The Ordinary Moments of 2014

I am here now, sitting on the floor of my childhood bedroom, a few days before the new year.  My back leaning against my bed, my feet stretched out in front of me, my left ankle resting on the right. Downstairs, my siblings are watching a marathon viewing of the Harry Potter movies and giggling at the videos on their phones. My mom is making a turkey chili out of the Weight Watchers cookbook and doubling the recipe, while my dad unscrews all of the dead light bulbs and replaces them with ones that are alive.

Christmas is over. We are tired and dehydrated. We are lounging. We are allowing the year to wrap up.

My Dad gave me a calendar for Christmas, each month featuring its own inspirational quote. The quote I’m thinking about most is by Magdalen Nabb, and it reads: “Never get so fascinated by the extraordinary that you miss the ordinary.”

It’s a statement that’s hard to live out, and even more so a the end of the year, when we have a time frame for calculating our joys and regrets and get a little drunk on the hope that comes with starting again. For me, it’s been a year where life on its surface stayed pretty much the same. I live in the same apartment, work at the same job and follow the same schedule. But in the spirit of this calendar quote, here’s for not searching for those extraordinary progressions. Here’s for the ordinary moments, the ones that come without trophies or pay raises, the ones that for whatever reason, I’ll tuck away.

January 4^th: In Logan Airport with my whole family, our plane delay headed into its fourth hour. We sat there antsy; ready to take off for the first tropical vacation we’d had together in fifteen years. This was the first day in what would be a span of the polar vortex—record-breaking cold, snowstorms and under-rested flight crews. We had no idea when and if our plane would take off.  Some of us sent out Snap Chats, some of us read magazines, and some of us stared at the crowds of people pacing around and lugging carry-on bags. The woman sitting next to us tapped my mom on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me! You have the most beautiful family.” We all looked up at her, and then at each other. We smiled, blushed and laughed. My mom said, “Aw, thank you! That’s so nice of you to say!”

June 7^th: It was my first time on a ferry as an adult, headed toward Martha’s Vineyard, for a weekend with my roommate and her parents. Even at the beginning of June, with the wind blowing off of the ocean, the air was hot enough to warm my bare shoulders. I had too much luggage—boxes of strawberries and doughnut-shaped peaches, a few bottles of wine, etc. It took a while to find a place for it all. I was reading Alice McDermott’s Someone and loving it, learning about the smells of Brooklyn in the early 50’s and that the key to a successful funeral home was the presence of a beautiful young woman in a conservative dress greeting the mourners. Next to me, two middle-aged men who had not expected to run into each other chatted about their wives, their work and their weekend. After a few moments, one of them got up to say goodbye, and headed to the other end of the boat. The one who was left pulled his sunglasses from his forehead to his nose and spent the rest of the ride looking at the ocean with a subtle grin.

July 11^th: We celebrated Jen’s bachelorette at the maid-of-honor’s parent’s house in East Hampton, New York. By the time we started to make dinner, we were already buzzed. It was a summer meal with many parts: grilled chicken and shrimp, pasta salad, roasted vegetables and some kind of sauce. A handful of us wandered around the kitchen, slowly figuring out where to fit in. “Why don’t you cook the spinach for the pasta salad?” someone asked me. I agreed. We had two bags of it and a bottle of olive oil. Using a wooden spoon, I added and stirred, feeling the heat rising and hitting my hand. Someone else sliced the zucchini and someone else spread a mix of spices over the shrimp.  When it was all done, we all sat down and ate it together, a little winded, a little closer than we were before. 

October 6^th: It was a blind date on a Monday, and neither of us had set a specific time. When I left my house I texted him with a twenty-minute warning, and I arrived to an almost empty bar. He said he’d be along soon, so I ordered a drink that the bartender recommended, and read a bit of my book. Then my phone vibrated with a text that read: “I’m here.” I turned around to see a guy walk in, looking for someone, and walking toward the other end of the bar. Must be him, I thought. I had the bartender call him over. He was cute. We hugged and he sat on the stool next to me, and asked me about my day. Then he said, “Your hair… it’s so much lighter than it looked in your picture.” I tuck a strand of it behind my ear. “Well,” I said, “that picture was taken last winter.” He nodded, and then mentioned how surprised he was to learn that we both liked Tool. My face must have made it clear that I didn’t know who Tool was.  That was when I learned that his name was not Matt, and he learned that my name was not Annie. We laughed. He took off, leaving the seat for my actual date.

October 10^th: Most locals don’t go to dinner until 10 or so, Abby, my sister, mentioned, but since it was our first night in Rome she made the reservation for 8.  She claimed that was exhausted the day that she first got there, so she figured we would be too. The restaurant came recommended to her for its Carbonara. It was small and set on the first floor of an apartment building across from the Tiber River. We were the first ones there. When the hostess saw us, she asked: “Abby?” We nodded, she directed us to our table, and we sat down. There was something about that moment of walking in, to a little place my sister had researched and selected and called ahead to claim our seats, in a foreign city that she had learned how to get around in. We traveled far to see her, and she would, with these small efforts and grace, take care of us.

Halfway There

It has been rainy and gray for the past few days in New England, and I have yet to buy an umbrella. In multiple places—the radio, the lunchroom, the check-in counter at the gym, people have said: “Thank GOD it’s not snow!”

A few days ago the little blue advent book that I picked up at the back of a church in Back Bay told me that the season is now half over. It instructed me to think about the goals I’d made for myself at the beginning, review my plan, and sit for six minutes in silence and think about how it’s going.

I have friends who are very goal-oriented. They set one goal, and sketch out the steps required to reach that goal, and chip away at it for days and months and years. Later they’ll say things like: “I ran that marathon in 4 hours and 30 minutes!”; “I opened that hair salon where people now must book their appointment three months advance!”; “I got a book deal!” It’s easy to get jealous of these human versions of y = mx + b; the stories of promotions and the house closing dates; the sight of someone’s glass Tupperware collection neatly organized.

Life road-map construction and following does not come naturally for me. My mind creates two or three goals, with several potential pathways to success, and then bounces from one to the other whenever I get frustrated. I think of the pain associated with each stepping stone, of mud-soaked boots and potential rejections, of crowds standing on the sidelines asking themselves: “What is she doing?”

Maybe, at least for Advent, it’s a time when we aren't meant to have a specific end-destination. Or get frustrated about the ways our lives are and are not unfolding. It's a time to be quiet and stay still. To stop questioning the amount of money we make, the relationship we may or may not be in, the way our apartment would look if we could only buy that West Elm rug. Maybe Advent is when we can practice telling ourselves, over and over, like Mary must have during her pregnant journey to Bethlehem, that God is with us. Maybe Advent is just enough time to allow ourselves to realize that it’s true.

So instead of making a grand plan and a never-ending list of festive aspirations, I committed myself to six minutes every night to sit in my bed and write about my day without any specific intention. To feel the warmth of my house, hear the sound of the cars going by, the see the dark, spidery shadows the telephone wires cast on the street outside my window.

We are all moving down certain paths, with or without a road map in hand. All we can do is step back for a few minutes, consider the sticks that we tripped over, and remember those who pulled over and offered a ride.

Winter underway

For the first time this season, there is a steady stream of wet, white snow coming down. Out my window, I can see a thin layer of it collecting on the top of telephone wires and blanketing the rooftops. All of the people I’ve passed today, the Body Jam instructor at the gym, the woman who handed me a large cup of coffee at the counter of Porter Square Books and the French family sipping espressos at a table near by, had something to say about it. It’s going to be a long winter, we all agreed. This is just the beginning.

There is something exciting about beginnings, even if the beginning marks mornings of scraping ice off the car windshield and afternoon drives home in the dark. Beginnings remind us that our lives are progressing. That believe it or not, the world is well enough to do it all again, and we have another chance to live through it.

So we’ll see how it goes. So far so good. My roommate promised to start the Christmas music early. The grocery store replaced Halloween candy with candy canes. I made myself a hot toddy after work. Last night, at a friends 30^th birthday celebration in Harvard Square, I wore my LL Bean boots. “They’re out again!” someone said from across the bar. I smiled and stuck my right foot out in front of me, tapping the rubber heel against the ground.  "Yes!" I replied, a little buzzed from a cinnamon and whiskey cocktail and the warmth of the crowded, dimly lit basement,"They're ready for another one."

Yoga in the Dark

I haven’t been to a yoga class in a while, so when I learned about a two-hour session taking place on Saturday in the dark, I said: Sure, I’ll go. Alyssa, a former co-worker of mine who is beautiful and strong and enthusiastic about encouraging people to just shut up and love themselves, was giving it. After some hemming and hawing, I told her I’d pop in.

There were a few of us who made the journey, one who was recovering from a cold, another working crazy hours at three different jobs, and another drowning in wedding plans.

Alyssa closed the shades and asked us to face away from the windows. She talked about the tendency of our egos to get in the way of things, in yoga and in life. How we move forward based on what’s happening around us, and how we want to look in the eyes of our friends and family. But in the darkness, with only our bodies and the small candles scattered across the room, we had the chance to let go of all of that stuff, and to just focus on how we felt in that quiet, empty room.

From all of the movements we did, I think the one I’ll remember most was pigeon pose. It's a hip opener. It requires you to face the floor, bring one knee forward toward your wrist, face your shin diagonally so your heel faces your frontal hip bone, and reach your hands out to the floor and down. Or something like that. (This is where the internet comes in handy.) My hips, which are turned in due the way my bones are aligned, don’t do this very easily. They never have. But this time they did their best. We stayed there for what felt like ten minutes. As the time passed on I could feel the stretching sensation expanding to new muscles and crevices in my hips and legs. Bit my bit my body accepted the position and then embraced it.

The experience reminded me of the time I sat in a sweat lodge with a community near Mt. Hood in Oregon for an hour or so, feeling hot steam in every pore of my skin; and of the morning I meditated with a group of Chaco-wearing fifty year olds in an home down the street from where I lived, sitting cross-legged long enough to make my spine sore. These are the forms of prayer that stick with me the most, each a reminder of the capacity I have to hold on, no matter how uncomfortable the position, and let it surprise me.

Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do with this little blog, which at the moment I’m too self-conscious to share with anyone. I’m following an urge to take my thoughts from a journal full of illegible handwriting to another place, and too keep coming back, even when I worry that I may not have anything valuable to say.

Maybe the act of staying is what we are called to do in our lives—to stay in the place we are, with the people around us, and the feelings welling up in our stomachs, and to never, ever, wish it away.

Noah, Chapter Three

Our tour guide sat us down on a stone bench before the main entrance to the Vatican Museum. She was a petite Italian woman with short blonde hair. She told us that once we got going, through the long hallways that led to the Sistine Chapel, she wouldn’t be able to give us what we needed to appreciate its the famous ceiling.

Once we got comfortable, she took a red book out of the tan bag that hung on her shoulder and began flipping through the pages, which described in detail every section of one of Michelangelo’s most famous works. She told us it took the 33-year-old four years to paint it, and that he didn’t want to do it in the first place. Commissioned by Pope Julius II, the room was meant only for the eyes of the most powerful; men who would be most able to understand the meaning the imagery held.

There too much to remember from a twenty-minute explanation, and the time we spent in the room in a quiet admiration of this ceiling. What I sticks with me most is Michelangelo’s choice to broadcast the section of Noah’s story in Chapter 9 of Genesis, that may have been left out of my CCD curriculum:

Noah and his Sons (Genesis 9, 20-27)

Now Noah, farmer of the land, he began to plant a vineyard. And he drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father, and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and lafet took a garment, laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward and covered their father's nakedness; their faces were turned back, they saw not their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done; then said, / "Cursed be Canaan! / Slave Slave / will be to his brothers" ./ And he said, / "Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; / Canaan be his slave / God expands lafet / and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem / Canaan be his slave. "

Noah drinks more wine than he should have while in the vineyard, his sons find him in a compromised state and do what they can to make it right, and the situation leads to an unpleasant family argument.  Not an image portraying the wonder of God's creation of light and darkness, earth and water, plant and animal, man and woman.  By chapter 9—all of these elements have blended together, in a discord and harmony that can’t be explained or controlled. And yet, life goes on. Generations continue, carrying their fears, flaws and sins.

I’m home now; almost over jet lag, but not quite. I’ve finally hand-washed the clothing items stained with gelato and red wine. Trying to eat more vegetables and less tortilla chips, be productive at work, get more sleep, “plan for my future." I’m back to ignoring and listening to the tiny nagging voices in my head. I just keep thinking about Michelangelo, twisting his body in all sorts of directions toward that ceiling, every stroke a plea to accept ourselves and each other for the mess we are.

The Year of _____.

Earlier today, I stopped in a cell phone store to buy a screen protector. Mine had fallen off the day before, while in the airport, and caught onto the bottom of my sister’s shoe. The cashier helped me find one that matched my phone and then led me to the register. That’s when she told me that she’d been researching car insurance quotes in her downtime. She asked if I had any advice. I didn’t, except for a few comparison search engines. She was 19 and this would be her first automobile purchase, and she was going to take the time she needed to make the right decision. I wished her luck, put the screen protector in my bag, and headed out the door.

I always feel a pang of jealously at people who are motivated or forced to wedge their way into  difficult decisions, like investments or retirement plans or in this young woman’s case, car insurance. These decisions make me nervous and I do my best to avoid them.

Which brings me to what everyone is almost done thinking about: New Year’s Resolutions. I have a friend who chooses a word rather than a resolution. For example, 2012 was the year of joy; the year that she allowed multiple men to buy her dinner and basked in excitement of new relationships. She pegged 2013 as the year of change and proceeded her quit a job, apply to grad school, walk the Camino and move to Boston. And so on.

We talked about her “years of” a few days before the 2013 ended, while sitting at a hotel bar after another friend’s wedding reception. Then we contemplated my possible words. Discipline? Patience? Trust?  She shook her head. It must be a word that can seep into every aspect of your life.  I told her I would keep thinking.

It wasn’t until a half hour after the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2014 that the word came to me, while bidding another friend—a few PBRs deep—farewell. “It’s the year of empowerment!” She yelled. Yes! That’s it! I yelled back. The year of empowerment. A year of experiments, running, painting, making mistakes, writing and telling people how you really feel. A year of less thinking and more doing. 

So we’ll see how it goes. The thing about the New Year is that after a week or so it becomes old again, and you realize you are still yourself, facing the same fears, living within the same patterns and eating the same breakfast as the year before. All you can do is take queues from those around you, like the girl working in a quiet storefront on rainy Saturday afternoon, and let them push you to into the places that you can no longer avoid.