Joy (and A Video of My Son Dancing)

One of my best friends from college died on Friday.

 

To combat the sadness, I’ve been thinking about joy and what brings it to me.  Small things, it turns out.

--The first gulp of lemonade on a really hot day;

--Sitting on the front steps after my morning jog;

--Turning a cake out of a pan and feeling with my whole body that it slid out perfectly;

--A belly-laughing baby;

--Figuring out a plot problem in any novel I’m working on;

--Watching David Letterman with Robert;

--Getting a phone call and looking down and seeing that the last two digits of the incoming number are either “74” or “02”;

--Animals, especially dogs and chimps (and yes, I know chimps are nasty and vicious, but I don’t care);

--Shopping with Cara;

--The moment in a restaurant (especially with Robert) when the waiter brings the salad and I know that the whole meal is still ahead of me, to be anticipated, but I don’t have to be hungry anymore;

--Birds twittering (which I never used to care about at all—how is that possible?);

--Road trips;

-- Tom Waits’s “Heart Attack and Vine,” Johnny A’s “Oh, Yeah,” anything by Benny Goodman;

--Opening a brand new book;

--Watching my son dance.  Here is a video.  He’s the tall young man in the untucked blue shirt--#424—dancing with the woman wearing a black-and-white top on the right-hand side of the screen.  This is a jack-and-jill competition, which means they were randomly assigned to be partners.  He had never danced with her before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w--V4LdtjA8&feature=more_related

Whatever joy I feel in watching him—which is considerable—is dwarfed by the joy he feels himself.  It is palpable in every move he makes.

A Little Old

Last weekend I drove down to L.A. to bring cookies to my thesis-writing daughter and a scratch cake to my son, recently bereft of wisdom teeth.   Daughter and I decided to bond over some retail therapy at an enormous mall in Glendale.  It was crowded and raining and I was tense, having already been in the car for six hours.

We entered a store, and immediately I noticed that the music on the loudspeaker was so loud that I had to shout to be heard.  “I hate it when the music is so loud!” I groused.  She said, “What?” and I said it again, yelling this time.  She laughed.  “You are such an old lady,” she said.

Something inside me snapped.  “You know what, Cara?” I said.  “I am an old lady!”  I felt incredible freedom—a sort of zinging inside my brain—as I said it.  I thought, Well, okay.  The secret’s out.

 

Except for one thing.  I was lying.  I am not old.

 

I know who Mumford and Sons are.  I can bench press half my weight.  I wear cool suede boots with brass studs.  I am, as I constantly remind my kids, adorable and hip.

 

I am the opposite of old.

As it happens, I am grouchy and curmudgeonly and a big complainer.  But it’s not because I’m old.  I’ve always been this way.

What I realized in the mall is that now I can chalk up all the weird things about myself—that I hate loud music in public places and camping and movies with car explosions and the way that nobody even cares about split infinitives anymore—to being old.

   

It’s completely fabulous, finally having an excuse.

   

While we were in the store with the loud music, I bought myself a filmy, float-y ecru-colored top patterned with figures of women in mid-20th-century hats and dresses.

     

I bought it because even though I know who Mumford and Sons are, I like to listen to Benny Goodman more.

Okay, maybe I’m a little old.

For Someone Who Makes A Joyful Sound

One of my best friends from college is very, very ill. 

I met Leslie on the first day of my freshman year at Bryn Mawr.  She—daughter of a Connecticut minister—sought me out, attracted by my curly hair and the fact that I came from California.  We nurtured our growing friendship with endless and largely inaccurate speculations about boys and sex.  We got drunk for the first time together.  We ordered innumerable cheese steaks from Pizzi’s.  We went to New York and sat in a bar with Paul Simon.  We worked at the dorm switchboard and laughed harder than I have ever laughed since.

We were both English majors and enamored of the idea of becoming writers.   She loved Virginia Woolf and J.D. Salinger.  She also loved James Thurber and Joni Mitchell and Alexander Calder and Woody Allen and Cape Cod and the doughnuts they used to give out in Thomas Great Hall every morning.  Mostly she loved Bob Dylan.  When I told her I didn’t, she threatened, seriously, not to be friends with me anymore, so I backed down and said I didn’t like him as much as Jackson Browne.  We spent many hours listening to our favorite records, trying to convince each other.  In the end, we decided we both loved Bruce Springsteen and called a truce.

She was a bridesmaid in my wedding, although even by then we weren’t as close as we’d been.  Later, she married Mike, her college sweetheart, and had two kids.  They lived outside of Chicago for many years, and then in Milwaukee, where they are both on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin.  Leslie did become a writer of nonfiction and wrote several best-selling books.

We lost contact for a while but re-connected via e-mail and Facebook.  It has been nice to be in touch again, although our friendship is grounded much more in memory than in events of the present day.  Which is fine—sometimes you need friendships like that—but I have always wished that we could rekindle what we had.  Even though I know that sometimes, “what we had” is such a product of time and place that it has to remain in the past, and the best you can do is call it up from time to time and remember it lovingly.

I ought to be able to insert a pertinent quote from Bob Dylan.  But I never really liked him. 

So here’s a little Jackson Browne for Leslie, with love:

“Keep a fire for the human race

Let your prayers go drifting into space

You never know what will be coming down

Perhaps a better world is drawing near

And just as easily it could all disappear

Don’t let the uncertainty turn you around

(the world keeps turning around and around)

Go on and make a joyful sound”

On Anthony Trollope, the Real Housewives, and What I Do All Day

I am always fascinated by what writers do during the day.  When I was younger, I had the idea that writers sat at roll-top desks, sipped tea, and took long walks on the beach for inspiration.  I did not think about land-locked writers at all.  And I did not think about how they had to get their engine lights checked or go to the drugstore or get a cavity filled or vacuum or sit freezing on the bleachers during soccer practice.

I’ve read about writers who say that they eat breakfast and then work from 8 am to 4 pm.  This is amazing to me.  First of all, what kind of breakfast?   Who cooked it?  And cleaned up after?  And then there’s the work itself.  Does working “from 8 am to 4 pm” mean actually working?  Actually writing something down?  Because that is just unbelievable to me.

Here’s what my work day looks like:  I get up at 7:30 am, check my e-mail, and play a few games of Mahjong Titans on the computer.  I may be thinking about work or I may not.  Usually I am thinking about how I know I have to exercise and don’t want to.

 

At 9 I go for a jog/walk through my neighborhood.  The good part about this is that I do get to do part of it on a beach.  The bad part is that it is exercise.

I get home at 10 and do weight training while I watch terrible morning television shows.  I know the Real Housewives and various hoarders intimately.  Then I shower and eat breakfast.  This morning, it was two bite-size Almond Joys and an orange.

By now it is 11:30.  If I have to go to the grocery store, I go now, when it is less crowded than in the afternoon.  When I get home, I put away groceries and do some medically necessary things to manage a chronic health condition.

 

At 2 pm, I am ready to work.  I take my laptop into the kitchen, because even though I have a lovely office and a perfectly nice desk, I get more work done in the kitchen.  I don’t know why, exactly.  I think it’s because in my office, I know I’m supposed to be WORKING, which freaks me out.  In the kitchen, I drink tea, look out the window, check my kids’ Facebook pages, and once in a while, type out a sentence.  I do this until 5 and if I’m lucky, I’ve written two pages.

Anthony Trollope was a postal surveyor who wrote 5,000 words every day before he went to work.

Camille Grammer is one of the Real Housewives.  She has four nannies for two children.  And homes in Malibu, Beverly Hills, the Hamptons, and Colorado.  And no job.

On the laziness spectrum, I fall somewhere in between Anthony Trollope and Camille Grammer.

Tomorrow I am writing three pages.

What Matters

On my walk through the neighborhood this morning, I passed two little kids unfolding a card table on their front lawn.  The boy looked to be about six; the girl about three.  Both were bed-haired and dressed the way locals at the beach dress on cool winter mornings, which is to say, barefoot and without coats.

As I passed, the girl whined and the boy said, “It doesn’t really matter, Lil.”  His tone was parental and kind, and the girl was immediately quiet.

I kept walking.  I wondered what the boy’s name was.  I decided it was Carson, because I’ve known two little girls named Lily who had brothers named Carson.  And also because I’m watching “Downton Abbey.”

At the end of the block, tacked onto a telephone pole at a level only a Pomeranian could see: a torn piece of lined notebook paper , “yard sale” and an arrow scrawled in childish blue crayon.

These kids reminded me of my own, seen this weekend in Monterey.  The 21-year-old dragged her non-dancing boyfriend to watch her brother compete in a west-coast swing competition.  The 25-year-old (he came in fourth in Intermediate Jack ‘n Jills) bragged when she was out of earshot about her many accomplishments as if they were his own.

I want to tell Carson and Lily, You have no idea how much it matters.

A Good Reminder

For Christmas, my adult children converted all the videos taken during their childhoods into DVDs.  I can’t stop watching them.  Four-year-old Evan “explaining” pistons, two-year-old Cara singing “Jingle Bells” the real way and also with the dirty words her dad taught her.  Me in high-waisted, stonewashed jeans with front pleats that do unspeakable things to my ass.  Evan playing drums and practicing for karate belt promotions.  Cara walking when she was just shy of nine months.  Both kids skiing like maniacs.  Me and my dog Henry at obedience school.  (What a waste of time that was.)   Family vacations with our great friends the Bruces.

 

An orgy of memory and nostalgia.

My son, who turns twenty-five today, dances in blues clubs five nights out of seven and regularly competes in west-coast swing competitions.  Last week, I said to him, “Isn’t it amazing to see how much time you spent playing drums and doing karate?  And now you don’t do those things anymore.”  (He still skis like a maniac.)  And he said, “Well, but dancing came out of playing drums and doing karate.”

Of course he’s right.  Playing drums exposed him to the intricacy of music, the joy of beat and rhythm.  And karate is all about controlling one’s body in space.

It’s nice to know that the things that gave him pleasure as a boy have morphed into something that has enhanced his life as a man.

It’s a good reminder that we are truly the sum total of all the things we have loved and hated, all that we have accomplished, the places we have been, the books we’ve read, the people we’ve known.  Everything.

Although it kills me to think that I am in any way a product of those jeans.

Mail. The Real Kind.

Remember when getting mail—like, in the metal box out at the curb—was the highpoint of your day?

For me, this was when I was about twelve.  I had a friend named Claudine, who was terribly exotic to me because she had long, dark hair that she wore in a thick braid down her back.  Also, her mother was Belgian and spoke with an accent.  (My mother was from Cleveland.)  Claudine was a brilliant artist who dabbled in calligraphy.  Add to all of this the fact that she had an older sister who introduced her to some of the accoutrements of late-‘60s Berkeley hippiedom: curtains of beads (instead of bedroom doors), incense, peace signs, Simon and Garfunkel records.  We saw each other every day in school, but I always had the feeling that at three o’clock, Claudine walked through an invisible portal and entered a different world where she sat in a garret lit with patchouli-scented candles and nibbled at afternoon snacks of pain au chocolat, brushing her hair until it glistened.

At about this time, my father made me watch a British television series called The Forsyte Saga, an adaptation of the novels of John Galsworthy.  At first, I was furious: The Forsyte Saga was in black and white, and it was on at the same time as Hee Haw.   Shortly, though, I began to be glad for my father’s persistence.  The Forsyte Saga was the very best sort of soap opera, featuring wonderfully drawn characters, magnificent costumes, grand explorations of family and loyalty, love and sex, money and class.  Plus, everyone had a British accent.  For the first—but not the last—time in my life, I was in BBC heaven.

I got Claudine hooked, and pretty soon, we began to write letters to each other, pretending to be various characters from the show.  In our  letters, we became Soames and Irene and Jolyon and Bossiney.  And Claudine’s letters were written in elaborate calligraphic script and featured the added bonus of relevant drawings, often on perfumed tissue paper.  Each envelope was sealed with a dollop of colored, stamped wax.  I couldn’t wait to get home from school and check the mailbox.  On a good day, I might have as many as three letters.

I kept all of Claudine’s letters.  They’re in an old steamer trunk in my garage, along with many others: from Amy, the girl I met at horseback-riding camp, from my father the year I went away to school, from old boyfriends, college roommates, from a girl I met in Washington, D.C. who died of anorexia in her twenties.  I almost never open that trunk, but I can’t imagine throwing away those letters.  They are among my most prized possessions.  They are a window onto my whole life.

I think it is unutterably sad that we don’t write letters anymore.