Hello lovelies.
At my parents’ house in Boston for Thanksgiving this week, sleeping in the bedroom that used to be mine and was then my youngest brother’s and now apparently goes to whomever stays the longest. It snowed on Tuesday, a gentle flurry that kissed the ground and melted. Here in CA it’s foggy, with the welcome promise of rain next week.
Continue reading “The Weekly Review: Winter is There Edition”
1. Avon 39 reflections. There’s a lot I could write about: all the people on the route who cheered us on, including the San Jose bike cops and a local motorcycle club; the fact that I could barely walk on Monday; the incredible rush of finishing and seeing D and M right at the line waiting for us. But what I want to leave you with is this: In among all the cheering, sandwiched between the tutus and the rhinestones and the boobie jokes, was real, unadulterated loss. People walked with pictures, with names, with messages for their dead. We met a woman and her stepdaughter at breakfast. “Her mother died of breast cancer,” the stepmother said. “We’re doing this for her.”
2. 5 years and counting. Let’s face it, marriage is hard. It’s learning to live with all of your spouse’s tics and all of your own. It’s compromise, endless compromise, long after you’ve given in to all the things you said you wouldn’t do. And it is glorious. It’s that smile you share in the morning, when you know all is right with the world because you’ve woken up next to each other. It’s the way your pace changes when you walk next to each other, so that your strides are exactly the same length. It’s striving, constantly, to be a better wife, a better husband, a better parent, a better person. Marriage is change, and it is growth, and it is a celebration of the little victories, day after day.
3. Shut up and write. I made my way to a writing group on Sunday, after a series of messages with a fellow writer that culminated in the realization that the only way I’ll ever have time to write is if I take it. So I did, and got almost 3,000 words down in an hour and a half. Good words. I think I’m setting myself up to fail if I try to make it every week, but once a month would be a good thing.
4. How we speak. I grew up in the era of the phone call, of the enviable coolness of the kids who had their own phone line, of paying the long distance bill for spending hours talking to my friends who lived on the other side of the state. I thought nothing of calling someone just to say hey, while scrupulously observing the 10 am to 10 pm rule. These days? I don’t call unless I have something important to say. I’ll text at all hours of the night, confident that if whomever I’m messaging is asleep, they’ve put their phone on silent. Conversations can take hours or days, snatched in between folding laundry and doing dishes. It changes the way we speak, the way we think about speaking. We are always on, always available – and rarely present.
5. Grace. I’ve moved around too much to have a giant group of friends. Instead, I’ve held onto a few people from each place I’ve lived. The kind of friends I can go without talking to for years, and then fall right back into where we were the next time we see each other. This has been a rough year, with lots of soul searching and self doubt and wondering if I’ve made the right decisions. And just when I needed it, one of those friends came back into my life and said exactly what I needed to hear.
An old friend of mine from summer camp died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. I found out through Facebook, of course, where his sister had asked people to upload their old photos of him. It wasn’t until I had all my old summer camp albums stacked on the dining room table that it hit me that he was gone, really gone.
I always thought I’d run into him again.
Sometimes, people come into your life and they change you, indelibly, unexpectedly. I remember the music, the way it infiltrated those liquid summer nights, spiraling into the warm night air and settling around my shoulders like a hug. I remember sunlight hitting bleached blond hair, and I remember summer girls in tank tops and denim shorts, and I remember a smile that went on forever, a smile that was yours, always and only.
I remember two questions. Questions that book-ended the years I knew him. Questions asked carelessly, in the middle of a crowded room. Questions that still cut to the heart of who and what I am. I never answered either. I didn’t understand, until many years later, that I wasn’t meant to.
You could say I had a crush on him, but that wouldn’t quite be right. I had a crush on the idea of him. I was too shy, too awed by his popularity, too afraid of rejection to get to know him. When I came across him on Facebook a few years ago I friended him, but I left it at that. I didn’t think there was enough of a connection left for us to have any kind of conversation, for me to try to meet up with him when I passed through Boston. I wish now that I had tried.
Because most of all, I remember a boy with mischief in his smile, and love enough in his soul that it was yours for the asking.
The house is a catastrophe of shoes, a mad explosion, as if all week we have been running in and taking them off, kicking them into corners and against furniture, only to grab a different pair on our way back out the door. Weeks like this, the house becomes less a refuge and more a way-point: fridge barren, plants screaming to be watered, laundry like a river in flood surging past the banks of its basket. It is like this with children, I suspect, only more so.
***
This was intended to be a longer post, but the day went by in a blur, as sunny Sundays tend to do, and the time I had planned for blogging seems to have fallen away.
I’ll leave you with this thought. I’ve been reconnecting with people I knew when I was sixteen, people I haven’t spoken to in years. What I find fascinating isn’t how much they’ve changed. Rather, it’s how much of ourselves has already settled by the time we are sixteen, so that in talking to someone I knew so very long ago it’s almost possible to make believe it’s only one summer that has gone by.
Friendships are a funny thing. They are more like weeds than garden-flowers, surviving untended and unloved for years at a stretch, existing in the in-between places. And sometimes, they burst brightly and unexpectedly into bloom, setting entire fields ablaze in color.
Spring coming, and with it the flood tides and the ebb tides and all manner of change. This is my time of year, the time when the trees become a riot of blossoms and the flowers start to emerge from the earth and everything – everything – seems possible.
1. I don’t believe in God or Fate, but I do think that the universe has a way of putting what we need in our path when we need it. Continue reading ““Gold Dust””