The One Last Crack

It’s 3 p.m. on the Sunday of Day Light Savings, and the sky is as bright as ever.

Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night with the stomach bug. I can’t remember the last time I had the stomach bug, and the experience served as a clear reminder of how horrible it feels.

I kept thinking about one of the nuns who I used to sit across from at Mass. Every time we’d get to the intersessions she’d say: “Let’s pray for the sick and the suffering.” It wasn’t until I was lying awake that night, my head propped up on three pillows, watching out my window as morning approached, that I realized the importance of her words. It can be so distracting and debilitating to have your body turn on you. She knew that. Her prayer would catch me in my pained yet temporary state, just as it had caught and will continue to catch everyone else. 

A few weeks ago, while I waited for the red line, with train after train flying by at capacity, I read this article on my phone. It’s about winter. In it, the Jessica Mesman Griffith talks about moving to South Bend, Ind. and then to Traverse City, Mich., cities with very different winter temperaments than the places she’d lived before. She did what many New Englanders have done in the past month: She tried to make the best of it with snowshoes, hot chocolate, and moisturizing cream. And yet, by the end, winter still had a way of ruining her.

She writes:

Now that I’m a hardened northerner, I know that winter isn’t a time to thrive. It’s a time to buy a light therapy box, take massive amounts of vitamin D and get on antidepressants… As my neighbor says, There’s no way out but through. And sometimes going through just isn’t pretty. Sometimes you crawl to the finish.
Sometimes, winter breaks us. And maybe that’s okay.
 

The morning after my stomach bug, I woke up and did not go to work. I fell back asleep for an hour and then gathered enough strength to walk to CVS, purchase three bottles of ginger ale and a box of saltines, and walk home. I spent the rest of the day helpless, sipping water from a green mug and watching reruns of Girls. After weeks of admiring snowflakes, befriending shoveling neighbors, and attempting to harness inner gratitude over early morning cups of coffee, I too had cracked. And maybe, as Griffith suggests, the cracking is okay. Maybe winter wants us to endure its sharp, brief pain. Maybe it's what we need to feel new again. 

More snow and The Bachelor (…whoops)

I’m in Boston now (well, Somerville, but same thing) and everyone everywhere is covered in snow. The red line is down and there are no parking spots left. Forty inches later, they're telling us there is more to come.

In the past few days, we’ve done the only thing you can do when your meetings are canceled and it’s too cold to go outside: we made breakfast sandwiches and banana bread, and when everyone was ready, we sat on the couch and turned on The Bachelor.

And so, here I am (still an episode behind) and attached to these women and their stories and their hair. I’m wondering: What do they chat about all day on that semi-circle couch? Where do they get their earrings? Why would they ever sign up for this?  I'm getting to know them, and getting to know people--even in this horrifying context--can be fun. There’s Jade who wishes it was easier to make friends in LA, Carly who pines for a boy who will treat her like her grandfather treated her grandmother, and Becca who feels strange kissing on the first date. There are small outfits, gossiping, tears and private airplanes. I’ll carry them with me, with embarrassment, until Chris Soules makes his final pick. I’ll blame this entire mindless journey on snow.

When I woke up this morning to shovel out my car the sky was light blue and pink. We were there together, adjusting to the new day.  As I shoveled people started to make their way to work. Most of them nodded in my direction and said “good morning." I said "morning" back. Maybe a succession of exchanged smiles is all we need to make all of this, and all that’s to come, bearable.

Snow Day Thoughts

Yesterday afternoon, I sat at the kitchen table in my apartment eating a mug full of leftover chili. The storm raged outside. Two feet gradually became two and a half. I listened to the sound of shovels against the pavement and the choir of snow blower engines. I had no plans.

My roommate Dave had just come inside from a walk. He sat on across from me eating an orange, his cheeks still flushed. Like others in New England, we basked in the pause that the historic blizzard had allowed us, in the canceled meetings and blocked off roads. In the spirit of being stuck, we started to throw around our Snow Day Thoughts; the questions, hopes and doubts that came to mind in the wake of canceled meetings and blocked roads.

Snow Day Thoughts have no order.  Like snow days, they just happen, without our consent or control. Here are a few of mine:

1) On snow days, I tend to feel like I have the capability of making my hopes and dreams come true. Don’t we all? I felt like this yesterday when I woke up.  I made coffee and toasted a piece of bread. Outside, everything was white. I’m enough, I thought. I’m enough. Maybe that mantra, and believing in its truth, is all we need to move along in our lives.

2) I spent a lot of time remembering a dinner conversation from last June. It took place at my roommate Becca’s parent’s house.  I thought about the orzo salad and the red wine, and the plants on the back patio where we ate. It was warm enough to not need a sweater. We were talking about careers. I asked Becca if had ever considered following in her Dad’s footsteps to become a pediatrician, and I asked her Dad if he had ever encouraged her. “I tell this to everyone I meet who is considering my profession,” her Dad had said, “Never go into the medical field, especially as a doctor, unless you cannot possibly do anything else.” I loved that: unless you cannot possibly do anything else. I guess some of us know what we must do and some of us have to wander around to find it. 

3) I thought about how when you eat an orange it’s impossible to do anything else. What a gift: surrendering your attention to a fruit until all that’s left is your sticky fingertips and the scattered pieces of the peel piled up on the table. If all food were like that, maybe we’d be healthier. Maybe we'd appreciate it more.

4) I thought about the movie Drinking Buddies, which I watched the night before. In it, Olivia Wilde and Jake Johnson work at a brewery. They spend a lot of time drinking beer together, sipping and pouring, talking about life and their significant others, and falling asleep next to each other on the couch. The movie ended before I wanted it to, with a conclusion that I wasn’t hoping for but made sense. The funny thing about drinking, in that movie and in life in general, is how it brings us together and also keeps us apart.

5) Eventually I had to get out of my apartment, so I walked to a friend’s house, and then to one of the two open bars in my neighborhood. The host had dark gray hair and good posture and wore a sweater vest.  He wrote my name down on the list for a table of four. Then, he pointed us to the corner of the room to wait.  He set up three stools near the window, form an L. “Sit here, ladies” he said, “It’s a great spot.” He told us watched most of the games from that corner. What a nice thing to be able to do--create a space in a crowded room and give it away to those who don’t know any better.

So that’s that. Outside it’s sunny, and most of the cars parked on the street have been shoveled out. We’ve had our time with our Snow Day Thoughts, and now all we can do is move on.

Bars that are crowded and mystical

I am here now, sitting at my kitchen table. Once again, I'm next to an un-read Sunday newspaper. It’s warm and rainy for January. Just now, my roommate and I laid out an apartment chore rotation. We wrote everyone’s assignment using colorful pens and posted it on the fridge.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the traffic hold up on 93 in Milton and Medford that happened this Thursday. Of all of the people that attached themselves to cement blocks, the detoured ambulance, the school busses, the people late to work.

Last night, one of my friends said she believes it is hard to hate people when you know their story. We were sitting together in a basement bar, and as the night continued people kept coming in. We were in this tiny corner of the city and the country and the world, and even so, the collective energy of the crowd, with their cocktails and lives and worries, felt infinite. How amazing, she said. 

I keep going back to that thought: that it’s the stories that keep us patient and loving. It’s the stories that allow us to let our guard down. Imagining what those stories look like for the people behind the Thursday morning’s demonstration, the police officers descended upon the scene, and the commuters that found their days unfolding in a new and frustrating way, makes it the scenario feel more possible to digest.  

I think that our problem is that stories come way too late. The sacred day-to-day details of other’s lives emerge only after the tragedy hits, and the details have already died with them.  After Ferguson, we started to learn about how Michael Brown went about his day, and about the lives of others in the community. Only after the two police officers died, were we able to contemplate what existed behind the uniform. Maybe the only way to love, and for that love to make a difference, is to crack things open earlier, and see what spills out.

Also, I stumbled upon this poem this week. It’s quick. And very worth it.

What we hold

^^^ (view from my window.) 

I am here now, sitting on my bed, looking out the window. It’s a sunny Saturday in January. Outside, people are wearing Patriots sweatshirts, buying cases of beer and bags of tortilla chips, wondering what’s going to happen next.

We took our decorations down on Tuesday. I wrapped the ornaments in newspapers and placed the wooden nutcrackers into cardboard boxes. My roommates placed our tree on the cold sidewalk next to the trash bins and swept up the pine needles from the floor. The week went on with its post vacation ups-and-downs. A realization came to me, hard and spontaneously, as Monday became Tuesday and Tuesday became Wednesday: that the beginning of the year, despite its youth, is just like any other span of time, and we, despite our hopes to be otherwise, are still ourselves within it.

In short, this week brought moments of doubt and crankiness, as I continued to wedge my way out of the holidays. Here are a few things that helped me to get over myself, which may be helpful to you, too.

·      I wrote a few weeks ago about having a very Mary-focused Advent season, thanks mostly to following this blog, by a lovely woman who I originally found because of her broccoli hummus. Her name is Sarah. She lives in Washington State with two kids and a husband, and had a very Mary-focused Advent as well. After the holidays ended, she reflected on what the scene must have looked like in the days after Jesus’ birth (the crying and throw up, the mass exodus of guests, etc.). Imagining how it all played out, its frustration and confusion and moments of unexpected joy, gave me comfort. Here we all are, just like Mary was with her new baby boy, facing our new and old realities, and doing our best.

·      As last year came to a close I thought about how I’d made very few surface-level moves throughout 2014. Around me friends got married, cousins started law firms and became VP’s, acquaintances closed on houses and learned to maintain their yards. It’s hard to resist stacking all of these things up not feel small in the shadow. But, reading this article on the epiphany reminded me where our hope and our worth are rooted, and its not in our milestones or accomplishments. Kathleen Hirsch reflects upon the Magi, the people underneath the outfits and the gifts, who believed deeply in human goodness and our ability to keep getting closer to it. “Reality is hard for us,” she writes. The desire to be successful intoxicates us. Maybe all we really need to do is let go. 

·      Real Simple magazine came yesterday (!!!) with its pink letters and white background, its suggestions for user-friendly houseplants and winter-afternoon soups. In it, editor Kristin Van Ogtrop talks about her role. She writes: “One of the best things about being a magazine editor is that you spend your days learning exactly how much you don’t know, and then you work really hard to overcome your stupidity.” She goes on to describe the scene in their office as the team brainstormed for this month’s cover story and identified a subject they knew nothing about (metabolism).  What an opportunity it was, she reflects, going on that journey together, and what a wonderful article it made in the end! (I am unable to find the link…) I guess that’s the most beautiful about life—all of the chances we have to discover what we don’t know and learn more.

So, that’s that for now. Let us keep going forward, into these bright and cold winter days. Let us be gentle. Let us be open. Let us recognize all of the gifts we already hold.

(And let’s go Pats J.)