's high, when even home in front of a television set and not absorbing the sounds and smells of the crowd and the players in a live venue, I am in every sense "in" the game, anticipating what the players are going to do, feeling wild desperation when they don't.

Why are they wearing green shirts in that picture from the other game? What is a referee? Will there be another fight? Is that a fight? Is that? Why is his nickname The Truth? Do you think the headband guys look like brothers? Lily's questions brought me back to a faraway place, made me realize how patient my father had really been when he was "in" the game himself, made me want to be the kind of parent who can impart and exemplify love and respect in the face of the most persistent, chatty four-year-old.

At one point, Ben came in from outside to find Lily and I quite literally on the edge of the couch, mirroring each other's posture, leaning forward, as thought to absorb just a little bit more of the tension. Are you watching TV with Mama? he asked, mocking me a little, as I have essentially banned it as a weekend pastime, particularly on days as beautiful as this one was.

She didn't even turn to look at him, so transfixed was she by the instant replay of the three point shot, which I'd explained to her--along with the equally fascinating one- and two-point shots--earlier in the game.

It's not television, Dada, she said, all seriousness. It's basketball.

Amen.

Fits and Starts

I still can't do my "in the zone" zen gardening essay because I need another "in the zone" zen gardening day to refresh my memory, the kind when I fall into bed and am asleep already as I roll onto my side, wake up feeling every muscle ache, individually and collectively. Maybe, with a little bit of luck, tomorrow.

But I did garden today, with Lily, leading me to some other kinds of thoughts on gardening, which is still--clearly--taking up quite a bit of mental space for me these days. We went to the gardening center to buy some seedlings for the vegetable and herb gardens, the bins at the bottom of the porch steps and the hanging planters on the porch. Lily wanted to plant a "special pot" for the porch, so she was on the lookout for "flowers in my favorite color," which these days is red.

As we pushed the cart around, and I kept my eye out for the things I knew I was looking for, Lily's eye was drawn to just about everything else: those fuzzy flowers in bright colors that look like caterpillars on stems, fledgling grape vines with tiny little fledgling grapes, and--as I surveyed the all-important, eye-level tomato offerings--the fruits and vegetables closer to the ground, on the less desirable shelves: cantaloupe, collards, and corn.

What's this? she asked about the corn, which I had naively tried to grow my first year in this house, until I realized that for the three or four stunted, bird-pecked, worm-mauled mini ears I ended up with, I could have had more time to enjoy the perfect ones the working farm 500 feet up the street grows and sells on the side of the road, close enough so I can put a pot of water on the stove and be back with the corn before it boils.

Corn, I said, about to give my corn spiel, when I saw her face as she fingered the little grass-like shoots. We had just bought some corn on the cob from Florida at the grocery store (which looked pretty good, in spite of its travels), and I knew she was trying to imagine how these measly little shoots could possibly produce those meaty yellow cobs.

By the time we reached the register my cart was full of all kinds of things I'd sworn off in the past: melons that have a tendency to take over the garden with their unruly vines, showy annuals that make me feel wasteful, hot peppers in all manner of unlikely shapes and colors that I will never eat.

When we got home, Lily ran immediately to the shed to get her little wheelbarrow, shovel and rake. I'm ready to plant, she shouted as she barrelled toward me and our collection of motley seedlings. Although she has planted with me the last two summers, it has never been with this level of enthusiasm or interest. I had to promise her more for tomorrow to get her to come in for bed.

This year's garden may not be my shining sea of heirloom tomatoes, neat rows of unusual salad greens and my beloved Chioggia beets, which I couldn't find and hadn't ordered. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure what it's going to look like. But it won't be just mine, either.

Ownership. It's a beautiful thing.

Tonight, Lily and I both will sleep with soil ground under our fingernails and satisfied, anticipatory smiles on our faces. After all, what is gardening but a gritty and tangible manifestation of hope?

Trying to Get to the Root of the Matter

Well, I was thinking I'd plant my garden tomorrow, but apparently it's going to rain. I've been thinking about planting my garden all week, though, and I can't quite let the dream die. I also am in dire need of a little escape. So I'm going to try a little experiment: I'm going to try to recreate the experience of planting my garden as a writing exercise. (Stop yawning; I'll try to make it good.)

Before I begin, though, I have also been thinking this week about how gardening is one of those things, like dogs, or cheese, or professional basketball, that is immensely important to me, and to millions of other people, but leaves others dead cold. It's so funny how you can meet someone with whom you have literally nothing else in common, but if you find out they are obsessed with their tomato plants you can talk to them for hours. I love this--this notion of people with their true passions sort of orbiting around them, and the fact that sometimes the passions bump up against each other in a like-meets-like sort of way allowing real connections to be made. When I discover some common passion with somebody, the more obscure the better, in fact, it always endears them to me no end.

So now, for you like-minded gardeners AND those who think they have zero interest in the subject alike:

I hate exercise. I do it sometimes, when I am feeling the need, but for me it is like taking medicine, only slower and less tasty. I find it monotonous and tiresome and frustrating, and I have never once, really, had that rush of endorphins associated with rote exercise such as jogging or using a stationary bike. I feel good when I'm done, but in the same way I do when I swallow an antibiotic pill after a long illness: as though I'm being proactive.

I do, however, love exhausting myself physically, almost running myself into the ground intentionally, in ways that engage the mind as well as the body. The examples that come immediately to mind are ballet, which I used to do full force for hours on end, in a state of exhilaration,and full court basketball, at which I have no talent but am able to completely immerse myself in, or used to be able to, back in high school, the last time I played. Skiing can almost do it, although I need to concentrate a little too hard to keep from coming face to face with a tree.

In my adult life, the times when this happens, when--and I apologize for the overused sports metaphor--I find myself "in the zone" are most often when I am gardening.

My vegetable garden is a large fenced-in square with a small extension off one corner in the back yard of our house in Connecticut. When we bought the house, it was clear this fenced-in square had once been a garden, but it was so overgrown it took me and two strong friends most of a weekend simply to clear out the brush. Once we had, I was a bit overwhelmed. I'd grown up gardening, but I'd never had one of my own: all mine, to plan, plant and tend as I saw fit, all of the responsibility and all of the reward.

So I just plunged in, bought dozens of seed packets, seedlings, bulbs, sets, and decided one Saturday morning to tackle the thing. This first year, although I had grown seedlings myself, indoors under grow-lights, I didn't actually do much planning at all. I bought on impulse, dug in some random rows and sections, persuaded hapless visitors to poke in peas or beans around the edges to fill things in. I think I was worried on some level that nothing would come up, but of course it did, lots of things, in that way that seems like magic: churned up soil to a sea of green in what seems like an hour but is actually more than a week.

But I am not doing what I said I was going to do. I said I was going to try to explain what it feels like, and instead: this preamble, this neither here nor there about exercise and connections, again. I will try to do this right, what I wanted to do, this weekend.

Stay tuned.

Self-Reflexive Self-Reflection

About a year ago my father purchased a number of baseball caps for his loved ones on which the words: 01-20-09 Bush's Last Day" are printed. I wear mine proudly, and often, and I like to think of the rest of the recipients wearing theirs, too, in other pockets of the country, little beacons (or beanies) of hope calling out to like minded patriots, something like George Bush Sr.'s Thousand Points of Light. Ha.

But before I get too pleased with that idea, I will rein myself in; what I'm getting at is that I wear my cap with pride, and here in New York, where I live, I almost always get thumbs-up signals, or big smiles, even the occasional high five. I have never stopped to think if I would wear my cap so blithely if I lived in rural Idaho, or Mississippi, or how it would feel to get a disapproving look, a negative comment. I suspect I would feel extremely uncomfortable, upset, in spite of the fact that yes, I am the woman who once unwittingly wore a Boston Celtics cap to a Yankees game and got cups thrown at my head for my troubles.

Anyway. The point here is that yesterday I was wearing my cap to take Lily to school, as I often do in lieu of brushing my hair, and when the elevator door opened on our floor, a neighbor from the 6th floor was already inside. Now I happen to know, based on an interaction at a previous co-op board meeting, that this neighbor is politically conservative, a rare quality in this neck of the woods, which is partly why the fact stuck. I like this guy, but we don't see each other that often, we don't interact socially, we are not close friends. I can't imagine that his reaction to my cap, its message, would have been much more than a barely perceptible eye roll, an inward: Whatever. Which is pretty much how I would have reacted in reverse had I seen him wearing a Bush/Cheney t-shirt. Well, my inward note to myself may have been a little less gracious. Perhaps his was too.

So what did I do when I saw him standing there in all his conservative glory? Make a joke about the cap to break the awkward silence? Refuse to acknowledge it? Try to engage him in a legitimate political discussion? No. None of the above. I quickly, before he had so much as a chance to read it, whisked the cap off my head and tucked it away in my bag.

Fortunately, my neighbor was, sweetly, talking to Lily, who finds him quite engaging, so neither of them noticed what I had done, which the neighbor would have found odd, and Lily would have certainly commented on (But WHY, Mama, WHY are you taking off your cap?). And when we reached the lobby, the neighbor, in a rush, walked ahead of us, and Lily and I continued on our slow mosey to the subway station at the end of the street. As soon as there was half a block between us , I took my cap out of my bag and put it back on.

When we got down to the platform, the train was there so we ran on, Lily practically airborne as I pulled her along. We sat, caught our breath, and suddenly the neighbor from the elevator appeared; he was on the same train, which must have been waiting at the station for a little while before we got on. He stood directly facing us, making conversation, and the whole time I was thinking: I can't believe I'm wearing this cap. There is no reasonable way to remove this cap for the second time this morning, as he's standing two feet away from me. He hates me. He hates this cap.

At the next stop, when Lily and I got out, and the neighbor continued on uptown, I had a flash of recognition or rather insight about myself. I was the kind of person, I realized, who would remove a cap that didn't mesh with a virtual stranger's political beliefs so as not to offend him in any way. This is, I believe, a problem. My sister, for one, would no more have removed that cap than cut off her arm; it would never so much as occurred to her.

I find it fascinating how we reveal ourselves to ourselves in such dribs and drabs, over such long and excruciating periods of time, and in such fruitless and frustrating ways. Not that this has to be, or is always so. Sometimes the revelations are actually revelations. But I feel abashed. Tomorrow, I will wear my cap again, and if Jerry Falwell himself is in my elevator I will smile politely, but I will keep it on.

Revise, and Improvise

It would be very, very boring if I were to make today's entry (which, at least, exists) an exercise in self-flagellation, about how annoyed I am at by myself, by the self-pitying excuses (cough, cough; it's Mother's Day; fatigue; Ralph Waldo?) I have come up with in the last few weeks for the entries I have missed. I DO NOT want you to write on here or to me in private and tell me it's okay, that I've done so well so far, that I need to give myself a break. Believe me: I do not have a problem giving myself a break, and if I didn't do it so readily when times are easy, I'd be kinder to myself about doing it when times are hard. I'm already bored. Let's write.

A sentence occurred to me this morning on the subway, as I was sitting there, slumped a little into the hard seatback, looking at a man holding a banana in a strange way, sort of cradling it to his side. The sentence was: This business of being human is all about revision. I'm not sure where it came from, exactly, but it keeps repeating itself in my head, and it's not because I've been writing so much, because I don't mean revision in the context of writing at all.

I guess I have been thinking--or accumulating unconscious thoughts--about the ways in which we need to keep revising as we live: our expectations, our goals, our beliefs, our selves. What we think or assume to be true at one moment in time may not seem so the next; Do we give up? Surrender? Throw our arms into the air in despair? Sometimes, I guess, but mostly we revise.

I thought she was so perceptive. I thought this place was so beautiful. I thought I wanted that more than anything. Wrong, not anymore, nope: So we revise.

This process of revision is actually quite beautiful, I think. It is testimony to the fact that we are so adaptable, so flexible, so willing and able as a species to roll with the punches when we need to, to survive. I am not talking about inconsistency, about a lack of core. But sometimes, even our most deeply held ideals reveal themselves to be off-kilter, for any number of reasons--we may stand still but all around us is in constant motion--and we revise them for the better, so again they work, hold true.

I am being vague, deliberately so, I guess. Maybe I will come back to this, if the sentence, the idea, keeps worrying at me; maybe I will not. But I want to end on a different if related note.

One afternoon earlier this week I was having a bad day. I can't even remember the specifics, just the feeling, and when I emerged from the dirty, crowded subway station into the dirty, crowded street at the horrible little section of town my daughter's school moved to this year, I felt even worse. As I stomped toward the school for afternoon pick-up, actually stomped, such was my mood, I started hearing music. And when I got to the corner across the street from the school, there was a skinny man in a gray blazer and skinny jeans, silver hair, sunglasses, playing the saxophone. It was 3 in the afternoon in a genuinely unpleasant, busy, touristy part of town, people were pushing past each other in every direction, and as the light turned red, then green again, then red again, I stood there, just listening.

And when I finally crossed, I looked up as I was walking, the long rich mournful notes growing slightly fainter with each step, and the sky was blue and clean, and the air felt cool on my face, and I was in the middle of an intersection in New York City and a guy was just standing on the street corner playing the sax.

Improvisation. Also important for humans.

Emersonian Excuse

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Just Thinking

Does everyone, everywhere, at every point in time, feel as though the world is suddenly changing so fast they can see it happening? Sometimes these days I feel as though I planted a seed, sat down to wait for five minutes, and harvested a watermelon. I feel as though I can't keep up, and when I try I inevitably realize that my efforts are so far behind the curve that I may as well have saved myself the time.

Time. It's really all about that, isn't it? What we do with it, mostly, how we fill the hours of the day. I read an article in the paper a few days ago about a ten-year-old girl and the various Web sites she spends hours on each day, sites I have never heard of, will likely never visit. Her mother, who writes about technology and is thus much savvier than I, reported this as though it were nothing, simply the way things are.

And I know this to be true. When I write about my negative reactions to it I end up sounding older than I actually am, curmudgeonly, even. I don't even know what I want to say anymore about this, except for that I keep thinking about it: the ways in which it's different to be ten, these days, than it was when I was ten, or the very real possibility that it's actually exactly the same and merely the surface trappings have changed. Perhaps the spelling bees or barn raisings or square dances of a hundred and fifty years ago are just the precursors of these Web sites, nothing more or less than how kids spend their time.

I can, however, speak to my own life, the way I spend my own time, and I have to say that at least 50% of the time I spend online is time I wish I had back for another purpose. In fact, writing this, an idea is brewing; I think I am going to have to curb my internet usage, not just because I will get more work done if I do (although I will), not just because I will feel better about myself (although I will), and not just because I am genuinely curious to see with what I fill those wasted hours.

I want to have control over my technological advances and not the other way around. Another mother and I were talking today about how modern children never have to wait. I think this is true, and I think it's significant. There is no delayed gratification, or rather much less than there used to be. Well, it's not just children. I did many amazing things on the Internet today. Most importantly I was able to view the work of my current favorite artist, whom I am fortunate enough to be collaborating with, without having to drive 6 hours north. I was able to finish an article and send it instantaneously to an editor, who probably took me more seriously for the expediency with which I honored her request. But other than that, today, nothing I did online was necessary, enriching in any way.

I need to think about this a little more before I decide how to proceed. This pledge--750 words--is kicking my ass; another one might push me over the edge. next thing you know I'll have to start....regularly exercising or doing whatever else it is people who keep resolutions do. Don't worry. I'm not an extremist. But I want some of my time back. Even it's just to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. And think.

Mother's Day Present

Sleep.

Wine, Continued (Hate Previous Title)

I'm sick again, Annika still sick. This will be short. Fooooorcing myself.

The restaurant was on a little dead end side street. It was open to the sidewalk, basically had three walls, so no matter where you were sitting, you were effectively sitting outdoors. It was a proverbial "hole in the wall," just the way I like it, if the food is as good as the atmosphere's shabby. We ordered the garlic soup, the roast chicken: the specialty of the house. There wasn't much more on the menu. The waiter brought us a basket of bread, ripped chunks of baguette. "Wine," he said, and we could tell it was meant to be a question, but one to which there was only one answer. We nodded. He didn't ask what kind we wanted; we didn't ask what kind he was bringing.

The jelly glasses he set on the table did not look like any of the wine glasses we'd encountered at any of our fancier meals. And the wine he poured into them, from a glass pitcher, no less, didn't either. It was pale yellowy-green, and effervescent. It looked like sprite, maybe, or a sparkling lemonade. "What is it?" I couldn't help but ask, in spite of his dismissive brusqueness.

"Vinho verde," he said.

I have forgotten to say that it was hot. Lisbon in July is baked dry. The air was vaguely dusty from the top layer of caked dirt in which somehow greenery still grew, flowers and shrubbery and trees. The sidewalks were hot, emanated heat like a baby with a fever, and the sun beamed down with uncanny precision; the skin where my hair parted was burned after one afternoon. And even though this restaurant was open to the air, had ceiling and floor fans running, it was hot there too, and the garlic soup worked that magic trick whereby hot broth makes you feel cooler by comparison, and the chicken was crisp-skinned and limey and garlicky, and even the chunks of bread were fresh, with a chewy crust that's surprisingly hard to come by.

But the wine. I had never tasted anything like it. It was cool and light and clean-tasting, so perfect a match for the garlic and lime and yes, the heat itself, that we drank glass after glass of it. And later, as we walked up and down the dusty winding streets, we didn't feel sleepy or heavy or regretful, the way one does sometimes after wine in the afternoon. We felt refreshed and even energized, and pleasantly, happily full.

This was the first time I remember realizing that there were wines and there were wines, and that when you somehow managed to match the wine to the meal to the occasion--whatever the wine happened to be--you had elevated the experience in a way nothing else quite could. Vinho verde, I learned later, is the national wine of Portugal. The people drink it like water, with every meal, in every setting, which is possible because of its low alcohol content, its bubbles. It is a classic example of terroir: a product from and of the earth that has produced it, and I will always remember that meal, that first sip of that wine, as an entry into a world I could suddenly glimpse and yearn for.

The Helen Keller Moment

A work request: A personal essay about wine. Hmm. I like the idea--so many possibilities. The occasion on which I could not distinguish between a bottle of Trader Joe's famed Two Buck Chuck and a fine Brunello. The evening my cousin who has a hearing loss opened the most expensive bottle of wine I have ever owned when she was babysitting because she didn't hear me say "on the counter." The regrettable fruit wines from Vermont. No, I think I will go in a different direction.

For much of my adult life I was the person who passes the buck when it comes to choosing the wine. Not deferential by nature, when the wine list was presented, I always deferred. I knew enough to know, as they say, what I didn't know. Which was pretty much everything.

I knew so little, in fact, that I started to get confused about what I liked and didn't like. At a restaurant with friends, or when presented with choices at a bar, I would often go for the "I'll have what she's having" approach. Sometimes I would drink a glass of something, think to myself, "well, that's pretty good," then taste something else and realize the first glass was actually revolting.

And then there was the language. I just couldn't get a handle on it: the nose, the undertones, the quaff--I'm not even sure if that's actually a wine word, but it intimidates me nonetheless. When discerning companions spoke of "smoky notes" or the taste of cherries or pear or the "lingering finish" I smiled and nodded along, but I could tell my brow was furrowed. It was red or white, that I knew, but it was all wine to me.

Until I got married and went, for the first time, to Portugal on my honeymoon. I loved Portugal, the rocky winding roads that led to wild cliffs and hotels in convents looking over oceans. I loved hot, chaotic, also somehow sleepy Lisbon too, especially the food: the little custard-filled pastries redolent of nutmeg, the sharp and lingering sheep's milk cheeses, the barnacles and bacalhau, the sopa a lentejana--soup with garlic and a perfectly poached egg.

When eating, I am in familiar, effortless territory. I know what I like and what I want; I know what I am eating, how it was prepared, how to make it myself at home. In fact, I have no food insecurities; they are all reserved for the beverage portion of the meal. So as I ate my way through Portugal, when it was necessary, Ben chose what we drank, or a waiter or shopkeeper chose what we drank, and I chose the food, and it all went swimmingly if not groundbreakingly until our last lunch in Lisbon before returning home.

There are a number of restaurants in Lisbon that specialize in a Portuguese version of roast chicken. I had done some detective work to determine which was supposed to be the best of these, and we had decided to make that our final meal.

More tomorrow....

And So, We Grow

So I wrote about gardens yesterday because lately I can't stop thinking about gardens, and gardening, in all kinds of ways, and sometimes a subject sort of has to whack you over the head to get your attention, and when this one finally did I thought of lots and lots I wanted to say.

Although I am fortunate enough to have a house with a yard on the weekends, a house where I have a vegetable garden and an herb garden and a perennial bed and way too many other planting projects that seemed like a good idea before I had children, I can't seem to stop gardening here in the city as well. In fact, I seem to be on a manic gardening bend, poking seeds into soil wherever and whenever I can.

But I waited too long and have a damp-haired, red-cheeked feverish baby to tend to, so I can't right this minute tell you about my urban gardening adventures, and my visits to Home Depot and the greenmarket and the hardware store and the flower district with my trusty equally gardening fixated four-year-old conspirator in tow. I can't tell you about our building's roof garden, which I created and maintain in spite of the lack of a water source, or the garden boxes Lily and I gave to her class and are teaching them to plant. Or the little gardens on the sidewalk in front of our building that my neighbor and I have been planning, bright squares of variegated color in the flat cracked sidewalk.

I will; I want to write more about this almost unconscious need to plant things in this inhospitable environment, how it makes me feel I am fighting back, mastering the landscape, refusing to take no for an answer. Staking a claim, I guess, too, making this place that still feels indomitable, impenetrable, a little bit mine.

But instead, because it will take less time, and my baby is stirring again, I will quickly write about my grandmother, who has gardened all her life, and is now 93. I have noticed that as she has grown older, although she is less and less able to physically garden herself, to get down on her knees in the dirt, is more and more interested in gardens in general: in mine, in anyone's, in her own.

When the swimming pool that was such a focal point of my childhood was filled in, erased in her yard, there was suddenly a vast expanse of dirt visible from my grandmother's sunporch, where she spends much of her time. When I sat with her there, watched her pale eyes gaze out the window at this expanse, I knew what she saw: the garden that could be. And now it is: it is planted, it is a garden, and though I have not seen it yet, don't know what it looks like firsthand, when I think of her looking out that familiar window at what could be the ghost plot of my childhood, I don't feel sad anymore. I smile.

I think I know why gardening is as compelling, as important or more so to my grandmother than almost anything else these days besides us. In a world, or a place, or a moment in time when we feel powerless, growing things gives back the power. To poke a hold in soil and place in a seed is to throw back your shoulders, fling out your arms, acknowledge--embrace--what will be.

Small Gardeners

At our first house the garden was at the back of the yard, up against a fence that divided our lot from the neighbors', the neighbors being the Lewises, who (just as a point of interest) had THIRTEEN children. There were smaller garden patches in other places, from the peas that grew up one side of the house, to the Concord grapes my mother grew for jelly, to the daffodils planted each fall, to the row of pine trees my father planted along the edge of the front yard in the year, I think, we bought the house, when I was one.

When I was seven, we moved to another house, with a bigger yard, and my parents put an enormous garden in the middle of it. I remember when my grandfather came with his tractor to plow up the plot; this memory is crystallized for me in a picture that exists of Alison, rosy cheeks and thick bangs, sitting on said tractor--I think she may have ridden on the back of it all the way from my grandparents' house, two miles away.

This garden was large and square, with even rows and carefully delineated areas, and we were allowed to plant in it too. My mother was the main planter and decision-maker as to what to plant; my father, the primary caretaker, and I can see him crouched in the dirt, thin and agile, weeding, weeding, always weeding. Weeding, of course, is a good job for the perennially anxious, as it is defined and concrete; it is the crossword puzzle of gardening. It is bad for the perennially anxious, though, in that it is infinite: one day's work erased altogether overnight. But enormous vegetable gardens need to be weeded so frequently that we all weeded; we could identify a summer squash sprout and distinguish between it and an infant dandelion almost as early as we could plant a seed.

Although my mother did do the seed purchasing, and this was a working garden--we planted what we ate and ate what we planted--it was large enough for experimentation, for fun. I always wanted to plant something dramatic and impractical: corn, or watermelons. Melons and pumpkins were showy, with their curling tendrils and snaking vines, but they took over space, got stepped on. Any fledgling actual fruits to appear were worried to death: caressed, lifted to show visitors, loved too much.

Harvesting was the most desirable job, with the exception of picking beans at the end of the summer, which grew tedious. But to twist and snap a zucchini, to gather a plateful of ripe red tomatoes, a bumpy, prickly cucumber destined for the pickle jar, was pure unadulterated satisfaction. The best harvesting job, of all, however, was the potatoes. They were planted in hills, the plants leafy and strong, and when we were given the go-ahead, we could dig up the hills.

This is one of the great sensory experiences of my childhood, which I will continue to recreate for my own children: the glorious scratching dig through loose and pale sun-dried dirt, the dark rich soil beneath, knocking fingers up against one little knobby potato, and then another. An Easter egg hunt in a pile of dirt, more potatoes than ever seemed possible, the big ones low and deep, the tiny marble-sized balls by the roots. All gave equal pleasure, all could be rubbed clean in the grass, piled up in a colander or a pail, carried in for presentation, with pride as true as if we'd made them ourselves. Which, in a way--the way gardening gives you ownership, even if you're only seven--we actually had.

Where Does the Love Go? It Doesn't.

Tonight, for about two hours, I sat and watched a basketball game, a Celtics game, on TV. It was a great two hours. Watching the Celtics play basketball made me feel like a visitor to my former life, although I certainly wasn't thinking that while I was watching; I was just watching. And talking back to the TV, and calling my dad and sister who were at the stadium during time-outs, and wondering for the thousandth time why professionals would think throwing up three-pointers was a better way to victory than just running the plays.

This is the point, though, that it is very difficult, these days, even when I am alone or doing something I love, to get away, out of my head, for any reasonable amount of time. Two hours felt reasonable; I'll take it any way I can get it. But besides serving as a much needed outlet, conduit out--for a moment in time, anyway--watching the game made me remember how much I love watching basketball, love this team.

It's a very funny thing, to love a team. For of course the team I watched tonight, KG, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, is not the team I watched and loved five, ten, twenty, thirty years ago, and those teams were not the same as each other. The players shift like detritus on the beach as the waves crash and retreat: a few new shells or strands of seaweed wash up, and a piece of driftwood washes back to the sea. A few players remain; the rest go, and then the old ones go too. The ocean changes, roughened by a storm, calmed by a period of mild weather, guided by the tides, but existing all the same; its existence is a constant, so is The Team.

So loving a team is loving an idea, a symbol, continuity of something larger than the sum of its parts, its parts at all. And for me, as I suspect is true for many other fans of basketball and other sports, it is being a part of something myself, of believing in and investing in something with other people, focusing hope on a single target as as an amorphous yet connected group. This is a weird concept, this "being a fan." I have tried to write about it before and have never quite succeeded. It defies logic, really, seems linked to some of the bad ways groups organize around a common theme. But yet it is good, and it is powerful, too--this unspoken connection to an enormous wave of emotion centering on a group of men in shorts, a leather ball, a wooden floor, a game.

Being a fan is like being in a family, the biggest family in the world. You don't have to agree on religion or politics, and you don't have to be nice to each other at holidays. Becoming a fan is more mysterious, a subject for another day. But being one is easy. You just have to want the same thing as your team's other fans, sit tight when you don't get it, ride the shifting tides of fate over time, and love: actively or passively depending on your circumstances. But actively is better.

This seems like a trifle, a cream puff, and maybe it is. I'm skirting around, haven't brought the nail-biting, hands to the head in dismay, actual fist pumping engagement of fandom to life. But my thesis is sound. Being a fan is a very real way to engage with the world, and engaging with the world, as much as you can, loving something in a way that transcends the thing itself, is important. It feels great. I needed a reminder. I wanted a victory, and sweetly, I got that too.

A Room of One's Own, Sometimes

It seems to be part of the American Dream for parents to provide their children with shelter, food, an education and....their very own bedrooms. Wherever families live, in the city, suburbs or rural places this seems to hold true. But why? It does seem to be a very American idea, grounded in our notions of independence and privacy, even within the confines of a family home. And it seems like a luxury, proof of the parents made good, no longer a spare room or a guest room until each child is set in her own compartment like eggs in a carton, not to mention the liberties inherent in the room's furnishings and decoration.

But I wonder. In our first house when I was growing up we each had our own room. Mine was a small square room with pink walls and a little desk under which I used to sit and read with my little nightlight. I remember it as being wholly mine; I liked the closet, which was long and large and in which my mother stored things, like books I wasn't ready for yet. Alison's room was little more than a closet off the kitchen, if I remember correctly. I can vaguely recall a crib in there, but after that? Nothing. I don't even remember the room with a bed.

When I was seven and we moved to a bigger house, the one my parents still live in, I remember the excitement of choosing our bedrooms, although in hindsight it seems that my mother had decided already which would be whose and that we were subtly nudged in the proper directions. These were both small, square rooms; the main difference between them was that mine again had a long narrow closet, in which I had my beloved bookshelf, and Alison's had what we called a "walk-in closet," in which we occasionally slept in our sleeping bags.

Those nights I remember well, the nights when I was granted entry into Alison's closet lair. And that's what I'm thinking about: how parents strive so hard to give each kid a separate bedroom, their own space, and then--if the parents have done their job well, or the stars have aligned for the family--gravity pulls the kids together one way or another and they end up lying inches away from each other on a pink carpeted closet floor, falling asleep in a pack like baby wolves, listening to each other breathe.

I don't know. Sometimes when Ben is away and I tiptoe into Lily's room to check on her at night I lie down beside her, turn so our backs are lined up in the middle of the bed, and sleep in there. This is not a big apartment. Space is at a premium. But it's not always the luxury we think it is to close a door and be alone.

I Can't Believe I'm Thinking About That Song: "I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again"

So Annika stood up today. Twice. Lily and I were both down on the rug with her but not interacting with her; Lily was attaching the dangling toys to the play-mat, and I was organizing the toy basket. Annika was just crawling around, and then I noticed she was near a chair whose seat cushion is pretty low to the ground. She was doing a sort of downward dog yoga position, then she rotated to a sitting position, then she crouched up and reached one little hand up to the seat. After a few seconds, she was vertical. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but when I realized she was actually standing, I was excited. What a big girl! I said to her, and she chortled, and then Lily looked up, and I asked her if she knew what this meant, what Annika would be doing before too long.

Falling down, she said, as though the answer were obvious. And I said no, walking, but later I was thinking about it, and I realized Lily's answer was just as valid as mine. And in fact, it happened Lily's way later in the day. We were in Lily's room; Lily was doing a kind of annoying Lego mosaic toy that she always thinks she wants to do but doesn't really like, and I was putting away some winter clothes. Annika, in a recurring theme, was just crawling around. She made her way to Lily's stool, again reached up that one little paw, and was soon standing, her expression revealing that even she was a little surprised. She's doing it again, Mama! Lily said, and I was about to make noises about how exciting this all was, when boom. She fell right onto her bottom, and her facial expression barely changed: that same, surprised, how-did-I-end-up-here?

And for a number of reasons I have found myself thinking about this all evening, the miracle of standing when you haven't ever stood, and the inevitability of falling, when you haven't ever fallen, and then for the rest of your life. Lily has been asking lots of questions about when the first people existed, and how they got here, so I bought a book on evolution, and we have been talking about the subject quite a bit: tadpoles to frogs, apes to humans, single cell creatures to eventually us by virtue of time, time, the passing of time. We've also been talking a lot about gardening, what seeds need to grow, and sometimes I find myself mixing up the ideas in my head: the single cell creatures needing water and sunlight to straighten their spines, grow taller, taller still, faces toward the sun like sunflowers on thick green stalks.

I'm not on any mind-altering medications tonight, so this is just me, and I don't think this is too far-fetched, if a little loopy in the rendering. But evolution is a kind of growing, and growing is a kind of evolution, and in a span of less than a year--she is eight months old today--Annika has gone from a tiny seed to an upright being, spine straight, face uplifted toward the sun. Welcome to the world, I found myself thinking for the second time since the morning of her birth, but this time not with exhaustion and relief suffused with joy but a little ruefully. For standing is a miracle, a beginning, the state before the step that launches all the walking in a lifetime, but it is also, once accomplished, only a matter of time before the falling starts too.

So as not to leave you (or me) on a somber note, I need to remind myself that as Lily (gladly) rushed away from her Lego mosaics, and I dropped a pile of hats and mittens onto the floor to rescue Annika from her splat, she put her little hands flat on the floor beside her, one on each side, and pushed to a crouching position. And then she started to crawl again.

Babies, Blogs and Phoning It In

There's some movie starring Reese Witherspoon that had a line in the promo that went something like this: You have a baby? In a bar?! As I sat down just down I thought of this, then amended it to fit what I was thinking, which was: You have a baby? And a blog?! This is pure silliness, of course. I suspect millions of people with babies have blogs, maybe more. It's just that mine wouldn't fall asleep tonight, kept waking up, and I finally had to scoop her up and hold her to sleep, which almost never happens--just figures she'd pick a night when I waited until the last minute to write AND I still have pneumonia.

You see where I'm going with this? Not yet, I guess. I was also thinking about my newly conflicted relationship with The New Yorker magazine. I love The New Yorker. I've been reading it pretty religiously since middle school. I used to wait for it to come in the mail, savor it, anticipate the next issue's arrival once I'd finished. Now, although I love the magazine just as much, its arrival each week haunts me like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story; I lie in bed at night imagining I can hear each issue's little heart beating, the beats sounding like the words: Read me, read me, read me, or we'll accumulate to such an extent that we'll smother you in your own apartment.

The thing is, I just don't have time to sit and luxuriate in The New Yorker the way I used to, and this makes me sad, sometimes, but mostly it makes me feel stressed out, so every once in a while I will have a New Yorker binge, and stay up until 3 in the morning maniacally speed reading issues, or force myself to take one with me when I go out and read it as I walk to gain extra minutes in the reading process. It's ridiculous, really. And although I could just chill out about it, and set the issues aside until I go on vacation or have some time to read (which I anticipate happening in 2010), somehow I can't. And so then I am left with the question (are you on the edge of your seat?): What is the point of reading The New Yorker if I'm not actually enjoying the experience?

How is this relevant, you may be asking. To anything, you may add, if you are a little bit mean. Well, it's about tonight. The pneumonia, the baby, the blog. I am writing this right now because I made a promise to myself a hundred plus days ago that I would do so unless I absolutely could not. Actually, I didn't even say that then but made it so when I physically couldn't write. I am not writing for any other reason, now, really, but this one: my pledge to myself and the fact that I will feel disappointed in myself if I fail myself.

Is this worth it? Is it meaningful? Or is it forcing yourself out of bed when you've had too much to drink to down an aspirin and a glass of water because you know you'll feel marginally better in the morning if you do? I'm not sure. But ha! I have a baby. And pneumonia! And I wrote this anyway! I actually just typed a question mark by mistake after the word "anyway." Or maybe it was a Freudian slip.

A Little Proxemics with Your Evening Tea

The year I got my driver's license, my senior year of high school, I was a member of the varsity basketball team. (I will let that go without comment, as it might make those who have never seen me play basketball think I was actually talented.) Because it made my parents' lives easier, with both of them working and my sister at a different school, this was also the winter I was allowed to drive my dad's (quite nice) car to school. Because I was a newly licensed day student at a school where half of the students had no access to a car and three-quarters of the students were too young to drive one anyway, this made me highly sought after as a giver of rides, at least, and on a new driver's high, I happily complied.

Did you think I forgot about the basketball team reference? Oh ye of little faith. I mention it because I remember one basketball team event in particular, a team party, that was to be held at the home of another day student. We were to leave from the school and get ourselves there, which meant that I was subtly wooed all through practice; there were only two of us with cars, and those who didn't snag a ride with one of us were to drive with the coaches, an infinitely less desirable proposition.

I probably wouldn't remember this evening at all, this team event, this short drive in my father's nice car, if it weren't for what happened when I unlocked the doors, and we all jumped in. For there, in between the driver's and passenger seats, right in the epicenter of the car, was a black, gleaming, gigantic device that looked like something out of a Star Trek episode. Or since I've never actually seen Star Trek, I'll revise: It looked like something the Professor would have made for Gilligan to attempt communication with outer space.

What I remember most were the oohs and ahs, the dead silence as I lifted it (straining a bit, it was that big, okay no it wasn't really, but almost) from its enormous base, and dialed my house. I provided my parents with some meaningless information and hung up, the significance itself ringing loudly in my ears. The silence buzzed. Finally, someone said what we all were thinking: Wow.

Yes, it was 1987, and I had just made an actual telephone call IN THE CAR. It seemed like a miracle, although a true miracle would have been if this basketball team had managed to win a game all season (some day I'll write about the time the coach of the other team forbade his girls from shooting at all in the second half so as not to humiliate us further). It seemed impossible, magical, awesome in the non-80s sense of the word. Joel H. Wilensky: Whatever else you want to say about the man, he was one of the early bandwagon-jumpers on the Car Phone Express.

I was thinking about all this (I realize even for me I've been hopping around like, well, someone on an awful lot of heavy medication) because a few days ago, in a feat that combines the subject of proxemics with the subject of my technological idiocy, I decided I needed to change my g-mail password. For one thing, a few close friends could basically assume my identity in five minutes flat if they so desired, considering how loose I've been with the log-in information. Nicole and Bryant: Stop ordering porn with my Pay Pal account. Just kidding. (This codeine is really strong stuff, apparently.) I was pleased by the fact that I managed to do this successfully, quickly, seemingly with no pitfalls. Until the next day, when I tried to access my e-mail from my Blackberry.

I kept trying, and I kept getting the same error message: Apparently the Blackberry would not recognize my log in attempts until I reset it with my new password, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do that. A technologically savvy friend couldn't do it either, and for this entire week I have not been able to access my e-mail when I am away from home. It makes me crazy, so crazy that I will probably next week go voluntarily to a Verizon store and beg them to help me, although I would under other circumstances choose having a root canal over setting foot in a Verizon store.

This is insane. I am not an executive. I have never in my life received an e-mail that needed to be answered within twenty-four hours, let alone in the ten minutes after its in-box arrival. The problem is that like Henry Higgins, I've grown accustomed. It now makes me uncomfortable, edgy, when I cannot check my e-mail whenever I feel like it. Not that I do check it all the time; that would be rude. But that the incoming business of the day (Has my neighbor played his Scrabulous turn? Has my dad read my blog yet?) is at my fingertips should I hanker for it makes me feel at peace with the world.

I'm not even going to get into how I feel when I don't have access to my cell phone. The me who wouldn't walk to the mailbox at the end of the street without it would be unrecognizable to that teenager who felt a thrill, if not an intimation that the world was about to change forever, when she made her version of the "man on the moon" contact with her mothership in front of her equally amazed basketball friends.

It is true that I do fairly regularly get work-related e-mails and phone calls that it's nice to be able to answer on the spot. But the world spun before I could do so, spun like a basketball on the tip of my index finger, which is to say a little wobbly, as though anticipating the imminent fall. For it was a fall, I think, in the biblical sense, a fall from grace, a fall from Eden, when we became accessible around the clock, and I think in our brave now world we are going to need to make some guidelines, set some rules for ourselves.

More on this--and I promise next time it won't just be the longest preamble in my own personal history. I would like to end by saying that I've always found the Verizon salespeople to have a certain serpentine quality. Hmmm.....

Briefly...

...I keep thinking about those people who do stuff when they're sick. I mean stuff like climbing Mt. Everest or running their first marathon. And I mean sick like cancer.

Now I have a legitimate reason to feel just the teeniest bit sorry for myself. I'm not responding to the antibiotic I was given and feel truly terrible again, so bad that I just spent the past 15 minutes engaged in bitter internal debate about whether I could--should--write "sick again" in lieu of what I am writing.

But the truth is, I'm not going to write much more than this, and I can manage this, think it's probably better in the long run to push through it than let myself off the hook without a fight. But those people, those really, really sick ones? I guess it's yet the umpteenth example of the importance of relativism and perspective. I guess if you knew you likely had only a finite amount of time left, your desire to do something impressive with or in it would likely rise.

But I personally think it's interesting how for me, being just regular old sick, intensely so, but not in a way that doesn't seem recoverable, makes everything nearly intolerable, from walking, to pouring a bowl of cereal, to sitting through a meeting, to typing at a computer. It's hard for me to imagine that if, god forbid, faced with that kind of scary sick, I wouldn't be quick to throw in the towel, back to the bed, prone for the duration. With TV and treats.

This sounds a bit pathetic. Not to mention that it makes me seem on the whiny side of the street headed toward the land of the precious and lame. But as I sit here, coughing and feeling--I admit it--more than just a teeny bit sorry for myself, this is what I am thinking. And about how absolutely amazing and impressive and inconceivable it is that someone who feels a hell of a lot worse than I do right now, with a lot less reason to think their situation is impermanent, could muster up the motivation to get up, and then try to push themselves further than it seems they could go.

I admire this spirit. I see it, in different incarnations, in people I know sick and well. It has something to do with living being about asserting one's aliveness, and with there being value in sometimes making yourself do the thing, whatever it may be, the thing, you aren't quite sure you can do.