YWRB: It Takes Nerve

By Amanda Page It took nerve to go to the microphone and ask a feminist legend for some advice.

It takes real nerve to be a rebel.

It took a year of writing about rebellion for me to build up the nerve to finally claim my life as my own. I was 22 and ready to travel and it seemed like the whole world was telling me, “No.” I simply wanted to get on a plane.

“You can’t go,” I was told. “You can’t leave.”

My biggest rebellions have always been about going after what I want for myself instead of living in service of what others want for me. It’s hard to hold our own desires and protect and honor them. The wants and expectations of others can so easily become the “shit” that we’re not supposed to take. If we don’t respect our own wishes, then we’re taking shit from ourselves.

It takes nerve to take no shit . . . from others or from yourself.

Nerve is like a muscle. Rebellion is the exercise that builds the nerve muscle.

And you can do rebellion by writing it.

It took nerve to whip out our pens and legal pads in bars at midnight. It took nerve to declare that we were writing a book. It took nerve to share the idea with the wild woman from my poetry class.

Each action was a tiny act of rebellion, working my nerve muscle, making me more capable, more daring, more able to surprise myself.

I was told, “No,” but I said, “Yes.” Yes, I will.

I can now say, “Yes, I did.”

The stories we hold dearest are the ones that come from the times that we dare ourselves to do something.

Do something that scares you. Today. Anything. Ten years from now, it might be the moment that changed everything. It might be your best story.

Your best story takes nerve.

Things

Whenever I tell someone that my husband and I went to high school together, I’m quick to point out that we weren’t high school sweethearts. Pat, always ready with a joke, will tell you that he didn’t even like me that much during those days. An impossibility, of course, but the truth is we’ve built our relationship on compromise, laughs, and most importantly to me after 8 years in New York, a common understanding of where we come from. We know that fish frys are eaten on Fridays, that the Penfield Patriots will always be the Chiefs, that the Park Ave Fest --- in Rochester, that is --- is the first weekend in August. There are inside jokes and stories that date back to middle school, way before “Pat and Ali” meant anything. We know these things inside out, these truths about our past and present, but there has always been a piece of my husband that I couldn’t grasp. When Pat was 19, just shy of his junior year in college, his father died. Suddenly, tragically. And in the blink of an eye, his whole world changed. His dad was his rock, his role model, his mentor in sports and school --- in life, really --- and one day he just wasn’t there. For 10 years, I’ve tried to understand, but the truth is, I didn’t. I couldn’t. And suddenly I do.

There’s a desk in our apartment that Pat has had for all the years I’ve known him. For most of those years, it was nothing to look at – scuffed, with old hardware and a shape too antique for my taste. What it lacks in looks, however, it makes up for in sentimental value. It belonged to Pat’s dad, and so it has moved with him from college, to several apartments in Rochester, and then to Brooklyn in the back of a U-Haul van. Two years ago, when we moved into our new condo --- our first “real” home together --- I was determined to get rid of that desk. We don’t have the room! I want a NEW desk, one with drawers that close properly! Let’s store it at one of our parents’ houses! I tried every argument in the book, but in the end it was my mom who saved the day. She first told me to shut my mouth --- and then volunteered to refinish it for us, to transform that desk into something new. It was a compromise, and I begrudgingly agreed. For weeks, my mom labored over the desk, meticulously following each step in the refinishing process and updating me nightly on her progress. Anyone who knew my mom knows about her penchant for "winging it," and so her commitment to following the directions here was both shocking and touching.  In the end, the desk was reborn into a better version of itself. Now shiny and smooth, it has since provided a place for Pat to spend endless hours studying for the CFA exam, and is my home base several days each week. I like to think that my mom and Pat’s dad are laughing together somewhere at the humor and irony in that.

As it turns out, I now find myself surrounded by my mom’s things. On my right ring finger sits her amethyst ring. Strangers stop me to take a closer look at the ring,  guessing that it must have belonged to someone special to me, while family and friends recognize it right away. I take my mom's pearl earrings out at night and put them back in first thing in the morning. My history of losing jewelry --- earrings especially --- haunts me, but somehow I don’t let these out of my sight. My mom’s purses line my shelves, and with each trip back to Rochester, I know I’ll return with more tangible reminders of her.

In the end, they are just things, like I told Pat for so many years. They don’t replace the memories or the laughs, and they certainly don’t soothe the tears. But then, they are more than that, too. They are a constant reminder that our parents are never far; perhaps out of sight, but never --- ever --- out of mind.

On (Un)following on Twitter

I've been wondering what Twitter is to me. While my favorited tweets reflect of my headspace, and encapsulate my strengths and flaws, my entire Twitter stream is the pool from which these highs and lows materialize—an idea-filled microcosm of my world, where my current interests lie. I've been thinking about the process of unfollowing, especially after reading Mat Honan's piece on Wired about unfollowing everyone. For me, the unfollowing process is active and ongoing, and while I've unfollowed people for various reasons, it's less about the account being unfollowed and more about me. My interests change from week to week, so I follow and unfollow to keep up with my mind, to keep the flow rushing and constant and healthy, to prevent debris buildups and mental cobwebs.

* * * * *

Earlier this summer, I noticed a a smattering of #TBEX in my stream, the hashtag for a travel blogging conference. I'm not a travel blogger, but in 2008, I'd created my Twitter account and my blog as platforms to complement my job at a travel website. In the beginning, I followed and networked with travel writers and travelers by default, but over the past four years, I've diverged from this path and discovered other interests and topics I enjoy writing about. It has made sense to unfollow publications and bloggers that no longer offer ideas and information that are relevant to me.

I still have friends and contacts from the online travel sphere and today find myself on the periphery of this world, yet wade in other currents that interest me, like technology and nonfiction, within my Twitter stream. I see how my Twitter feed is constantly evolving, not stagnant. It feels natural to follow and unfollow; to cull and prune; to find a balance, on any given day, between information and entertainment, hope and despair, and significance and irrelevance.

And I notice occasionally that when I unfollow someone, they immediately and automatically unfollow me in return (and sometimes on other networks, too). I find this kind of reciprocal following and unfollowing meaningless, but I understand people use Twitter, and other social media, in different ways.

* * * * *

I have my reasons for following each account on my list. I follow a handful of bloggers because I regularly read them; a group of people for interesting ideas on all things digital; a bunch of folks for general news, art and design, and pop culture; book handles of bigger publications like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books; and then a sprinkling of accounts who add the necessary color, humor, and "padding" to my feed.

I've thought about what kind of irrelevance to keep in my stream. I don't enjoy reading complaints and the daily minutiae of a person's day, yet I don't mind the wickedly inappropriate trolling tweets of assholes. I hate when "LOL" or "LMAO" appear in my stream, but am completely fine with other abbreviations.

A systematic randomness, I suppose.

And I don't follow my closest friends. Not because I don't like them, but because I don't use Twitter to communicate with them. I also may love someone's photography so will follow them on Instagram, but that doesn't mean I will follow them on Twitter. (Can't I be drawn to just one facet of a person?)

* * * * *

But ultimately, do I have to explain this process?

So, I'm curious: do you actively follow and unfollow people on Twitter, too?

Defining Simplicity: An Introduction

I fell in love with women’s magazines by about age twelve. My mom had a friend who was a librarian, and she would bring us back issues that would then pile up around the house, their glossy covers beckoning. Each issue offered its own promises of quick weight loss, clutter-free closets, and five-minute meals. I guess you could say I grew up in a sort of magazine heaven. Our house was a place where serials came to live on, far past their prime, dog-eared and well-loved. They made the journey from couch to recycle bin only on rare occasions and more often remained nestled under beds, in over-full baskets, or between cushions. Ironically, these volumes of promise eventually became a part of the clutter and weight of our material lives.

Of all the magazines I lived among, one title stood out above all others: Real Simple. I devoured the how-tos on packing healthy lunches for your kids, simplifying your beauty routine, and entertaining effortlessly. I remember a summer weather tip that suggested cooling off by running cold water over your wrists. How simple. I couldn’t get enough of it.

If I visualized my grown-up life, it was a collage of images and checklists swiped from between the covers of countless issues of Real Simple. From an adolescent perspective, age 35 looked something like a hazy mishmash of perfect white button-downs, a couple of charming children, a golden retriever, and something called a “work/life balance.” Above all, I was filling notebooks and mental file cabinets with instructions for keeping it all “simple.”

These days, my dreams have evolved (although, the ever-elusive perfect white button-down is still on my radar), but “simple” has stuck. It’s become a recurring question and a promise I encounter on a daily basis. Simple time management strategies. Simple DIY. Simple meals. Simple cell phone plans. Simple apps. Simple weddings. Simple investing. Simple skincare. Simple living.

I can’t help but wonder, what does “simple” really mean? And what is “simplicity”? A state of mind? A practice? A place? An illusion? Even a dictionary defines “simple” mostly by what it is not. It is not complicated, ornate, artificial, elaborate, or affected. More subtly, I would argue that “simplicity” is not necessarily cheap or convenient or easy, though the terms are often used interchangeably.

What is “simple,” then? And why does “simplicity” continually elude us and tempt us as consumers and as human beings? These are just a few of the questions I hope to explore in this column, through stories and memories and wonderings.

For now, though, I’d love to know what simplicity means to you. Where and when and how have you encountered it or achieved it in your own life? Or, alternately, how has simplicity eluded you?

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Maggie Shipstead was born in 1983 in Orange County, CA. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, VQR, American Short Fiction, The Best American Short Stories 2010, and other publications. "La Moretta," a story published in VQR, was a 2012 National Magazine Award finalist for fiction. Maggie is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and a recent resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She doesn't really know where she lives but is open to suggestions. Seating Arrangements is her first novel. After seeing it on every list of best summer reads (including this one and this one), we ran out to buy our own copies and suggest you do the same---unless you hate laughing. I tend to have a smorgasbord of books going, dog-eared and sometimes set aside for weeks or months until I’m in the mood to pick them up again. Which book to read before bed on any given day is a question I address much like I figure out what to wear: with lots of blank staring at the possibilities, maybe making a false start or two, wishing for an infinite selection, and then yielding to the necessity of making a choice. I don’t feel much enmity for e-readers, but, for me, an integral part of the pleasure of reading is the pleasure of selecting a book from bookshelves, either mine or a store’s. Last fall I spent a month in Bali, and the Ganesha Bookshop in Ubud was a treasure trove of weird paperbacks discarded by travelers from all over the place (but, okay, mostly from Australia). I love the associations that grow between books and the places I read them. A certain mystery with a cracked cover and pill-y, yellowing paper is inseparable from a corner of shade in my landlady’s pool, where I stood in the water for hours, trying not to fry in the tropical sun. In January, when I was doing an artist residency in Paris, a Left Bank bookseller handed me The Hare With Amber Eyes, a haunting family history by ceramicist Edmund de Waal that’s about Paris and Vienna and Tokyo and war and precious objects. I read it on a hard single bed in my Spartan artist studio while the city and its past slept outside in the cold. Perfection.

These days, my bed in San Diego is a much less exotic venue for reading, but here, nonetheless, are some of the books that have recently been the object of my fickle attention.

Just finished . . . A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer duBois A wise, crazy-smart, and heartbreaking debut novel built around the question of how to wage a battle that you know can’t be won. Sounds grim, but duBois’s writing is a treat: full of wry humor and incisive observation. Irina is a young woman from Boston living with a terminal diagnosis who embarks on a quest to Russia to track down a former chessmaster turned dissident politician, Aleksandr Bezetov, and see if he can give her any answers. DuBois also delves into Aleksandr’s past, starting in St. Petersburg in 1979. I have a lifelong thing for Russia, and—past and present—that sprawling, inscrutable country is the third lead in this book.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon Okay, so maybe this won’t actually be released until September, but a friend scored an advance copy for me back in the spring. Sweeeet! The novel follows two families living on the seam between Oakland and Berkeley, one white, one black. The wives are partners in a midwife practice, and the husbands own a record store. Chaos ensues. This is a fat, meaty, absorbing book, jammed with off-kilter characters and happenings and with Chabon’s signature riffs on pop culture.

The Honourable Schoolboy by John LeCarré I’m a big fan of LeCarré, especially his Cold War novels. This novel falls between Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy (best title ever) and Smiley’s People in a trilogy about George Smiley’s pursuit of his KGB nemesis Karla. Just on a language level, LeCarré is an amazing stylist—a very, very, very fine writer who is extremely nimble within the omniscient point of view—but he’s also a master at assembling complex plots and setting them spinning in a perfectly rendered, dreary-yet-fascinating, invisible spy world.

In the middle of . . . Look At Me by Jennifer Egan I’ve been meaning to buy this novel forever, and finally it appeared in front of my face at the right moment at the right bookstore (Books Inc. in San Francsico). One of the many things I admire about Egan’s writing is that she’s always experimenting with form and daringly fills her books with unexpected twists. In Look At Me, a model comes out of a car crash with eighty screws in her face, not disfigured but undeniably altered, and must figure out how her place in the world has also changed. That would be story enough, but other characters take turns behind the narrative wheel as well: a high school golden boy turned unhinged history professor, an outwardly plain teenage girl with a reckless streak, and a private eye, to name a few.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff I will always be obsessed with a short story of Groff’s that was in the 2007 volume of The Best American Short Stories and is called “L. Debard and Aliette.” The opening is set in New York in 1918 as a flu epidemic erupts and an Olympic champion teaches a girl recovering from polio to swim and, eventually, to do sexier things. The story is retelling of Eloise and Abelard and has a mesmerizing dreaminess to it that I’m also loving in Arcadia, which begins in a hippie commune in the 70s and, the reviews tell me, progresses all the way into the future. Groff’s writing has a matter-of-fact lyricism that allows her to write about very strange things very naturally and with apparent effortlessness.

Can’t wait to start . . . The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje I love ships and the ocean and Michael Ondaatje’s books, so I see no reason why I won’t love this book. It’s about an eleven-year-old boy traveling from Sri Lanka to England on an ocean liner, and I think it’s going to be beautiful.

From the Italian Lakes....

Dearest Clara,

I think one of the nicest surprises you can have is when you unexpectedly find yourself back somewhere that holds a special place in your heart.  Sometimes, places you loved just have a way of working themselves back into your life.  Six years ago, I met your father---long before he was your father, and before he was a husband even---in the Italian Lakes region.  Como . . . Lago di Garda . . . Lugano . . . we did them all.  But the one that's just a little more special is Lago Maggiore.  That's where he got down on one knee and asked me to be his wife, and it has been one adventure after another for us ever since.

We have always wanted to go back, but we never pulled the trigger on the trip.  We said we would go for an anniversary . . . for a birthday . . . for a long weekend . . . but somehow something always got in the way.  Yet on this trip, which was not at all about Italy, the little town of Stresa, where we stayed after our engagement, just so happened  to be on our way as we were driving from Austria to France.  We couldn't help but stop to spend the night---in the same hotel no less. And it turns out it was worth the wait, since we were able to come with you.

In thinking about our very first trip there, here is what stands out in my mind:

• Always have some cash in your pocket: Believe it or not, while we were out on the lake, taking the ferries from island to island, we ran out of money.  We didn't think much of it, but it quickly became clear that credit cards were not going to get us on the last boat. We weighed our options between panhandling and swimming to shore; the latter lost out.  We will forever be grateful to that total stranger, and your father always makes sure he has some cash in his pocket when we leave home.
• Eat a big breakfast: No one does a breakfast like an Italian hotel---chances are you already paid for it with your room so take advantage.  Pick good proteins and fresh fruits, and a little roll in your bag for later comes in handy.  If you enjoy a nice leisurely and full breakfast, you can often skip lunch and make the most of your day out and about.  And don't forget a good cappuccino. Or two.
• A passegiata every night: The lakes aren't exactly bustling with nightlife, in the traditional sense.  No clubs here, but you'll find nearly the entire town taking a walk along the lake every evening before dinner.  That's a party to be part of.
• Admire pretty things . . . just because they are pretty: In this region, there are so many beautiful hotels, some would even call them over-the-top.  And you'll find some of the decorations to be excessive, maybe even unnecessary.  Just admire them for what they are: adornment.  The region is so beautiful, you can't blame people for trying to translate the visual feast of the view into their everyday surroundings.
• Take time to do nothing: The pace of life is entirely different around the lakes.  Days are calm, and there is nothing to hurry for.  Take in the view of the lake, enjoy a long walk, read a good book, have another coffee.  Or just sit and be.  You'll have time for it all here.  There will be hardly any obligations here---enjoy that rare freedom.

All my love,

Mom

Girl Problems

Everyone thinks my 6-month-old daughter is a boy.  She is the spitting image of her father, so if they catch a glimpse of him before they decide which pronoun to use, the situation is compounded.  I don’t routinely dress her in pink---although I have to say it is a universally flattering color.  I don’t scotch-tape or Velcro bows to the downy tufts on her largely bald head.  I do consider her gender when picking out an outfit in the morning and never quite land on any particularly comfortable solution.  On one hand, I want people to understand “who” she is and identify her as a girl.  In this case, my impulse is to reach for something pink or even a dress.  Often, I will select a pair of neutral pants with a pink drawstring, a relatively subtle item, so I don’t feel like the pressure is getting to me.  On the other hand, I don’t want to kowtow to the notion that a baby girl should be a living doll.  After all, she is only MONTHS old: How could we possibly have any idea whether she will be “girly” or a “tomboy” or anywhere else on that spectrum in her style or proclivities? The question of gender identity never fails to excite debate.  Even within my own mind, I find it almost impossible decide how I feel about stereotypic gender roles.  Some days, I am strongly convinced that gender identity (sexuality, a separate issue, could be an entirely different and equally hot topic) is ingrained or at least some interaction of genes and environment.  At other times, I sense that the socialization of gender happens so early and is so pervasive in our culture that I am surprised anyone develops the free will to resist his or her prescribed role.  My own experience bears this out . . . while the baby is still in utero, before it even joins the party, the burning question is, “Do you know what you are having?”  People desperately need to begin with the categorization as soon as possible.  I am just as guilty of this as anyone, fretting over a “gender neutral” baby gift for my sister-in-law.

When I was pregnant, we ultimately decided to find out the sex of the baby.  In the abstract, I wanted to be one of those people who doesn’t need to know.  I pictured myself indignantly telling inquirers, “We don’t need to relate to the gender of this fetus.  You see, we are very progressive . . .”  In reality, I was struggling to “plan” for her without knowing.  It felt silly, but I wanted to decorate her room, buy her clothing and think about her future with at least this clue about who she might be.  And the whole process of growing a human being is so bizarre, I felt much less like an alien pod with a sense of this label and all the things it (not necessarily) implies.  Of course, we know that all bets are off when an actual person emerges from the womb.

In time, we may come to discover that Isadora is all tutus, all the time.  She might bedazzle her dresser and have tea parties with the dog.  It could also be the case that she adores trucks and machines.  Like it or not, these are preferences we most closely associate with one gender or another.  But what if she demonstrates an interest in astronomy, math, or dinosaurs?  How about ballet, cooking, or child care?  I want so much to be a parent that doesn’t automatically think of these as “boy” or “girl” activities.  I would love to have a girl who excels in the sciences, beats her father at chess and has an amazing arm.  More important, I don’t want to be surprised by the fact that she does any of these things.

As much as we’d like to believe that kids are a tabula rasa, it is virtually impossible to opt out of gender.  Frankly, most children initiate their own affiliation with one gender or another before a parent has the ability to influence this in the slightest.  I am constantly regaled with anecdotes from family and friends about how they dutifully tried to open the field for their female children by exposing them to a wide array of toys, games, clothes and experiences.  In many of these stories, the girls immediately and stubbornly chose and clung to princesses, dolls, fairies and the like despite the efforts of the parents.   This could be the effect of many factors outside the home or subtle cues inside the home or simply hard wiring.

Distilled down, the real issue for me is to ensure that our girl has lots of choices and feels secure making them.  Her mother does flowers for a living---an industry typically associated with and dominated by women.   As a young girl, I loved anything with glitter, rainbows, or sparkle and my favorite Muppet was Miss Piggy.  I also played many sports and was an academic decathlete.  I am aware that my modeling may or may not have much impact on how she develops.  I just hope that if there is a tea party with the dog, I get an invite.

Ramadan

Ramadan started last week. Around the world, Muslims are fasting, allowing nothing to pass their lips from sunrise to sunset. My husband is one of them.

At seven am the alarm goes off, often my husband is already awake, being one of those people with an annoyingly accurate internal clock.  He’s out the door for work before seven thirty.  He doesn’t have a cup of coffee or a granola bar for breakfast and he doesn’t kiss me goodbye before he leaves.

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, which means it gradually moves throughout the year. The first year my husband and I were dating, Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan, happened right around Thanksgiving.  The fact that holy month moves around the calendar combined with fasting times that are based on sunrise and sunset means fasting in July is different than fasting in November.

By the time my husband comes home at five, the hunger is present, but there’s still three and a half hours to go.  As the clock ticks towards 8:30, my husband starts preparing his meal.  He’s decided to celebrate the season by cooking Kitchari, a rice+lentil combination the color of scrambled eggs.  He’s also made Chicken Curry so spicy the fumes made my eyes water.

I stand in the kitchen, watching the digital readout on the microwave flip numbers as he arranges his plate and glass at the table.  I call out the time. 8:27.  My husband breaks his fast with a sip of water.  The first thing he has tasted all day.  Before he moves on to the spicy food, I lean in for a kiss (or three). Our first kiss of the day.  Finally, he’ll turn to his plate.

I’ve already eaten. Since I’m not fasting, I eat my dinner earlier in the evening.  I’ve never been a big believer in the old absence makes the heart grow fonder.  I think my heart is just as fond no matter the distance. But as I walk into the other room, I can’t help but think about the power of abstaining. It’s like pressing the reset switch.  My kiss at 8:30 in the evening seems to have more meaning, more something because I’ve waited for it.  It is not second nature or ordinary.  It is a treat, something infinitely special. I am reminded to be appreciative and grateful for all the small blessings in my life. The things that seem so ordinary that I’ve taken them for granted.  A nice place to live, food on the table, kisses from my husband.

Ramadan is less than a week old, but I’m already feeling the impact.  I’m going to appreciate the fact that I get to kiss my husband every single day rather than mistake it for ‘everyday’.

What little things are you appreciating this week?

Wine, Literature and Music

Imagine these three things at once. Imagine yourself sipping a glass of red Barolo wine, and reading your favorite book while listening to a song that has been the soundtrack to a cherished part of your life.

And now imagine yourself in Italy, in a beautiful village called Barolo, Piedmont, enjoying the fourth edition of the Collisioni Festival, a summer celebration of music, literature and wine. Every year Collisioni presents important authors and artists from different parts of the world, in a wonderful and dreamy atmosphere and in a setting that is definitely worth a visit, at least once in a lifetime.

This is the opinion of Patti Smith, special guest at Collisioni, who during a magical summertime afternoon shared her passion for Italy, and her thoughts about art, environmental issues, politics, and of course music. I couldn’t wait to see Patti Smith. I’ve been listening to her songs forever, but curiously enough have never attended any of her concerts. So I’ve always wondered how it would feel seeing her in person. From a few feet away, I can tell you that she is friendly, down to earth, interesting, smart and very passionate. It felt like I didn’t need to agree to what she said to appreciate her.

And now project yourself fifty years ago. It was 1962 when a twenty year old boy from Minnesota told the world that a new wind was blowing, blowing through poetry and songs. A wind that would soon become a hurricane, and, most importantly, the voice of young people trying to imagine a different future. Bob Dylan was in Barolo, too, the only Italian date of the legendary American singer-songwriter during the summer. I can’t describe my feelings when he sang Blowin’ in the Wind or Like a Rolling Stone.

And then there was Don DeLillo, speaking about his last (latest) books, Boy George, Vinicio Capossela, and Zucchero, and many other artists from Italy too.

Music and books among the vineyards, tasting local wines from the many small cellars that offered glasses of Barolo, Dolcetto and Barbera along the way – overall, this was just a perfect weekend.

THE LAND and THE VINEYARDS, AS I SAW THEM…

 

LAST WEEKEND THROUGH WORDS.

DON DELILLO ON TIME.

“Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.” from The Body Artist

PATTI SMITH ON TIME.

“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.” from Just Kids

BOB DYLAN ON TIME.

Yes, how many years can a mountain exist / Before it's washed to the sea ? Yes, how many years can some people exist / Before they're allowed to be free ? Yes, how many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn't see ? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind / The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Grief, love, and Joan Didion

As far as thieves go, grief is the greatest one. She robs us of the people we love, but—perhaps most achingly—she zaps our ability to imagine the future. Lose a place, a person, or a love and, suddenly, measurements of time become irrelevant. Grief warps time; she renders our plans for next week and dreams for the next vacation incongruous. As Joan Didion put it in The Year of Magical Thinking: 

"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."

For the grieving, imagining a future day of being is a triumph over that "as we will one day not be at all" that Didion describes. Imagining the future is an act of boldness. Didion herself, in a description of her husband's desires for their shared trip to Paris, associates the wishful imagination of a future with being alive:

"He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them, but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living."

My discontent with grief comes from its blocking my boundless want. By drawing strict lines between the living and those whom they lost, grief casts the world in harsh light. She makes it impossible to believe in forever. Instead, she injects a heinous pragmatism into sentiments that would rather be unadulterated by it.

***

My only antidote to that has been love -- the kind of love that floods every crack and fills the vacuums of loss with the promise of togetherness. I do not know Eleni and Stamati. I do not know anything about their love. All I know is that 46 years ago, on April 28, 1966, they felt something strong enough to carve it onto a brick on top of Lycabettus Hill, with all of Athens below serving as witness.

Maybe Eleni and Stamatis are now divorced. Or grieving. Or maybe they have been best friends all along. Or siblings.

What happened on April 28, 1966 on Lycabettus Hill is of little importance to me; rather, I am intrigued by Eleni and Stamatis' audacity. They left a bit of their heart printed so permanently onto a site in Athens that future travelers would have to experience it. That is the triumph of love over loss, of affection over grief, of dreaming over pain.

***

Like a band on its farewell tour, we loaded the car with wafers and pretzels and drove nearly 2,000 kilometers to say farewell to the country we called home and the home that housed our love. There are still wafer bits encrusted onto the map. Those were not the only tokens of the journey. Near the waterfalls of Banias, close to the Syrian border, he found a patch of wet cement. "E ♥ R" is still there.

I want us to go to Banias in 46 years. Or 32. 11? Next year? I want us to go to Banias at an undefined point in the future because love is the imagination of a future without an end point and, in that, it is a triumph over grief. I want to find us at Banias. If not the literal us, if not the "us" carved onto the cement, then the selves we once were.

Hatshepsut, the Female King of Egypt

Flipping through the glossary of my student’s high school world history textbook (I tutor history on the weekends, one of the sole professional manifestations of my recently-completed master’s degree) I was amazed to find that of the hundreds of key terms the book highlights, of which at least a hundred or so are people, there remain only two key terms that are historical women. Think about that. Two, out of five thousand years of history, deemed worthy of emphasis.

More surprisingly, perhaps, are the two who carry this high honor: Hatshepsut, a 15^th-century BCE queen of Egypt’s 18^th dynasty, and Eva Perón, the wife of 1940s Argentinean president Juan Perón (also a key term).

It’s a given that women are underrepresented in history books, and in history in general. Most of the chapters in our textbook, be it on ancient Egypt or Renaissance Italy or the Mongol Empire, have a subsection which should effectively be titled “So, what were women doing while all this other stuff was going on?”, just to, you know, remind us they existed. Answers variously include “being/not being allowed to own property” and “being/not being allowed to get a divorce.”

It’s not the problem of this particular textbook by any means, and neither is the scholarly field of history and its practices entirely to blame. Sources from the point of view of women, or concerning women, are scarce in many historical eras and in many countries, and that’s something historians just have to deal with. Those who focus on women’s history make do with limited sources, piecing together as full a picture as is humanly possible of women’s lived experiences.

Still, it was a little dismaying to realize just how limited female representation in the history books is. So I aim to expand that representation just a bit—a great big thank-you to those ladies who made us look good, or at least, made us look powerful (and let’s face it, power is the paradigm that never goes out of style).

Today’s historical woman: Hatshepsut, the first of those two lucky ones who made it into the third edition of The Earth and Its Peoples.

Hatshepsut was born the daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh around 1500 BCE. She married her half-brother, Thutmose II (don’t judge—it’s a different culture), who became pharaoh at their father’s death. The two had no sons, though Thutmose II did produce a male heir with another wife. However, when Thutmose II died, his son, Thutmose III, was still just a boy, so Hatshepsut took the throne as the king’s regent.

This in and of itself wasn’t so unusual: a woman taking on the kingship as a kind of “interim” ruler while the real heir grew out of childhood had happened before. But Hatshepsut’s reign was different. After a few years, she proclaimed herself pharaoh and began to take her kingly duties more seriously, participating in kingly rites and building monuments. And everyone knows that building a monument is basically just a giant “hey, look how great I am” to the world.

One of the most interesting things about Hatshepsut was that, in assuming the unlikely role of female pharaoh, she adopted a masculine role with all the trappings associated with that gender. Early on, visual evidence shows a synthesis of male and female imagery: in some temple reliefs, Hatshepsut is wearing a woman’s gown, but stands with her feet wide apart in a decidedly masculine and kingly stance.

Later, however, her female gender is effectively obscured, with depictions losing their female traits altogether and instead portraying the traditional male traits of the pharaoh, down to the false beard. Hatshepsut was not trying to change her gender, however; her depiction as a male king was more an avenue towards kingly legitimacy, in a society where female pharaohs were unheard-of and females thought unfit to rule kingdoms by religious law.

What Hatshepsut attempted in becoming a male king of Egypt, while different in style and convention, seems to me to continue to exist in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Female politicians have often had to prove themselves in a male-dominated milieu, adopting what are considered “tough” and “masculine” traits because that’s what is expected of a world leader (or, looked at another way, those women who do adopt these traits are the ones likely to be considered successful leaders). Some of the most aggressive foreign and domestic policy of the latter half of the 20^th century has been undertaken by women, from Golda Meir in Israel to Margaret Thatcher in the UK. This “necessity” for masculine legitimacy can also, probably, be seen in more innocuous ways: the prevalence of pantsuits, the stone-faced expression. (Remember when everyone freaked out because Hillary kind-of-sort-of cried during an election stop in 2008?)

Hatshepsut’s stepson Thutmose III took over following her death, and during his reign he made what appeared to be a systematic effort to erase his stepmother from the record books. He removed her name from the king’s record, took down monuments, defaced images: all a clear attack on her personal legitimacy as well as a major blow to the whole female pharaoh phenomenon. I guess the last laugh is on ol’ Thutmose, though, because today, Hatshepsut is remembered as one of Egypt’s most successful pharaohs.

And she’s an AP World History key term. If that’s not success, I don’t know what is.

Looking Forward: Screen Time

On the rare occasion that I meet someone who’s not on Facebook, I find myself having two distinct reactions: first comes surprise; next comes envy. What would it be like, I wonder, not to have the urge to scroll through a newsfeed; not to be concerned with checking to see if it’s someone’s birthday; not to feel obliged to comment on a friend’s new profile photo? In the past year, my involvement in social media has sky-rocketed. I started a blog. Opened a Pinterest account. Last month, I joined Instagram. I tweet (however infrequently). I’m on Facebook.

I wouldn’t be a part of these networks if I didn’t enjoy them.  But the amount of time they consume in my day-to-day life does make me a little uncomfortable. And it’s not just social media. The number of hours I spend in front of a screen every week (iPhone included) is staggering---and I don’t even have cable.

There’s a part of me that would love to turn off the phone and ignore the laptop---if only for a day or two. Would I feel bored? Liberated? Would I miss anything important? My job, of course, would make it difficult to do this---but maybe I could start in little ways, like riding the bus without scrolling through the photos on my phone; or walking the twelve blocks from the subway station home without flipping through my emails.

The sad fact is, by spending so many hours in the virtual world, I am missing things that are important. Conversations with strangers. Brilliant performances by musicians on the street. People-watching that may be great inspiration for a short story. Sunsets. The possibilities are endless. Still, it's surprisingly difficult to disconnect.

I'm wondering, what have your experiences been like when it comes to balancing an online presence with a life in the real world?

Tokens

This was going to be an essay about seedlings. Those tiny starts of plants that are so aggressively green that they’re nearly glowing. I was going to write about how good it felt to plant a pot full of herb seedlings: tarragon and mint and oregano. I planned to describe how delicious the soil had smelled in our tiny apartment as I pressed tiny plants into the soil and set a newly-minted family of plants on the windowsill to get sunshine and fresh air, how plants make a city apartment feel bright and vibrant, how their own will to thrive in a crowded space can feel like a metaphor for my own. But I realized as I was writing about these things, that the story is as much about friendship. More than the tarragon or the mint, it’s about the friend who called me up to tell me she had extra seedlings. It’s about the plastic wine store bag that she filled with soil using a cardboard berry basket as a shovel.

Growing up, my mother’s friends were always bringing plants to our house. They’d pull into our driveway and throw up the back of their station wagons to unload tangled piles of Evening Primrose or Rose of Sharon that’d gotten too big in their own yards. Theirs were gifts that didn’t cost anything but the generosity of spirit that took them from one yard to another.

My childhood friendships were full of similar tokens. Sporting sweaty ponytails and scraped knees, my friends and I gave gifts with great ceremony: sea stones and turkey feathers, miniature slipper shells, and skate egg cases. More often than not these treasures came home and were tucked into corners of my sock drawer, imparting subtle hints of low-tide to my childhood bedroom. They stayed around long enough to collect dust and lose their stink, but when I went to college the rock treasures were put out in the garden and the broken bits of shell and feather were mostly swept into garbage bags and thrown away. I don’t tell this bit with any sense of melancholy. It’s not the sticking around of these tiny gifts that matters so much as the moment of exchange. The moment when one person hands off something that they think another might just find precious. My new seedlings might not make it through a week out of town, but I’ll remember the phone call and the smell of the dirt as my friend prepared a tiny present.

My Story: Poetry and Prose

My parents are my heroes. I was their first child, born when they were 21 and 23, respectively. They were young, hopeful, and excited to become parents.

For the first four months, everything was normal. After that, things went downhill quickly. A bad reaction to an antibiotic sent my infant self into a quick spiral of electrolyte loss and malabsorption, until my tiny body was so taxed by constant vomiting and dangerously low potassium levels that my parents were told I was near death.

When I turned twenty-one—the age my mother was as she experienced all of this—I marveled. I could not imagine the pain that the two of them went through, welcoming their beloved first child into the world only to be told months later that the end was likely.

Finally, at six months, the doctor thought to test me for cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that causes a buildup of sticky mucus throughout the body—and also, incidentally, leads to very quick electrolyte loss. The diagnostic test came back positive.

My early memories of cystic fibrosis are a jumble of doctor’s appointments, strange machines, and leaning upside-down on a pile of pillows as one of my parents percussed my chest to help keep my lungs clear. There are other things that swim through my remembering as well, like the time my babysitter told me that if a necklace clasp worked its way around to the charm in front, it meant you could make a wish.

Crystal-clear in my memory is one sunny Sunday afternoon as I left church with my favorite necklace around my neck. The clasp nestled against the heart-shaped pendant. With childish fingers, I reached to pull it back, remembering as I did so the babysitter’s words.

That’s easy, I thought. I wish my CF would go away.

Still, my childhood was by and large a happy and very normal one, defined far more by the monsters that lived in my basement and my favorite park two blocks away than by my disease. I breathed easily, and could not remember those early days of endless hospitalizations. It wasn’t until high school hit—and with it, sleep loss—that the hospital became a part of my life again. Each winter, I would be admitted for a few days to begin a course of intravenous antibiotics. I would finish out the weeks-long course at home, needing a month or more after I’d finished the round to recuperate from the harsh effects of the strong medications.

And then, early in my junior year, everything changed.

High school had been a hit to my immune system, and I’d grown used to spending the winters fighting off one cold after another. At first, the virus I picked up around Thanksgiving of my junior year seemed like all the others: I was tired, my throat was sore, I had a cough, I was spending most of my time in bed.

But unlike all the other things that had come my way, this didn’t go away. Months stretched on. I was exhausted all the time, living in a half-awake world where even reading a novel was sometimes too much for my brain to process. Weeks would pass in which I never really left the house. I rotated from bed to couch to my parents’ back porch, where I would stretch out across two chairs and watch the squirrels jump from tree to tree in the backyard. I canceled plans with friends again and again. Even a twenty-minute phone call was enough exertion to leave me so drained that all I could do was crawl into bed, desperate for sleep.

Every few weeks, my mom drove me to the pediatrician for more tests. Nothing came back positive, and still my symptoms did not change. I began to have pain in my legs and feet; over time, the pain got so bad that I could hardly walk. I spent my days confined to places where I could have my feet propped up, my legs stretched out, to give my aching muscles a little relief. I left church early each week, roaming the building to find an unused room where I could lay down on the floor. The simple effort of sitting up had become exhausting.

Eventually, a diagnosis came. Ten months after that first sore throat, my doctor tested me for Epstein-Barr, the virus that causes mono. It came back positive. Another doctor explained that because of my weakened immune system, I hadn’t been able to shake off mono like most teenagers do; not only would it take longer for my body to fight off the virus, but I would be susceptible to relapses in times of stress for the rest of my life. He also said that I had developed Fibromyalgia, a muslce pain syndrome, as a complication of the mono.

I hardly recognized my own life anymore. Gone was the vibrant, energetic teenager; in her place was a girl I didn’t know, a quiet girl who found long conversations tiring and needed as much sleep as a newborn. I raged against this change, raged against the loss of the life that I had loved.

But slowly, so slowly, I learned to find the beauty.

Nearly a year after my diagnosis, I sat at my desk with my computer slung across my lap and felt bathed in light and loveliness in a way I had never quite experienced before. That afternoon, filled with a peace I had not felt in so long, I wrote these words:

There is a state, somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, prose and poetry, that is entirely unique.

Colors seem brighter; sounds are sharper and clearer but, at the same time, gentler on the ears. Every movement you make—lifting a hand to brush at loose hair, blinking, turning to look beside you—feels lyrical, like ballet. You don't speak: there is no need for words. You simply are.

This, then, is one of the gifts that sickness has given me. This, the talent that some people are intrinsically born with, but I never was: the ability to slow down, to take things as they are, without preconceptions or misperceptions to cloud my vision. The ability to stop for a moment, and see loveliness in ordinary things: a mess on a table, a bag comfortably stuffed with contents, a plastic craft bead. The ability to recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary, and understand the beauty of peace.

I have always been a writer. I would venture to guess that I probably spun stories and wove words in the womb; I certainly have for all the years afterwards. But, I think, as I silently uncurl my legs and shift my position on the chair, that it is sickness that has made me a poet.

YWRB: Rebel for Want

By Amy Turn Sharp I love that Amanda remembers the Brando quote.

Who the hell knows what we were rebelling against, except my soft soul back then, the girl who still had invincible skin left.

I was rebelling for the future. I was leaving the past in the dirt.

It was also that year that I met Gloria Steinem and in a large crowded lecture hall I was able to stand at the microphone and ask her a question after the event. My lips bumped the mic, there was quiet noise.

I just need some advice, I asked. My name is Amy Turn and I need some advice for my life.

And so Gloria shook her head and said {and let me tell you it was certainly like a movie}

Amy Turn, BE A WOMAN WHO TAKES NO SHIT.

The crowd roared and we all looked at each other and it was like church up in there. It was gospel. Always has been.

What are we rebelling against and what is happening at a young age as women?

Well, I hope we are all practicing what to want. How to to need and want to be treated, how to love, how to push away. All the parts to be a woman that are not taught in classrooms, but in friendships, love affairs, seedy bars, libraries, and offices.

In Praise of Essays

By Randon Billings Noble Yesterday afternoon the twins were napping, rain was just starting to prattle through the leaves outside my window, and I was curled up with a cup of tea and a collection of The Best American Essays.

This is when I realized:  Something happens when I read essays---something that doesn't happen when I read novels or short stories or even memoirs.  I feel . . . enlarged.

The essay in this collection that brought my attention to this feeling was  "After the Ice" by Paul Crenshaw.  I won't write much about the content of the essay---I'd rather you read it yourself and let it unfold for you---but here is a passage that starts to show what I'm talking about:

"After the funeral, while my family gathered in the living room of my grandmother's house and some of the men stood on the front porch and talked of violence, I walked through the woods on my grandmother's land.  It was stifling inside the house, and loud with the sounds that accompany death, but outside it was cold and still.  The air hovered right around freezing, and the light mist that fell could not decide whether it wanted to be snow or rain.  Late in the afternoon, the dark came early, and by the time I turned around to walk back only the porch light was visible.  The rain had finally made a decision, and the only sound around me was ice on frozen leaves."

Nothing really happens in this passage.  But something does.  A boy leaves a crowded house and walks in the woods.  Something elusive but meaningful shifts during this walk, even though we never learn exactly what: the passage ends with a section break, and on the other side of that white space a new line of thought begins.  But the moment is captured.  A dilated moment of meaning.

When I finished reading I sat for a while.  The rain was coming down hard and steady, filling the room with its fresh green smell, and there was thunder in the distance.  This moment---this moment on my couch with the tea cold at my elbow and the rain outside and the feeling of this essay settling in my mind and somehow lightly tingeing it forever---this moment felt enlarged.  It felt important.  It felt connected to the moments that Crenshaw describes, walking through the woods after the funeral or driving by an empty house or standing in the backyard at night after a snowfall.  And it promised me that my own future moments---tonight holding one of the twins after a nightmare, later this summer looking out a window in New Hampshire, years from now running my hand absently along a stalk in a field of lavender---these moments would have the same largeness, the same sense of importance, even if I never wrote them down.

And maybe that's what essays do: they call attention to moments---real, lived moments---and that's all that is needed.  Attention.  Attending.  We notice and we wait and we serve the silent shift that marks the internal change from "then" to "now and forever after."

A moment in the woods.  In the dark backyard.  On the couch with a hard summer rain falling outside.  Sometimes that's all it takes to know that our course has been subtly shifted---to whatever our new future holds.

Lovely illustration by Akiko Kato 

On Narrative and Country Music

My son took his first unassisted steps this week. It was pretty amazing, particularly because he took them while giggling hysterically. We had to buy him big boy shoes, and once we got home and he was toddling around in them, there were tears. I try not to be too much of a sentimommy, (that’s sentimental + mommy, I think I just coined it) boring people with maudlin stories; however, seeing him in those shoes walking on his own made me flash back to a year ago this time when he was a writhing, yelping, mess of a baby. When my son was brand new, I spent a decent amount of time alone in the car with him. Often, when he woke at dawn (or just before), I would whisk him out of the house to try and foster an hour of two of uninterrupted quiet for my wife to sleep.  If the weather was nice, we often went somewhere to take a nice walk, but if it was too hot or rainy, we just drove around a bit.

I found myself one morning listening to the “today’s hit country” station on the satellite radio. I have never had a strong feeling about country music one way or another. I’m from West Virginia, so it’s always been around, but it’s not the first genre of music I choose (I do, however, have strong opinions about people who say “I like all music except country” because it’s a coded statement about rural people, the same way I dislike “I like all music except rap” because it is a coded statement about urban people). All of that said, I have a trivia maven’s knowledge of country music. I know who major stars are, I can identify certain key songs, but I am by no means a fan.

Last summer, though, I went all country all the time.  When my wife asked me what the deal was, I had a hard time coming up with an answer. Part of it was having something new and different to listen to. For a period of time, every single song I heard was new to me (which lasted about a week before I could easily identify which songs were in heavy rotation). But, more significantly, so many of the songs had actual narratives. Stories! Country music has always been known for its stories, and while it’s not true for every song, it seemed to be true for many.  I followed each narrative to its end, and in a time when I couldn’t often find a moment to finish a magazine article, much less a book, it was a little bit of comfort at a chaotic time.

I began to discover recurring themes and motifs, much like I am always asking my students to do. Last summer there were several different songs getting a ton of airplay that made passionate arguments in favor of back roads rather than the interstates. Multiple songs name-checked Hank Williams (both senior and junior).  One made fun of men who eat sushi, drive Priuses, and drive on the interstate. In the bleary-eyed days of early motherhood, I threw myself into music that I can’t say represents much of my worldview.

Except for one thing---my worldview does value narrative. A story, even one told in under four minutes that I can’t personally relate to, can be truly transformative. Sleep-deprived and at times overwhelmed, I was soothed by the narrative structure of country music. I hazard that there is no other genre of American music that conveys as many narratives as country music (somehow, Katy Perry’s story of “Last Friday Night” doesn’t have the same push and pull of plot as, say, Martina McBride’s song about breast cancer, “I’m Gonna Love You Through It”).

One day, about five months later, I realized I had stopped listening to the country channel and had gone back to my old stations. My acute need for narrative had passed somehow. Maybe it was because I was more rested, maybe because I was about to go back to my day job of teaching high school English, but it passed. I listen to some of the songs from that time, but more because they remind me of the early days with my son than because I really enjoy the songs. I’m grateful for the solace that country’s narratives brought to me. Oh, and for introducing me to Miranda Lambert’s “Baggage Claim.”  That one is just a great song.

In Lieu of a Tandem Bicycle

My fiancé commutes by bike most days. Roundtrip, it’s a five-mile ride, and from what I can tell, it’s uphill both ways. When I moved here to Atlanta from Boston in June, he’d been riding this route nearly every day for a year. Before that, he’d been riding in Boston, unphased by snow and ice and rain and groceries. There, he taught me how to ride in the city and waited patiently while I freaked out about traffic and potholes.

On Sunday, I surveyed the unfamiliar bike that had been borrowed on my behalf---I’d left my rusty Schwinn in Boston---and agreed to come along on his daily route. For the past few weeks, I’ve been busy trying to carve out a place for myself in this new-to-me city. In countless interviews and new-girl conversations, I’ve been trying to find a way to explain that I belong here too, as an individual, even though we’re in this together.

Finally, on Sunday, I decided it was time to catch a glimpse of the shape of his life---those mysterious pockets of “his life” scattered at the periphery of “our life,” which we’ve been working so diligently to arrange, together.

For him, riding is a way to get where you’re going, and fast. It’s about independence and shortcuts and bypassing traffic jams. For me, riding a bike is something I did as a child, meandering around the block, keeping to the sidewalk, never traveling much faster than a jog.

I have visions of the two us riding off into the sunset on our bikes. It’s a vision that’s soft around the edges, and in it, I’m wearing a chambray sundress that somehow never flies up or gets stuck in the wheels. Somehow I never have trouble keeping up with my handsome partner, and I certainly never sweat.

Our real life Sunday ride turned out to be a vision of another kind. Stephen cruised along effortlessly, perfectly suited up in his bike gear. I lagged behind, sweating and huffing the whole way, silently cursing the gods who created bicycles, and even worse, hills. My imaginary self would have made pleasant conversation (“What a lovely morning!”), but my real self could only muster the occasional pathetic squeak in response to check-ins as to whether I was still alive.

He looked at me with concern and a bit of remorse as I dragged myself and my bike up the very last hill.

“Maybe we should have started with a shorter ride?” He wondered out loud.

I quit panting long enough to shrug my shoulders. “Might be more fun on a tandem bike,” I offered, wading through the thickening summer heat.

Often it feels important and necessary to test my own limits and prove my own strength. Perhaps sometimes it’s simpler, though, and sweeter, to partner up, pedal in sync, and push through the hills and valleys together.

What Are You Reading (Offline, that is)?

Liz Moody, a freelance writer and former newspaper columnist, now runs a lifestyle blog, Things That Make Us.  Her posts about sex, love, travel and being a 20something in this crazy world (and, of course, the Point of Writing series) can be found at http://www.thingsthatmakeus.com.  Follow her on Twitter at @lizcmoody.  I spend a lot of time (too much!) thinking about the point of the written word, what function writing serves in the world at large.  Through my blog, I’ve gotten the opportunity to ask some amazing writers, and have received incredibly diverse and insightful responses.  “Writing allows the spotlight’s beam to cast outward into our society, then begin to illuminate ills and joys in ways we hadn’t allowed before,” says Kevin Salwen, author of The Power of Half (and my uncle).  My friend Hannah thinks that writing expands people’s capacity for empathy, while my other friend Chris thinks:  “Being able to feel from another person’s vantage point turns out to be nothing but intense self-examination.  What you’re doing, really, is finding out what it means to be you.”

I, of course, ask other people because I haven’t yet decided what my thoughts on the matter are.  The purpose has morphed over time, from the large type books I read when I was first learning how to interpret words on a page to the perfect world of Sweet Valley that I hid my face in as I walked to and from elementary school, on the bus and on the playground to avoid the less than perfect awkwardness of talking to real people.  There were the books I read in college to gain literary street cred, able to drop names with the pretentiousness one goes to college to learn.  Now, though, I’m free to read books for purely my personal relationship with them, free of other necessities or circumstances.  If I were to say what, right now, I believe the purpose of writing is, it would simply: to make us feel things.   If I close a book with my belly sore from laughter, it’s accomplished its purpose.  If I close a book with tears streaming down my face, all the better.  These are a few of the books that have made me feel the most:

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion The opening essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” radiantly captures the optimism of California gone awry.  It tells one story of one family in one town, in a way that is both incredibly intimate and incredibly universal.  It always leaves me with an eerie feeling, where I’m unable to talk to people or feel completely settled in whatever environment I’m in.

A taste:  “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Beginning as a Greek epic, seguing into a tale of an immigrant family’s American dream, and brilliantly interweaving a coming-of-age story, Middlesex, to me, is about figuring out what it means to be oneself. The book manages to be incredibly complex and lyrically written while maintaining an easy read, page-turner quality.  I alternated between sobbing and feeling incredibly uplifted, in between wondering:  how did someone write this?

A taste:  “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris While I love all of Sedaris’s books, this one is where I feel he really hit his stride.  I read an interview with him where someone asked if he worried he was going to run out of material (Sedaris writes nonfiction, often mining his past).   Sedaris answered that the more he wrote, the less “big” things he wrote about, and the more he liked his pieces for it.  This book is often about the subtle moments that matter in the every day.  It veers from don’t-read-in-public laughter worthy (a Neanderthal take on the college experience) to incredibly poignant insights on family and friendships.  This will be the funniest death-themed book you’ll ever read.

A taste:  “I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he’s unable to stand. “If only I’d paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,” he says. I see Hugh, drying his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket, then crying even harder when he remembers I bought it for him.”

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff A collection of short stories wherein each story has the emotional payoff of a novel is not an easy thing to come by.  I often had to set down the book as I finished a story, in order to let the story properly marinate in my head.  The pieces are wildly diverse: a baton twirler’s path to motherhood and meaning, a polio victim and her unlikely lover, the role of water in the world, and in one life.  While the form, particularly, allows Groff to tug on a wide range of emotions, the one I felt most acutely was a sense of loss, a pang in my stomach and chest of something I was now missing that I didn’t know was gone.

A taste:  “There is no ending, no neatness to this story. There never really is where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.”

Are you, like me, seeking emotion as you turn pages, or do you read for another reason? What do you think is the purpose of books?

Lessons from coming home...

Dearest Clara, Coming home from a trip is always a bittersweet moment, a mixture of relief that you made it safely with a touch of sadness for an adventure completed.  I’ve never been good at all of the activities that are supposed to take place after a trip: the laundry, the photos, the getting back into the swing of things at work.  I alternate instead between reliving the memories of where we’ve just come from, and dreaming away into planning the next adventure, the next trip.

Nonetheless, I still love the familiarity of home, wherever it is for us at the moment---here is what I always do when I arrive at ours:

• Tell people you are coming home a day later . . . or even two: The minute people know you’ve walked in the door, the world will start turning just as fast as it was before you left.  Tell others you’ll be home just a little later, and enjoy the quiet time that comes with no one knowing you are there.  Use the time for whatever you need for yourself.
• Don’t go back to work on a Monday: A boss of mine told me this years ago and I’ve stuck to it ever since.  There is something overwhelming about coming in first thing Monday morning with a list of things to do and a line of people to see you a mile long.  Come in on a Tuesday;  the week can start without you just fine.
• Drink lots of water: Whether you came home by plane, train, or automobile, I guarantee you didn’t drink enough water on the trip.  Drink lots, more than you think you need.  It will make you feel better and help ward off any unwanted souvenirs.
• Unpack on the first day you are back: Unpack at least a little . . . if only to throw your dirty laundry in the hamper (that alone should be the bulk of your suitcase anyway).  If you don’t start unpacking the first day, you can bet that your suitcase will stand there for at least a month before you touch it.
• Write it down: You think you’ll remember everything from your travels, and you think your photographs will be enough, but it is amazing how quickly the details start evaporating the minute you walk in your front door.  If it was important to you and you want to remember it, write it down, even if it is just a quick list in a notebook.
• Have a “coming-home” routine: Order dinner from the same place, take a taxi from the same stand, spend the first evening taking a bath or reading a magazine . . . whatever makes you feel relaxed and comfortable.  Since our home changes so often, we can’t always rely on the structure itself to make us feel like we are “back”.  Rather, the routines that we have developed over time have become our sense of home, our sense of arriving back where we belong.

I know you will travel far and wide over the coming years, and on your own---probably much further than I will ever go.  Enjoy every adventure that comes your way---but don’t forget that being at home sometimes can be just as beautiful.

All my love,

Mom