Belief

I believe that I will be happy again.

Because I have to.

I believe in making things and hanging them up, in saving roses and handwritten letters, in well-earned dirty fingernails, and miniature candy bars.

I believe that someone who can make you laugh should know how much it matters.

I believe in candles, and rescuing bugs, and that people who hurt animals are going to hell, which I don’t believe in, although maybe I actually do.

I believe in poems, even though so many of them are terrible, and in the way hot sand and hot pavement feel under bare feet, the way the sun warms things all the way through.

I believe that people who aren’t loved will never recover, and in children, all of them, and in movie theaters, kindred spirits, full moons, and driving around with the radio blasting with nowhere to go, which unfortunately is one of those things only teenagers do, although it shouldn’t have to be that way; it’s our own fault.

I believe that kindness is character, that air-conditioning is mostly unnecessary, in ferries, and dancing, and making people feel heard.

I believe that gardens are miracles, that my parents would die for me, that humans are myopic, that dogs know how to love.

I believe in convertibles, and public transportation, which is allowed—both, I mean—and in libraries and champagne and that sometimes it’s okay to clean up by throwing things in closets and slamming the doors.

I believe in catching snowflakes on your tongue, and swing sets, and newspapers with coffee, and watching your team win, and doing the dishes a certain way, which is not one of my best qualities, but still.

I believe in words, and holding hands, and unmistakable chemistry, that it’s true you only regret the things you didn’t do but not true that what goes around comes around, which would make life a little too easy, I guess, but more fair.

I believe in islands, and bathtubs, and yellow rain boots, and that your heart can actually hurt.

I believe in getting up each morning, however reluctantly, and telling yourself you will get through the day.

I believe that falling asleep with your arms around someone is one of the best feelings, and in looking up, and in lying on the floor or ground or grass or carpet, which I do all the time, even when it isn’t appropriate.

I believe most people want to be good, because I have to, but that some people just don’t know how.

I believe that naps are important, although I never take them, and in finding furniture on the street, and in writing in pencil, and black ink over blue.

I believe in singing, that my children love me for all the reasons I most want to be loved, and that this makes me lucky.

I believe the story is always in flux. And somehow, for some reason, I still believe in happy endings.

2014. A Beginning.

Not till we are lost….do we begin to find ourselves….    --Thoreau

What We See

It was a topsy-turvy twelve hours or so for me—roiling evening, some peace at sleep—and I woke up twisted in the comforter with wild hair and the unfamiliar sense of being rested. Half-sat, rubbed my eyes, extricated myself from the bedding. Pushed aside enormous cat, rearranged the pillows, pulled up the bedspread, and felt something hard underneath, near the end on the side away from the wall. Lifted it to find my glasses, prim little package, smug as though resting on burgundy velvet in a long glass case. I picked them up, contemplated them briefly, and set them on the kitchen counter, where they remain.

            This doesn’t mean anything unless you know that they’ve been gone for over a week, and for 18 years or so I’ve worn them almost every day. I looked in the bed, of course; it was the obvious place. It’s so rare you can pinpoint when and where something is lost, rarer still that knowing so, the thing stays lost. I had been lying in bed with my little one, in that half-awake state you get when you put your child to sleep, intending to roll out when she’s out and find yourself hours later opening your own eyes wondering if it’s day or night. My glasses were pinned to the pillow by my face, and I picked them up and, as I’ve inadvisably done so many times before, tossed them to the end of the bed. I didn’t hear them hit the ground, so assumed all fine, until the actual morning, when I searched through and under the bedding, enlisted a search crew with better eyesight and, irritated, decided I’d find them later. Where could they have gone? The trajectory arc had been six feet long.

            But somehow, at the end of that day, after a cursory pat down and quick peer around the baseboards, I didn’t look anymore. And the day after that, and the day after that, and even yesterday evening, as I walked alone up Park Avenue, just past rush hour as the sky turned milky and the lights came on around me up to the sky like stubborn fireflies, blinking, one by one, I reached up and stroked my own cheek to feel their absence. Grand Central loomed larger in the foreground as I walked, the street signs unintelligible, the light exquisite, nothing clear around me but my own hands, in focus and distinct, like the pavement under each step forward.

            All week I’ve been aware of this contrast, the sharpness of my immediate surroundings, the silvery-white of my nail beds, the yellow streaks in my eyes in the mirror, the dust dancing in the faded light through the Madison Avenue side windows, and then the vast, soft, vagueness of everything else. I’ve been walking the streets looking up—skyscrapers with rounded edges, watercolor trees and storefronts, no brushstrokes, no primary colors, even, the whole wide world through a filter of silvery-grey.

            And I, pushing through the weighted light half-seeing, have felt unseen, in a strange and even glorious way. Not anonymous, or one of the teeming masses, or whatever people say about being an ant speck in a city of millions, but unseen, and the relief has somehow changed everything. Where are you? a friend I’m meeting asks on the phone, and I look up, first, and then around me. I can see the green, the vertical lines of the poles, but no numbers or words, not even the existence of numbers or words. It’s midtown, so suits, shinier shoes, briefcases like a forties movie—nobody’s young, even out of focus. I stop on a corner and look at my arms, still brown, fine etched lines, golden hairs glinting a little in the dying light.

Where exactly? she asks again, and I cross the street, music playing in my head for the first time in a long time, teeth not clenched, shoulders not tight, eyes ahead on a chalk-rubbed horizon. I don’t know, I finally say, although I know of course I have to stop up close to answer, close enough to see the 36^th or 38^th, or 39^th Street sign, stop because we’re meeting, stop because I have to, because even in this iridescent bubble I’ve been moving in I know that everybody isn’t in there with me. But in that instant—that single shard—I don’t know where I am and I don’t care where I am and I can see that in not knowing, not seeing, letting things recede, accepting the lack of clarity, I have somehow found myself again.

And when my little one—soft-focus, pink and tan, no edges, inside or out—looks at me this morning when life starts up again, after spotting the found glasses on the countertop, and asks me if I’m never going to wear them again, I am startled. Why would she ask that? I think, squinting at her hard, although she always asks the questions you would never think of, forcing me, so literal, to circle back and wonder how she ever got there. And I look at her, and see her very clearly, see the white webs in the black countertop, the fly on the lid of the sugar bowl, my own lined hand reaching out to stroke her soft, soft hair. The glasses rest on the counter, neutral.

I don’t know, I say, which is the truth, and she walks off, satisfied, always, with the indefinite response. And I look at the glasses again, and pick up my lukewarm coffee cup, and follow her out of the room. Without looking back. For right now anyway, I can see enough.

January 1, 2011 aka 1/1/11

And so we begin.

What You Do

I spoke to a friend at around 5:30 this evening and realized, when she asked me point blank, that I had not left the apartment in over twenty-four hours. Why? Sick baby, that's why. The routine is familiar to me now, in a dreamlike way--sharply defined behind a veil of haze--perhaps because it so often launches itself in the middle of the night. Like most people, I suppose, I loathe being wakened from a deep sleep, but when a hot face presents itself to you with a wail of utter despair, you are suddenly so awake that it's as though you never were asleep, as though night never actually happened--it is in these moments, at 3 a.m. with a sick little girl in my arms, that I can really believe the world has stopped, that only she and I exist, that only her suffering and my desire to alleviate it exist, and that I was given this child, put on this earth, for precisely this reason, to be the source of some, of any, relief.

We spent all day like this, once the long night finally turned itself over, and all day, we lay beside each other, her eyes hot with tears each time she sat up over the pot I was carting around with us from room to room. She knew the sips of liquid she was drinking were making her sick, but she is two, after all, and she couldn't quite get over the emptiness in her stomach, and we tried, again and again, my teeth clenched as I waited: a popsicle, a cracker, some Gatorade, a rice cake, some seltzer. It all came up, and I held her head each time, and then she sank back into me each time, collapsed, almost, in a rare submission, saying, over and over, "Me not better, Mama. Me not."

"You will be soon," I said, holding her, pushing her damp hair off of her forehead, my own mind flashing a surreal sideshow of my own sick memories, as they always do when they are sick: the antennae on the small TV carted into our sick rooms and the static on the screen, such an anachronism now, my father in the doorway with a coffee Fribble from Friendly's, my mother's face, a face I never imagined wearing until the first of these night wakenings, the cool cloths she always brought, just before you needed to ask her, poking those chalky orange-flavored baby aspirin into the soil of a plant in the living room, a story I have not told my girls, maybe won't.

The rise and fall of a day with a fever, the sobbing at the worst of it, the hot flushed skin, the bright eyes, and then the cooling off, the euphoria, the padding around holding hands--"I like to walk with you inside, Mama," making me mad at myself for tiring of it. "Now I better. I hungry," and then the rise again. And the fall. And the inevitable turn to the favorite game, the way I will remember my littlest girl over the course of this remarkable year of her life: Tiny Mama, in which she turns to me with no warning, no introduction, and announces, "Now you baby," and I am meant to immediately assume my role, no dress rehearsal, no allowances for timing. This time, though, when I complied, when I asked for my blanket and for her to make me some soup in her kitchen, she shook her head, forgetting, in that instant, that the whole thing had been her idea, initiated not by me. "No," she says, climbing onto the couch and nestling into me, her skin, I can sense through her shirt and through mine, hot and dry again. "You Mama."

"Why?" I say, curious about the unprecedented pivot, unexpected change-back.

"I need you take care of me," she says, matter-of-factly, aptly, so sweetly that I almost cannot bear it.

And the day continues. The rise and fall of it.

And I do.

poemish

Things have been turning up: the ladybug towel, just today.

And the silver ice tongs, and the puzzle piece.

And I wonder if this is the way it is: that nothing is ever actually lost?

The Heart Cake Day

Yesterday, Lily, Annika and I made a cake for a just-four-year-old we love, and today we presented it to her at her birthday party. We made the cake because the birthday girl's mother had expressed dismay at her daughter's very specific yet frustratingly vague vision and wasn't sure if she could take it on or if a bakery could be hired to create it. I liked the idea of the challenge: how do you make something look the way it looks in someone else's imagination?

This is what the birthday girl wanted: a large heart-shaped cake that was the color of raspberries and covered with glitter. We mixed the batter, which I had thought would be white but which Lily and Annika insisted be pink. We baked it, and made the frosting, which came pretty close to raspberries, perhaps a little more pink. We covered the entire cake with silvery translucent glitter sugar crystals, and Lily and I wrote the words "Happy Birthday Amelia" in "fancy" lettering with a glittery, silvery icing tube.

Annika and I walked to the party carrying this enormous cake, as Lily was meeting us at the party spot from the school bus. It is amazing how much attention you get when walking that many blocks with a giant raspberry-colored sparkly birthday cake and an Annika. The cake itself suffered only one relatively minor smushing, into my sweater button, and arrived at the party before most of the guests. It was set in a place of honor, tilted up for maximum viewing potential, and after about five minutes the birthday girl realized it had arrived. She ran across the room, hair flying, eyes enormous, skidding to a stop in front of her cake. She climbed up on a stool for a closer look. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, as though to see if the cake had remained in place. She shook her head slightly.

"It's EXACTLY what I was hoping for," she said.

Sometimes, this actually happens.

I Believe in Dog

This seems like a good sign: even though it's 11:48, and I still have about 2 hours of work to do on the baby food cookbook, I have not one but TWO entries I want to write. I think I will choose one and have the other in my back pocket for tomorrow. But maybe this will spiral out of control in a good way and tomorrow I'll have seven or eight ideas, and what will I do then? As one of my wiser friends would point out: That would be a high-class problem.

So which to tackle first? Dogs. Or rather dog as conduit to a light at the end of the tunnel, by which I mean a shift in perspective, which really, when it comes right down to it, is often all I am looking for, all anybody ever needs. Today was Sadie's second dog job in two days--they don't call collies working dogs for nothing. (Although don't tell Scout--he thinks his job is licking the garbage can and occasionally moving from the couch to the bed.) This visit, for several key reasons, is mine and mine alone. For one, it takes place when Lily is in school and Annika, theoretically, is napping. For another, it is to the YAI NAtional Institute for People with Disabilities, and when they say disabilities, they're not kidding. I thought I had prepared myself, done my homework, before my first visit, but I was truly taken back by the severity of some of the disabilities: people who could not see, hear, speak, walk or move their limbs of their own accord, people missing eyes, hands, arms, legs, parts of faces, people who, on first sighting, barely resembled what we think of as people at all.

So what is a person, anyway? An assemblage of limbs and organs and brain and skin and blood? What if all that isn't there?

As it turns out, Sadie knows, knows what a person is and how to pad right up to one and lick that person's hand and then her face, turning slightly and leaning into a wheelchair so that person can rest her hand, a loose and angled contraption with three fingers and heavy bulging veins, on her back ever so lightly, burrowing those fingers into her fur, throwing back her head, sightless eyes toward the ceiling, her smile so wide you can't bear to look at it for long because you feel yourself on the verge of bursting into tears, which would be a human thing to do, would make one certainly a person, too, but wouldn't be quite right under the circumstances.

Wouldn't be quite right because this room, the lunchroom of this huge facility, with a sort of funny not-quite-hospital smell and plastic chairs around the edges and social workers and therapists who have that earnest liberal arts vibe and groovy faded t-shirts from expensive islands and a leader of the program who has a digital camera to photograph the people with the dogs and a shiny bald head and the confidence that must come with knowing you are going to heaven if there is one and six dogs, from the polar bear sized Homer down to a teeny curly ball of fluff named Mica, and about thirty people who didn't come with the dogs, people in wheelchairs and careening around unsteadily and lying on the floor and leaning into the walls and clutching at my arm and reaching into my back pocket where I keep the pictures of Sadie--this room is full of joy.

It is the most joyful place, in fact, I have been in years, maybe ever, because the people--and feeling joy, that makes a person--are so joyful that they are shrieking with it, some of them, mouths open so wide I can see their tonsils, or so overcome by it that they are trembling with it, rippling all over from head to toe with it, throwing out their arms and throwing them around the dogs, the whole dog in the cases of the smaller ones, the neck or midsection or tail end of the larger ones, like Sadie, who licks and leans and makes a sort of vibrating whistling happy sound she doesn't make anywhere else, overcome herself, perhaps, with so much showing of joy, so much directed at her.

What makes a person? Joy, and sorrow, too--the man who whispered, "Noreen died," in my ear each time I drew near until one of the earnest social workers explained, "He loved her. It was a very long time ago," and I looked closely at this man's face, his leathery black skin, his red stained sweatshirt, the mournful piece of spaghetti stuck to the top of his shoe and put my arm on his shoulder. He jerked; I realized he hadn't seen or sensed me. "Noreen," he said, shaking his head, and I could see his eyes were cloudy white all over. "I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

But most of all, I think, more than the joy or the sorrow (one thin line, remember?) is connection--that moment when a person becomes linked to you and you to them in that moment more meaningfully than anything else in the world because for the two of you, it is that moment--that is the moment of your life right then. Sadie knows this, always has, knows how easy and life-affirming it can be to simply connect. She brings me to it, takes me home remembering, valuing, wondering--wondering how many people like this there are in the world, people we just don't see.

Oh, Sadie. You are such a very good dog.

And finally, one last late note: the director always tells the people who come to visit with us in the lunchroom not to touch us, to touch the dogs but not the people. They never listen--they prefer the dogs, for the most part, but when one isn't right at hand, they reach out to me instead. And I close my hand around the hand on my arm, it is always my arm, and whisper, "Thank you."

The Thin Line

That song from the Breakfast Club is running through my head as I type, in part I suppose because the one small section of the Oscars I managed to catch involved a somewhat disorienting sighting of Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald standing on stage together. I felt like I should be spraying Sun-In in my hair and zipping up the bottoms of my jeans. You know which one I mean: Don't you, forget about me...

This blog, my struggles to keep at it despite, well, everything, is exposing an insecure side to me that I'm not sure what to do with. I do know that I cannot, will not, give up on it, especially when I least know what to do with it, so here I go, again--is that a song title, too? Anyway.

A new friend, someone I liked from the instant we were introduced, wrote to me recently that, "...the line that separates happy stages from sad is always rather narrow...along with our age seems to go a sense of deep vulnerability." This struck me as astute and even somehow comforting, not to mention the fact that "deep vulnerability" is such an apt way of describing how I am finding 40 so far. These girls, my fierce, open-hearted, self-possessed Lily and my merry, sharp-eyed sponge of an Annika: they fill me with awe, make me laugh until my eyes water, cause me to lie awake consumed by their well-being until the sun rises and it's time to fill the milk cups, leave me dazzled and drunk with exhaustion, and raw. Vulnerable. Deeply, deeply so.

Tonight at dusk, the three of us set out for Sadie's "dog job," our therapy work at Gilda's Club, into a perfect early spring evening, the kind when the air feels so clean and new on your skin that you almost want to lie down and sleep on the sidewalk. A loud night--ambulances, more dogs than ever, it seemed, strollers swerving, pizza parlors open on all sides to the world, radios blasting, even a bagpipe player in front of the art house on 6th Avenue, wearing a kilt and sending piercing honking notes out over the sounds of the voices. "Mama?" Lily said, flushed with pride on our way home as passers-by commented on her leash technique and praised Sadie more extravagantly than usual. "Yes?" I said, suddenly a little bit shocked that she was old enough to be walking beside me like this. "Is it mean to say I find that music a little annoying?" I just laughed, and she laughed, and Annika, who loves nothing more than when we are laughing, laughed, too, and we kept walking, and laughing, and becoming, I saw later, when I thought about it, a part of the beautiful chaos of the evening, the street, the city, and in that moment, on the happy side of the line.

Talking Points

You know that thing we all learn in a college linguistics class or from some yahoo sitting next to us on a bus to DC or because it seems to be one of those things that Americans just know by osmosis about how Eskimos have so many words for snow? I am, again, tempted to look this up on Google, exactly how many words for snow the Eskimos have, but am remembering the time I found myself looking up how old Barbra Streisand was when she made Yentl, for no reason any reasonable person could discern, and so again I will stop myself--although I won't promise not to do it tomorrow, after another glorious four hours of sleep. Did you read the Huffington Post piece about how sleep is the real feminist issue these days? If not, do. But back to my story. I know you were riveted: Eskimos. And snow.

No, not riveting, but this morning when I was helping Lily decide which coat to wear, the snow thing popped into my head, and for the first time ever I found myself thinking it didn't necessarily make very much sense. Or rather, that if we were to ascribe anew a word to every possible noun in our own language, there would have to be as many words for each noun as there are Americans (again, tempted: Damn you, Google and your infinite knowledge).

It's late, and even in a land that hands over Ted Kennedy's Senate seat to a Cosmo centerfold, it's not really a good idea to follow Obama. But do you know what I mean? When I was first explaining to Lily what a dictionary was, I told her that if you wanted to know what a word meant, you could just look it up in this book, and the book would provide you with a definition. "Does it have a picture for the word?" she asked, and I smiled, thinking of all those SAT words: loquacious, indeterminate, obdurate, scintillate. "Not usually," I said, but then--when I scoped out the children's dictionaries at the bookstore--realized that kids' ones do and became perhaps irrationally enraged. If anyone can picture what a cupcake looks like, or a kite, or a carousel, it's a kid, and whatever the kid's version is, it's bound to be better than the dictionary artist's. It's like falling intensely in love with a book and then seeing the movie and thinking: What? That character isn't supposed to look like Matt Damon.

More to the point, if you say cupcake to me, this is what appears in my mind's eye: a white, fairly fine-grained, regular not behemoth sized cupcake in a foil wrapper with a tall swirl of the kind of icing that definitely contains shortening, not butter, and when I say tall, I mean about two-inches, and when I say icing, I mean fluffy but solid enough to hold its shape, pastel-colored, and I wouldn't be adverse to a sprinkle of colored sugar crystals for a little additional crunch. If you say cupcake to a certain friend of mine, this is what appears in his mind's eye; a dense, fudgy, low-to-the-ground little mouthful with a slick glaze of dark chocolate on top. If you say cupcake to Lily, there's no cake at all: she's strictly a frosting gal, a quality I endorse in my children.

So a hundred words for snow, if that's what it is? I guess I'm not actually all that impressed, you seemingly ubiquitous (why are the SAT words coming so fast and so furiously?) linguists, you. Go beyond, deeper than, cupcake, and see what I'm getting at: love, family, mother, peace, happiness, anger, life, death, self, I could keep going forever. Does any word mean what it means to me to anybody else in the world? Not even close. Frankly, I think it's a bit of a miracle most of us find so many people to communicate with. I wonder how often we actually know what each other is saying.

Tomorrow

The world seems off-kilter, and I talk, talk, talk and think, think, think, and still it rains in the morning, hard, and I send my first-born out the door in her yellow rain jacket, walk her onto the school bus, kiss her soft head, and walk off again, the little one in my arms, send her off as though she were a parcel or a soldier: out into the world, thinking, thinking as I watch the bus disappear around the corner: I would die for you.

The little one searches my face as we wait for the elevator, reaches out and touches my cheek with a delicate finger. What you name, Mama? she asks, a new game, and I answer, wiping a speck of crayon from her forehead, My name is Amy. She chortles, shakes her head in mock-dismay. No, no, she says. You not Amy. You Mama. You my Mama.

Later I emerge from the subway, from this bizarre maze of train-filled tunnels below the streets on which cars and trucks and buildings dash and perch and settle, and as my head clears the overhang and is first exposed to the air outside the subway system the sun appears, and the sky, for the first time all day, is a sort of dirty pale blue but blue nonetheless, and the rain has stopped, and I walk my boots around the puddles stretching my gloveless fingers, testing the air for premature signs of spring or at least a winter on the wane.

The girls have been listening to Annie, begging me to sing the songs they love best: "Maybe," to see me rock an imaginary baby, or a gleeful Annika, or even a lanky Lily; "I Don't Need Anyone But You," to hear me tell the story of the duet I performed as a babysitter on the beach, in Cape Cod, as a just teenager (while I wonder how at thirteen I minded seven children most of each day for a week, marvel at the energy and resourcefulness of my barely adolescent self); but most of all "Tomorrow," for the sheer belting joy of it, the way my woefully inadequate (so pretty, Mama, they say, believing it) voice cracks at every high note, the way I beam when they join me in the chorus.

And as I walk up and down the city streets, especially, only, on those rare occasions when I am alone, I find myself singing it in my head, wondering about the lyrics--is tomorrow always a day away or only a day away? I want to check it, but I keep forgetting, and then when I could, say now, I decide not to do so, not to know.

Instead I remember what I keep letting myself forget: that I have always had a way to set things straight a little, a little at least, a way to rein in the voice at the edge of an octave-and-a-half, a way to be everything I am, to center, to breathe. And so I do that, this, instead. And a little, a little, at least, it works.

I would like to remember that...

this morning Annika announced, verbatim, "Hey guys! Grandpa Joel is fast asleep on the couch, dreaming."

And stay tuned for my thoughts on hardware stores. Baby steps, baby steps...

Lily is Six

Fortieth birthday came and went with little fanfare; in truth, but for the constant questions as to what my "big plans" were, it seemed like a blip on the radar screen. But tonight, although I was up until nearly 4 the night before, I am not so sure I am going to be able to sleep--all I can think about is this night six years ago, nearly to the minute, when Lily was born, and everything changed irrevocably.

I now cannot help but thinking of my life as "before" and "after," meaning that an almost impenetrable ravine exists between the part of my life before I had children and every instant since. Do I think this is too dramatically stating the case? Not for me, and not, I think for many people I know. It is hard for me, sometimes, to recall the "before" parts now in any way that doesn't seem like a dream. But this night, December 19th, 2003, the dividing line, as it were, I know will remain real, concrete, alive, for as long as I live.

It is true that I don't remember it seamlessly. Certain parts are blurry--I can access faces of loved ones popping in and out, the race down the corridor, the way my mother looked at one moment as the doctor was speaking to me, the Indian accent of the anesthesiologist, and so on. But other parts, scenes, are so visceral that my eyes well up if I so much as conjure them into re-existence: the moment my eyes met Lily's for the first time, for example, the tiny, soft yellow outfit my grandmother had knit for her to come home in, and the strangeness of trying to get it on her tiny limbs in the hospital room the frigid morning we brought her home.

I was just having a conversation with a friend about how in a way, there are no right choices, or wrong choices: there are only choices, and we make them, and then we take it from there. It's the unknown, the "after the choice," if you will, that defines us, and the way we respond to what we can't or don't choose: what happens to us, as we plough ahead, perhaps thinking we actually have more choices than we do.

I am such a skeptic, such a pragmatist. I have always, since very early childhood, been one of those people who believes you make your own luck, that the notion of fate or destiny is a bit of a fool's gold--shiny and appealing but worthless in the end. But somehow, although it defies logic, and my very core, I also believe on some level that Lily and I chose each other, and I felt that way six years ago, when I lay on a narrow gurney late in the night before we almost lost each other, and looked into those eyes and in that looking, that lock of connection, for the first time in my entire life lost sight of everything else in the world.

Forty, Day One

My graduate school thesis, which led to the writing of two books I wish I hadn't written, was a collection of essays written during the year I was twenty-five, which somehow seems like it happened about seventy-five years ago. I remember one line from the introduction of this thesis, or at least part of it, that described twenty-five as "the year I decided to document." This is not entirely true, however it is true that I did, actually document that year almost inadvertently, due to the requirement of writing the thesis. I can decide, purposefully, to document forty, and maybe because I have had an extra glass of wine tonight, I think that I will. So here I go. Night one. I have the venue. I have a goal. Let's see what happens from now until forty-one.

Work In Progress

Ugh. Last time was so bad I think I scared myself off. Remind me never to write a bad second novel if I ever actually publish a first one; I"m not sure I can tolerate the self-loathing. But now, now--I begin again, feeling like a Democratic president trying valiantly to pass a health care bill or get Israel and Palestine to sit down to a nice brisket, or falafel, and just talk it out. Actually, I feel a lot better than that, for no good reason. Have I mentioned I'm about to turn forty? Yes. And although I'm not exactly doing back flips on mattresses like the cast of Glee (a reference only 1% of you, if you still exist, will actually get), I'm not dreading it in quite the way I expected to.

I will admit that back in the day, those days when I could drink more than a glass-and-a-half of wine without falling asleep mid-conversation, those days when I occasionally went for a run, those days when I knew--and not in a purely nostalgic way--that movies were also shown in real theaters on big screens with surround sound, I used to think forty sounded impossibly old. And then everyone else around me either was forty or almost there, like me, and it suddenly seemed still kind of like the beginning of things--the beginning of the middle of things, anyway, and I didn't mind the thought so much, not the way I had hysterically met the age of ten: that fateful move to two-digit numbers.

I think it must be said, and if you are reading this it is pretty likely you have at the very least met me and more likely know me well, that thirty-nine has been, in so many ways, one of the more challenging years of my life. Although the particulars of everyone's thirty-nine are unique, I suspect that when viewed through a long lens, perhaps from the sager (oh, I hold out hope) vantage point of fifty, mine will seem part and parcel of what happens to many of us at around this age, or rather stage in life, when suddenly the opening credits are firmly behind us, the characters have for the most part been established, and the plot is in motion, for better or worse. What then? we say, or I do. What now?

But this isn't what I thought it would be like, I sometimes find myself whimpering to myself (not in a crazy out-of-body way but in a pathetic, feeling-sorry-for-myself way), and I'm not even really sure what "it" is, although I guess in a vague way it means my entire existence. And it's not that the particulars of my thirty-nine are even that distinctive or necessarily bad--in fact many of them, such as my children, are in so many ways even better than I ever could have imagined, but that is such a simplistic thing to say when of course their sheer existence is a piece of what I mean: my life, the whole, messy, disobedient, unraveling but only within the confines, hilarious, exhausting, frustrating, incomprehensible, slippery, elusive, did I say messy?, whole of it.

What did I think it would be like? I'm not sure I ever thought much about it, although in fifth grade my best friend and I had an elaborate vision of our adult lives that involved pink taffeta dresses and Mercedes sedans, which I think says vastly more about our upper middle class suburban surroundings and the very early eighties than it does about my vision for my life.

I guess I am thinking now, right now, in this instant, as I sit at my computer at almost midnight on the Monday before I turn forty, on an evening before I will get up at 6:30 with my two little girls to give them breakfast (ponytails made while seated on stools at the counter, please finish your milk, Annika turning on the same CD over and over to hear the "Mama song," where's the backpack? where's the permission slip? downstairs with my splashing cup of coffee to put Lily on the bus), that what needs to happen for me to meet forty with any sense of equanimity, is for me to tell myself, and to believe it, that the story is not yet written, that what matters is to keep writing it, that often the best writing happens when you don't know just exactly what you are going to say.

So here I go, with forty in mind. Let me keep writing. I must.

Baby Steps

It's always the second act that gives one pause, a pause that all too often becomes a grinding to a full-on halt. This is my way of acknowledging that yet again I took an unexplained, probably unearned, certainly uninteresting break from this, my essential outlet and yet my bete noire too. And that yesterday, in honor of my father, my most vigilant reader, I returned, like the fog, on "little cat feet," and that tonight I find myself, as I have so many times over the last however many nights, sitting at my desk thinking: Why am I doing this again? What on earth could I possibly have to say?

I just took a long break and pretended for a while I was not going to make myself keep writing, but all along I knew that I would. I always know when I am going to do something and when I am not, which seems to be a useless gift, as so often the things I know I am going to do are wholly unimportant, and the things I know I am not going to do are the things that must get done. And besides, we all know that at heart, I do believe I have a lot to say, and will keep saying it, even if I occasionally wander off into a void for a period, a void filled with small child obligations, vaccinations against already mutated viruses and some really atrocious TV.

One reason I started this blog was to have a place where I would be able to work through pieces intended for publication, and I have been stalling quite impressively, and I am quite a staller on my worst days, on writing so much as a line. So I think I will start here, and perhaps work it through in this capacity, as the bad TV is not proving conducive to productivity.

What I am working on, in my head, anyway, is a sort of a manifesto, inspired, in part, by Orwell's brilliant "Why I Write;" it will be called: Why I Read. I am both in love with my as yet nonexistent manifesto (always a bad sign) and overwhelmed by it, even in concept. I have been asked to write a piece for which this essay would suit, so it is, therefore, one of those things I must do, but as explained above, that fact alone is a speck of dust trapped in a light shaft: nothing, or very little more.

Pondering why I read, I guess would be, in the words of the immortal Maria, "a very good place to start." Except there is no pondering, really; I have mostly thought this through. I read because there have been more moments in my life consumed by reading than by any other thing, and because so many of these moments have made me aware, either consciously or subconsciously (which I realize later), that there is a reason for my existence on this earth--to read the words I am reading in that moment, and in the other moments, too.

Although it is neither the first nor the best example that comes to mind, I remember reading these lines from Orwell's essay entitled "Reflections on Gandhi." Such an innocuous little throw-away of a title; such a knife plunged into the clueless heart of what people had thought before Orwell raised the knife. He wrote: No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. Not the most devastating or reprinted line in the essay, but the one that, when I read it, stopped my breath in my chest, made me then read almost everything else the man had ever written.

It is the last part, the part about sainthood, that makes me want to raise that knife skyward, letting the blood flow off it and around my feet. Had faint praise ever damned so much as when Orwell referred to Gandhi's "clean smell?" Gandhi, to get back to the "Why I Write" essay, wrote because of his political beliefs, but his political beliefs were his muscles and organs and bones; they were him, boiled down to who he actually was. I read because it makes me know Orwell, and I read because it makes me know almost everything I know, including how to live, and think. Reading is the only way I know to connect myself to every mind that ever wrote, every idea that has ever been written, every picture that has ever been painted, and more: to all the thoughts that haven't yet been written down in words. I read because to read is everything.

See? Working it through. Bear with me!

Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby...

Tomorrow, on November 24th, my father will turn 67. A few weeks down the road, my birthday will arrive in the wake of his for the 40th time. But in honor of my dad, a man who keeps the greeting card industry in business but rarely receives any birthday recognition of his own, I would like to revisit a different birthday: his of 27 years ago.

When my father turned 40, my mother threw him a surprise party with a 1950s theme. There was a live band playing all of my father's favorite songs, and hours upon hours of dancing, and everybody got all dressed up. My dad, who had arrived in his regular clothes, was given the proverbial white sport coat and, I believe, a pink carnation by way of transformation. I remember my parents' friends in matching leather motorcycle jackets, my aunts in poodle skirts, cousins in sweater sets and rolled up jeans and my own outfit: a turquoise taffeta circle skirt and a white cotton blouse tied at the waist, a black velvet ribbon in my high ponytail. I was twelve, but thirteen was just around the bend, and I felt very glamorous to be at an adult party with dancing and live music and so many grown-ups, grown-ups who seem to me in my mind's eye like sophisticated creatures from another planet, eons older than I am now, will ever be.

How is it possible that all of those grown-ups were only forty years old? If I close my eyes I can see my father calling requests out to the band, doing the Twist in the middle of the dance floor, his hair still mostly black, the room surrounded by his friends and loved ones. The event itself was a perfect incarnation of my dad, a man who doesn't actually seem much older now than he did then, who still can twist as though American Bandstand were filming, would still cut a dashing figure in a white sport coat and who has raised two daughters with perfectly imperfect unconditional love that has given them a foundation on which all else is built and without which nothing much would stand.

The funny thing is that I felt that way at twelve. I remember leaning against a wall with a cup of soda, admiring the way my skirt glinted under the lights, and then watching my father dancing with my mother to a "slow dance," the kind I still, at nearly thirteen, avoided whenever I could. "They look so young," I really do remember thinking, swishing my skirt to make the taffeta rustle, watching the couples swaying to the mellow sounds of the music I had been taught to love by my dad.

If we are lucky, life is long and complicated. We celebrate and commemorate, we suffer and agonize, we triumph and fail, we persevere. I don't mind turning forty. In spite of all those corny greeting cards, it doesn't really seem that old; it never did. And as I always tell my grandmother, who will soon be 94, growing old seems, if not a walk in the park each day, certainly preferable to the alternative.

I think of my father's 40th birthday not just because my own is impending but because in so many ways he cannot see, my father is still that same man dancing, the last man on the dance floor for the love of the music, the man the band stays late for just because they like him, the man who again and again makes me feel like I am loved, and appreciated, and admired, and loved.

Happy birthday, Dad. This one--and all of them, really--is for you. Thank you for teaching me that every day is a possibility. I love you. And don't forget, ever, ever: This is the first day of the rest of your life.

Sisters

This morning when the alarm went off I forced myself to get out of bed and made my way to the girls' room to make sure Lily was up and getting ready for school. The light was on, I noticed, and as I neared I heard giggling. When I pushed open the door, Lily and Annika were both in Annika's crib surrounded by books. "I'm reading to Annika," Lily said, when she saw me standing there, watching them. "You're both in the crib," I noted, Mistress of the Obvious. Annika laughed uproariously at this.

"Two Lilys!" she said, pointing to herself and then to the actual Lily. "Two Lilys in crib!" I wonder if Lily will always loom so large to her little sister, be the sun around which all else orbits, so much so that her name, in some contexts, seems to have become synonymous with "girl."

On Mary's Death

I'm not as young as I once was--have I mentioned I'm turning 40 this year? no? if I can ever get back on my treadmill and write like I'm supposed to be doing, I will. But I'm still a good deal younger than most serious fans of Peter, Paul and Mary, a trio who recorded some of the most wistful, melancholy ballads I have come across, along with some of the most authentically earnest, persuasive protest songs of all time.

I grew up on Peter, Paul and Mary, one of the few groups my parents both loved. Peter, Paul and Mary rocked enough for my dad but were folksy and lyrical enough for my mom. And my sister and I loved every song that they sung. I think the songs you hear as a child, that you see your parents loving, are formative. My affection for Rod Stewart (thanks, Dad) and Cat Stevens (you, too, Mom) falls into this category. But my love for Peter, Paul and Mary transcends my childhood memories in that the songs I grew up loving, knew by heart, are the same songs--really the primary songs--I sing to my own girls now.

This is in part because I know all of the words, which I cannot say of so many other songs that I love. But it is also because the songs themselves have such a universal, ageless quality. I have to confess that there is no--zero--music written expressly for children that I can tolerate, with the occasional exception of the Free to Be, You and Me soundtrack, and that is definitely thanks to nostalgia. But "Puff the Magic Dragon" is another story altogether. The first time Lily really listened to the lyrics as I sang it, as I have been doing since the very night of her birth, she started to sob. "It's so sad," she said, and I felt both pride and a jolt of preemptive anxiety for this child of mine, so like another little girl whose fear of leaving childhood behind kicked in much earlier than it should have.

And the other songs I loved, love still: "Lemon Tree," also sad, "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Blowing in the Wind," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"--for a solid year the only song that would make tiny Lily stop crying, then Annika, too. It took me a while to realize that this one is, as a small friend of mine would say, "unappropriate." But I guess they all are, if you shy away from death, separation, loss, in your kid music.

Not all, though. Not all. Not the protest songs. My childhood friend Kate, whom I loved instantly upon first meeting but even more so when I learned that Peter, the actual Peter, was her godfather, and I used to jog around the high school track, wash our cars, drive to the movies, singing "If I Had a Hammer" at the top of our lungs. When we marched for a woman's right to choose on the mall in DC four years in a row, we sang it then, arms linked, understanding on some level that the words had prepared us for our actions.

Peter, Paul and Mary was a great introduction to popular music; I am grateful to my parents for instilling a love for it in me. And I have seen many Peter, Paul and Mary concerts since that first one, one here in New York with an especially sympatico friend (you can't just invite any twenty-something to a Peter, Paul and Mary concert) at Carnegie Hall. I made fun of us for being there, mocked myself for my uncoolness. But we both sang along to each song. Knew every word.

A few weeks ago I was stuck in traffic with the girls, a situation in which I can occasionally be prevailed on to sing. "The plane song, Mama," Annika said, and Lily concurred. "Jet plane, Mama," she said, and I sang, sang the chorus again and again at the end until they'd both drifted off into sleep. I hope Mary knew that there were those of us out there passing it on to the next generation. I think she probably did.

Time, and Time Again

On Sunday Lily learned how to ride a bike--"I just kept coasting and finding my balance and suddenly I could do it!"--and today she went to her first day of kindergarten, although as it was for precisely one half of an hour I'm not sure we all felt like it was really the First Day, if you know what I mean. In short, time is racing.

Didn't I just write about this? I'm in this groove, and I guess I'm not going anywhere for a bit. Time works like this: this is something I did not know when I was younger and am only fully realizing now. Like reading, and bike riding, for Lily--suddenly days, weeks, years of anticipating, experience, practice, desire--condense unexpectedly into instant reward. And then for days, weeks, years, something else seemingly utterly unattainable, time stretching out into infinity.

Today, we swam together, Lily and I, and I knew what she was thinking; she said it once, actually. "Swimming is next," I think she said, with shining eyes, thinking it would be magic, like the bike riding must have seemed: Now I cannot, but now I can! And I, old and consumed by the passing, and stopping, and racing of time, smiled slightly, suspecting that today would not, in fact, be the day Lily swam on her own--thinking fate likes to even things out--but I held her lightly in the water, walked back farther away for her to come to me, just in case.

I don't want to blink my eyes and have her not need my hand under her back as she floats. Floating, if done correctly, freezes time.