blessings | pull up a chair

January 18, 2013

welcome mat. even when it’s borrowed…

dispatch from 02139 (in which dear old friend rolls beneath the transom, but before she does we whistle while we work, loving the art of red-carpeting for a friend…)

the coq au vin bubbled away. the flannel sheets, unfurled and tucked tightly onto bottom bunk (with nursing-school-acquired hospital corners as far as i could reach). even the bathroom mirror got spritzed with shiny polish.

i hummed the whole day long, from the moment i awoke (at 4 when the cat let out a yowl). till the last stalk of hyacinth was plucked into a vase, an olfactory and faux springtime attempt at masking the inconvenient truth that the kitty-litter bin has nowhere else to hide but alongside the claw-foot tub in the already itty-bitty bathroom, the one just inches away from the living-dining-conviving rooms.

a dear friend was flying into beantown, a friend from long ago and far away (we’ve been close as close since the day she wandered into the tribune newsroom back in 1985, and through the years we’ve weathered many of the bumps that life can bring).

all day long i savored the pure oxygen that is the art of putting out the welcome mat. even when it’s borrowed.

puttering for this particular friend is all the more delicious because a.) i ADORE her, but b.) she too loves the art of red-carpeting for a friend, or making like the keeper of a dreamy b & b, one who wholly grasps the concept that it’s the little details — a fresh pitcher of water by the bed, complete with lemony life rafts floating in the drink; a paperwhite bulb bundled in see-through wrap tied up with string and plunked atop a stack of fluffy towels, a token to take home; the red-wine clouds wafting from the oven — that whisper, “i love you, my friend, and i’ve taken every care to wrap you in the luxuries of deep, long friendship.”

if you’ve ever been taken care of in this particular way — and i hope and pray you have — you know the magic powers of this potion.

perhaps you too have been lulled into dreamy state as someone paved your way with the beautiful. as someone thought two steps ahead, and laid out a fluffy robe, filled a canister with bath salts and rubs. stocked the fridge with icy drinks, or left out a tub of cocoa, fat marshmallows and king leo peppermint sticks.

all in all, made you feel like the cherished guest they’d waited a lifetime to behold.

i’d long been an under-the-radar admirer of these domestic arts. didn’t want to let on (not too loudly, anyway) that i might secretly pine for martha stewart — her actual self, not merely her glossy pages — to be stationed at the back of my pantry. nor that i spent time dilly-dallying over fresh-picked bouquets or tucking lavender sachets between my linens.

but then, some years back, it was this particular friend — one of my most brilliant, certainly among the most widely and deeply read, harvard-educated and bayou-steeped, a newspaper scribe-turned-public radio news hound — who once confided that she was hankering to write a book on, not the influence of castro on miami’s cuban ex-pats and not the cajun roots of zydeco (which i might have guessed), but rather on hospitality, pure and, yes, holy.

it is, of the many nesty arts, one of the most exuberantly selfless.

it is about wrapping the ones you love in the comforts you might only dream about. maybe some of us tend to overthink it because we so deeply wish we were so wrapped. or, to be even more honest, because we wish we had the knack for being kinder and gentler to our very own selves. and so in doing for others we inhale, absorb, deep-breathe whatever afterglow seeps out.

i’ll not ever forget the long-ago weekend i spent tucked inside my radio friend’s coconut grove, florida, tile-roofed house. i can still hear the tumble of the tomato chunks as she poured that evening’s gazpacho from a chilled pitcher into wide-waisted goblets. can still feel the egyptian-thread pillowcases against my cheeks. still hear the jazzy soundtrack that played softly as we curled on the couch, catching up on whatever stories hadn’t fit in all the long-distance phone calls.

and so, two whole decades later, i still indulge in returning the indulgence whenever she comes to visit. and, even after all these years spent on far ends of the continent, she makes a point of doing so at least once every year, even re-routing her itinerary this week from LA (where she lives now) to DC’s inauguration with a stop in cambridge, so we could — together, on a chilly misty day — walk her old stomping ground.

and this time round, with my college-girl budget (meaning the few dollar bills that happened to be in my wallet), i got a bonus round of seeing what i could do without grabbing for the credit card. which somehow made it all the more delightful. the nice man at the flower stall in harvard square let me buy a single hyacinth stem, then threw in — for good measure — a clutch of laurel branches. i scrounged in the stairwell for the leftover bottle of bordeaux someone gave me for my birthday, and that — with a plop of chicken, carrots, potatoes, mushrooms — became my bubbling brew of coq au vin. clean sheets don’t cost a dime, nor do fluffy towels. nor bowls of oatmeal stirred and studded with cranberries and raisins. the fresh snow falling out the window came free too. and the long long hours of unbroken conversation. even the sumptuous global gala at the ambassador’s house, one filled with women peacebuilders from the world’s most war-torn countries (all in town for a one-week women’s peacekeeping colloquium, and with which a few scribes — including me — helped out), it all made for 36 hours of sacred time.

and 36 hours that will forever be tucked in our shared treasury of time magnificently spent.

although i’ll add to those heavenly hours the 12 that came in pre-amble, as i whistled while i worked. and, at every turn, thanked the angels for the gift of this most delicious company, a once-in-a-lifetime friend you forever love through and through and through….

what are some of the welcome tricks you tuck up your sleeve, for i happen to know there are a few masters at the art of hospitality who so benevolently pull up chairs? do tell. a girl can never ever have too many tricks in this divine department….

9 Comments

November 30, 2012

on call…

dispatch from 02139 (in which stirrings of the highest order are due to occur….)

as the final hours of the month of november melt into the newborn ones of the month of december, i find myself jumpy.

jumpy and oh-my-goodness-y every time a chirp or a burp or a hiss or a moan rises up from the belly of the flat little phone that follows me everywhere.

i am on call.

on call if not for flat-out midwifery, well then for the auntie approximation thereof.

in which the doting and dying-to-be-there auntie babs gets to make one lifelong dream come barreling true…

in which, once the labor pains come, come hard and deep and unrelenting in that way that they do when they mean business, she will stuff the toothbrush into the bag, the one that’s already packed clear down to the street map. she’ll rumble down the stairs, shove open the door into the brisk cambridge air and hightail it straight to the fine state of maine, a mere 127 minutes away (minus the seconds i’ll certainly shave with my foot emphatically pressed to the gas).

yes, any hour now, up portland way, a baby — the baby — is due to make his global debut. the stars are aligning, the planets are too. did you happen to catch that full-bellied moon? it’s as if the nightsky were a blanket, blinking on for the nursery.

and, for once in my life, i am close enough to the centrifugal force that i can’t be kept from what amounts to a celestial sky dive.

plan is, i’ll be there.

not when the wide-eyed one first flutters opens his eyes, drinks in his mama, his papa and the whole world around. but shortly thereafter.

miracle is, i’m likely to be the one to hold his big sister by the hand, feel her heart pumping straight through her palms, as she slips her wee fingers through mine. i will be there as we pad down the hallway, she and i, as we round the bend, and for the first time in her life, as she steps into the all-over glow of being the one who now leads the way.

i consider this an advent miracle of the first order, the highest rung on the ladder of enchantment and wonder: to be in the room, shortly after the arrival of one strapping bundle of love upon love.

and, indeed, and thank you lord, it is yet another miracle in this year of living most sumptuously. that i just happen to be a short jaunt away, just a hop and a skip down the eastern seaboard, when life stirs again in a portland delivery chamber (this one complete with birthing pool).

last time, back when ellabellabeautiful was born, i was in a bedroom far far away when the phone rang, when word came, that she had arrived. with my whole heart and soul i wanted to shrink down to a dot, squeeze through one of the speaker holes and shimmy my way through the wires to pop out on the other end, where the newborn mewed.

but i hadn’t yet mastered that bit of prestidigitation. so all i could do was stand there, in the dark, weeping and yearning.

not so this time.

this time, watch out.

this time, hallelujah, i can ooze my loving, my cooing and cuddling all over the place. on the big sister. on the mama, and papa, and, yes, quietly, contentedly, all over sweet baby boy.

all week it’s seemed that the baby could come, would come, at any hour.

after all, all was ready, at last.

the farmhouse my brother had gutted down to the studs and rebuilt of his own labors, it was complete. the little family had moved down the lane, and into the homestead, with garden and beehives and room, come springtime, for hens and their cluckings. he’d driven down to the cape (cape cod, that is) and hauled home a truckload of family heirlooms. tucked them in corners, placed them front and center in the best of the rooms.

and then, as if that babe had his ear pressed to the wall, as if he knew, all’s ready, the little one began his stirrings.

any day now, his mama told me. so i packed the bag, unreeled the street map. started living hour by hour, ready to rocket-launch at the drop of a pin (or amniotic waters).

my boys here on franklin street will be fine, oh so fine, without me.

and i will drink in the best december elixir: the birth of a newborn babe. and the rarest of loves that i’ve ever known. a perfect start to the season of advent, the holy days of awaiting…

(if that baby comes in the next 13 hours and 14 minutes, it’ll be a november delight…but no such word yet this morning. for a girl who’s old enough to wonder if she’ll be around come the day her own boys have babes, this is a rare thrill, one that might not be repeated in my lifetime. so i am drinking in deep. wholly saturating my soul in all of its glories.)

seems apt that, come sunday, advent begins, not the countdown to christmas for me, so much as it’s the season of waiting. the season of settling deep into the quiet corners of the soul, even if it means swimming upstream from all of the madness this world has layered onto the month, and the weeks leading to christmas. how do you plan to quietly wait for that that might take your breath away?

17 Comments

September 14, 2012

light coming in at the edges

dispatch from 02139…

it struck me, in the middle of a long-strided lope this week, as i race-walked from point A (andover library) to point B (memorial hall), my shoulders weighted down with satchels of notebooks and pens and binders, my breath coming in rapid spurts as i righted my wrong direction and sought internal gyroscope, that i was quickly becoming one of the lemmings.

schedule in hand, spreadsheet at the ready, i’d chalked up six whole classes plus wednesday night seminar plus friday master class plus etched-in-stone 75-year-old nieman tradition, the tuesday night “sounding,” in which each worldly fellow gathers us all at the conference table and pours out the why of his or her journalistic lifework.

geez.

the fact of the matter was i was darting past grolier poetry book shop, inc. (est. 1927). i’d not yet ventured behind the great stone walls of the monastery nestled along the bend in the charles river. i’d barely spent a morning here in the third-floor aerie where the sunlight streams in through lace curtains, where we’ve a whole library of sacred music, dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries, where bookshelves overpopulated with the likes of thomas merton, t.s. eliot, rainier maria rilke, mary oliver and wendell berry call out to me so insistently and incessantly that surely their throats by now are rubbed raw and hoarse as chafing sandpaper.

“but here you are at harvard, fool!” i heard myself chastising myself. “clock’s ticking and you turn back into a pumpkin soon enough. glass slippers will shatter; you’ll be back to your pink rubber crocs quicker than you can say ‘manolo blahnik.’ don’t tarry. don’t stop for breath. inhale. swallow, swallow.”

and then i heard myself choking, sputtering like the tail pipe of some chitty-chitty-bang-bang (a cultural reference that solidly plants me a school-age child of the late 1960s, in which the whole family trooped to a crimson-upholstered downtown movie house to take in the big-screen rendition of roald dahl’s film delight, the one that starred dick van dyke in the role of hapless inventor of flying car).

and that’s when the editing began, the self-editing, the making sense of the morass of these past few days and weeks, in which dizzy heads prevailed, and the intellectual binge began.

no wonder we all looked dazed. it’s what happens when you unloose a troop of would-be thinkers on an ivy-walled institution catapulted off the drawing board back in pilgrim days, a mere hop, skip and a jump from plymouth rock, for cryin’ out loud. with the bona fides to prove it (just stop and read the olde english prose pounded into the limestone slab at johnston gate, at the maw of harvard yard, should you require chiseled veritas).

it wasn’t hard, really, to check my pulse and proclaim it overstrung on overdrive. i could hear it pounding in my head. i could see it in the rosy streaks that had stained my irish cheeks.

the choice, truly, wasn’t complicated: i could a.) keep up the mad-dash, and hyperventilate my way toward christmas. or, b.), grab the pruners, play curator of my own calendar, and try my hand at nips and tucks.

i heard the gong go off — bing! bing! bing! — when numero due, little letter “b” rolled through my brain cells, washed over the gray matter, kicked off its placid powers, settled me into a state of soothe i’d not sensed in, well, months and months, quite frankly.

the whole point of sabbatical, the essence of that latin root, sabbaticus, is, indisputably, “a ceasing.”

in other words, it’s a holy plea to hit the brakes on all the tumult.

“shhhhhhh,” you can hear the big lips in the sky whispering, imploring. dial it down. chill, baby, chill. it’s time to rest now. go to your cubby, and grab your sit-upon, that padded cushion upon which to doze while the teacher turns the pages of the picture book, and you nibble on your grahams and slurp your milk.

see, just the notion of that long-ago rug time, back in the children’s garden when you were five, it makes you all heavy-lidded, doesn’t it? slows your ticker to a sweet adagio.

and so it was when i realized i could ditch a class or two. didn’t need to take in the spectacle of rock-star ethical reasoner michael sandel (heck, i’d been a student of the jesuits, and i’ve yet to stumble upon a living-breathing soul who teaches ethics more solidly than a three-star jebbie). on a gosh-darn roll, i realized, too, i didn’t need to whittle away my thursday afternoons tangled in the algorithms of “science and cooking.”

suddenly, as if cumulus clouds had parted, i saw clear blue stretches in my week, whole blocks of hours unclaimed.

why, i could amble down the cobbled lane, climb the steps to that famed poetry corner, slide a slender volume off the shelf, curl up in a cozy nook, and discover bliss in stanzas.

rather than exist beneath an opaque wall of back-to-back commitments, i could step off to the side of the lemming’s march, pay attention to where the light seeps in around the edges.

isn’t that where holiness presides?

isn’t that the glory that makes this whole endeavor matter?

isn’t that why God invented sabbath, and on the seventh day she wholly rested? plunked her achy tootsy-toes upon the footstool, sat back and sighed?

i am always late to understanding, and i nearly always manage to stumble, bloody-up my knees before i figure out the obvious, but might we come to hear our deepest whispers, quench our deepest thirst, when we stop the noise, quell the fury, and get about the work of purely being alive?

and so it’s been in recent days.

can’t claim i didn’t feel a twinge, a seismic pang of guilt, when i skipped my first “justice” rock-‘n’-roll show. can’t pretend i didn’t wince when, yesterday at 2, i knew full well i was missing out on the physics of sous vide, that chic undercooking mode made famous by the spanish roca brothers (whose lecture i did take in on tuesday afternoon, though i was left barely grasping how you cook filet of sole in a vacuum-sealed pouch on very few degrees for 36 hours, and live to tell about it).

i mustered up all my heaven-sent determination, and — egad, what pray tell is this? — found myself sinking down into a featherbed of slow time, pay-attention time, do-what-matters-to-your-heart time.

i tiptoed out of bed at dawn, and marched down the cobblestones toward the great stone monastery, saint john the evangelist, at the river’s bend. i pushed open the great oak door, and stepped into the candle-lit stone-cave quietude where the monks were deep in morning prayer.

i’d missed the bells, it turned out, because i read the schedule wrong. but, still, i was there for the gospel and the chanting. and i was soon alone, my knees resting on the cobalt-blue velvet cushion, my head bowed before the rows and rows of votive candles, one of which i’d lit, one of which flickered its holy vesper up to where the prayers waft.

and here, on a friday morning where the breeze flutters the lace that drapes the window, i am alone with the tap-tap-tap of the alphabet keys, a somnolent but soulful rhythm if ever there was one.

and i made time this week not for a night class, but rather to visit the book store where a fellow who’s written julia child’s biography, stood and told us tales from the cookstove. recounted how julia’s hors d’oeuvres of choice was nothing so fancy as pepperidge farm goldfish. “by the bowls full,” the scribe informed. “whole mountains of them,” he emphasized, as if letting us in on her long-held kitchen secret.

it just might be that serendipity is the savior of this year. that floating without rudder, dancing unchoreographed, just might be the magic trick.

to live, to breathe, with all your might, just might be to let the hours unspool all on their own, to grasp the sacred when and where you find it.

most especially when you slow down, grow quiet, so much so that you can’t help but pay attention to the sunbeams peeking in from between the shadows.

that’s the harvard book store, up above, where bob spitz, author of “dearie: the remarkable life of julia child,” and the white-shocked pin dot, just to the right of the tv square, was spilling kitchen secrets the other eve. and just below, the candles that burn at saint john the evangelist, a holy place i fully intend to make my home away from home……

oy. and before i lose this entire page, thoroughly upending my new-found calm, i’d ask simply, have you discovered a need to edit the demands of your life, to curate the gallery of what matters most deeply, and what’s dismissible? and what unfolds when you slow to a pensive quiet?

4 Comments

August 24, 2012

tumblings from a cambridge notebook…

dispatch from 02139… in which the chair explores the nooks and crannies of this wonderland where at every turn, it seems, there is something to capture the imagination and set it soaring…

because i’ve somehow managed to decorate my days-long fever with wall-to-wall crimson spots (ever conscious of the college colors), i’ve decided that the wisest dispatch here this morning would be the one in which i merely shake out my reporter’s notebook from this enchanted week in cambridge, one in which we launched deep and wide into orientation at the white clapboard lippmann house where the cottage garden blooms and where already i’ve encountered a slew of amazing souls from all around the world.

it is pinch-me hard to believe, quite often, that i am in fact sitting in a chair in a sun-streamed assembly room, looking up at a wall, where there hangs a banner that reads: “nieman foundation for journalism at harvard.”

but there we sit, eight hours in a day, absorbing all they have to tell us about this year of, as the curator of us all so beautifully put it: “exposure to big and wonderful minds.” not a bad agenda for a year.

among us is a foreign correspondent (whose identity i must keep masked) who tells tales of interviewing terrorists and then being told that if the interviews don’t work out, maybe she could marry one of the ol’ bomb-lobbers. yet another is a woman who has dedicated her life and every waking second of the last two years to documenting every single homicide in washington, d.c.; she has been in court for every hearing and proceeding of every bloody death in the district, she hears from victim’s families and suspects and accusers, along with eyewitnesses, and a host of hangers-on, and she was in tears when she got up to introduce herself and explained that in order to come on the fellowship she had to close down her site, and for the first time in two years, there were murders in d.c. going down undocumented this week, unwatched by her watchful eyes.

the conversation i’ll not ever forget is the one that unfolded the other night, sitting at a picnic table, beside a man from a country i won’t name (for confidentiality reasons), who told me that he is publishing a book on the history of his country, and that when he returned home at the end of this year, “trouble will be waiting.”

when i asked what exactly “trouble” meant, he quietly answered, “prison.”

“how long,” i asked.

he shook his head. he didn’t know. but he had two friends, he told me, who’d been in prison 17 years already.

you don’t engage in conversations like those and not begin to feel a shifting deep inside, as you realize that around the world lives are risked for the work that journalists — hellbent on truth-telling, no matter the cost — do each and every day, recording every bloody uprising, every random gang-bang.

on the other end of an indelible spectrum, i’ve been witness to my little fellow, the one who in recent weeks was scared to death about leaving home, the one who on the morning of our leaving, when i walked into his bedroom at dawn to announce, “it’s time to go,” burst into unbroken sobs. i have been watching him cast aside every doubt and worry and dive into friendships with kids he never knew a week ago. even when they don’t speak a word of english.

the most heavenly of those friendships is the one we’ve come to call the three musketeers: there is my little guy, who speaks barely a word of spanish; there is a little boy from spain who speaks barely a word of english; and, in the middle, there is a little fellow whose parents are from argentina, but who has lived in cambridge his whole life, and who fluidly and fluently is the verbal glue between all three. that and the universal conjunction, the soccer ball, which needs no translation, and which the other night, on the sloping lawn of the lippmann house, steering clear of the butterfly bush and the cosmos, was the magnet that drew some 20 kids, from the diaper-set to the 11-year-old ringleaders, into a game that would not quit, not till well after the last drop of cambridge sunlight had been wrung from the night sky.

in my fevered state, it’s hard to find words for how darn proud i am of that little fellow, who has dug down deep and pulled forth a motherlode of courage and great good wit, to already claim a host of friends from all around the world. glory be to the angels and saints to whom i’ve prayed for months, for this very answer to countless whispered pleadings.

and so this week, more than anything, has been about making friends, peeling back that layer that we all show to the world, and through the simple act of asking questions, and listening carefully to the stories that spill and spill, finding divine connection that will carry us through a short and winding year.

a mother from south africa told me how, through meditation, she came to know she was birthing twins. a radio broadcaster from chile extolled the virtues of a chilean feminist poet who’s been clouded by pablo neruda’s blinding fame; and she and i, now on a shared poetry quest, intend to trek to grolier’s, the oldest poetry-only bookstore in the country, just off harvard square. a food writer from new orleans promised he’d make us gumbo.

and so it goes. all upholstered by my smashing case of spots, in harvard crimson colors.

next up: shopping for classes. on the list? “poetry and religion,” in which we explore the works of Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Anna Akhmatova, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy, Sylvia Plath. or maybe “the science of cooking,” yes, cooking. or perhaps wynton marsalis’ ongoing lecture series. or whatever else tumbles on my hungry path.

and by the way, oh goodness what a difference a year makes, we take the college boy back to amherst tomorrow morn. it will soon be just the three of us. and already i miss that gorgeous soul who inhabits such an enormous chunk of my heart.

do you, too, revel in the art of discovering those divine connections that draw us together and hold us forever after? (and how was that for a rhetorical question…)

12 Comments

July 27, 2012

the year of magical living

it’s not even started yet, but already serendipity keeps tapping me on the shoulder, and as i turn my head swiftly to see who’s there, i discover a bright and buoyant sprite hovering behind me. it’s as if she’s cooing in my ear, soothing me with the words, “it’ll be all right.”

up and moving does not come easily to nesty girls, girls like me, girls with roots like wild fennel, that twisty-turny underground extension that nearly requires a crowbar to expunge it from the garden.

up and moving is not on my list of things i’d do on any old unscheduled monday.

no, not at all.

but here’s the thing that keeps giving me goosebumps: our adventure to cambridge, massachusetts, seems to be enchanted.

the uncanniest bits of magic keep darting into the cobbled lane, standing in my path, shouting, “look at me, you can’t deny me. who says you’re too old for make-believe and happily ever afters?”

it seems that there are life lessons here, ones worth mining, ones to hold up to the sunlight, to examine from every which way.

long, long ago in the depths of winter, once i’d talked my way through the self-imposed hurdles and barricades, the ones that tried to keep me back, the 101 reasons why staying put made much more sense than up and moving in the middle of my family’s merry life, why it seems the heavens took their cue, opened wide and showered down on me what, so far, seems a fairy-dusted parade.

there’s the third-floor aerie i’ve described in a meandering at the start of summer. and more than that — so much more — there’s the fellow you might technically call my landlord, though i now think of him as something of a life beacon, a spiritual guide, a friend.

why, just last night he sent a final email from his cambridge study, telling me how he’d transformed his college daughter’s bedroom into a room fit for an 11-year-old sports fanatic boy. he called it a “sports den,” went on to note that he’d erected bunk beds, found a bulletin board and hung it over the desk. he cleared shelves for the trophies that are sure to be accumulated (these days, at least in these parts, sports teams dish out trophies for the simple act of showing up….). he even bought and washed a set of twin sheets in a color he chose after careful consideration. he didn’t want my little guy sleeping on girl-colored sheets or store-starched ones straight out of the package; he wanted comfort for the sportster, and he stopped at nothing, bless his bountiful heart.

he’s left me a whole study filled with poetry tomes and texts. the sacred music shelf awaits, arranged in chronological order, no less (i’d best not mix up my medievals and my renaissance chants). and he’s written out directions to the monastery two blocks away, and the one farther down the shore where he tells me i can rent a hermitage for a $60 donation, and expect three meals with all that quiet.

here we pause for that holy exclamation, the one we shout at all our passover seders, “dayenu!” meaning, as if that’s not plenty enough….

ah, but there is more.

and the latest serendipitous installment is pictured up above. that charming house, the one with window frames in blue and red and yellow, the one with at least one parrot perched in a window, well it’s just down the lane from where we’ll be roosting, and i was so enchanted by its paintbox whimsy as i strolled past that first fine sunday morning when we sealed the deal on the aerie, i snapped its picture. i couldn’t help it. it just called out to me, and even if i only tucked it in my pocket in digital pixels, i could not leave it behind.

turns out i just spoke to the lovely woman who lives there, and it’s the very place where we’ll likely be parking our four wheels. we’d been searching high and low for lots or garages — civic, public, paved or unpaved, didn’t matter — and through the most circuitous, serendipitous of circumstances, i found myself just this morning on the phone with the owner of that storybook cottage, and as might be expected her voice is one that might lull you into a soft and feathered state of contentment.

now how could it be — other than pure stardust and moonbeams — that the one house in all of cambridge that i could not pass without clicking a snapshot is the one house where i’ll soon get to pull into the gravel drive, perhaps exchange a morning’s greeting, or a basket of muffins, with the dear dear soul who lives there?

and so, as i continue on with the steady work of packing up our clothes and a little boy’s essentials, as i feel the tug and pull of saying goodbye to friends and a house and a garden and a mother who i’ll miss each and every day, i keep my ear tuned to the whispers that keep coming from the east: i’m convinced that it’s the beckoning of sprites and angels, and they’re drawing me to someplace magical, to a year of deep enchantments and truths to last a whole life long.

all that’s left to do is play along….

dear chair friends, as i type these keystrokes, our beloved HH is being wheeled into surgery. hold her in your prayers. hold her, hold her…..she did not escape the fear that nearly leveled me. it’s her second round with breast cancer, and while the prognosis is great and good, a mastectomy is no woman’s first choice. dear God, hold her and all her hopes and dreams.

and while we’re at it, please watch over my beloved landlords as they drive from massachusetts to new mexico, for the first chapter of their new adventure. the aerie is emptied out now, for a short spell. we’ll be the next ones who lay our sleepy heads on its pillows, who open wide the doors, fill the bird feeders, listen to the sacred chants. after we pull our shiny car into the slot at the paintbox house of serendipity and charm, and yet another new friend…

what serendipities have leapt upon your cobbled path of late??

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July 20, 2012

apple pie, poker & the afterglow of hardballs to the noggin

these odd chapters somehow always manage to creep up unawares. and so this one.

we were sitting the other eve, forks in mid-lift, i’m certain, when suddenly a skinny pair of sun-browned legs came swishing through the steamy jungle that these days is my secret tangled garden, the one tucked along the side of this old house. not many lopes behind him came another pair of legs, grown-up legs, a mother’s legs. but not his mother’s.

while it took my brain cells a spell or two to shake all this out, it all came tumbling clear once i saw the look of dazed despair on the little one’s face, and the ashen worry on the mama trailing just behind. then i saw the boy holding something to his dust-splattered head, and i needed little explanation to reach the quick conclusion that this was not how the evening had been scripted.

while the little guy stared up at me with those thirsty hazel-brown eyes of his, in that way that kids have of signaling simultaneous distress and “help me, help me, mama! this here’s your job,” the mama trailing behind him began to spill the dots.

there had been a game of stealing bases, and a hardball, one zipping through the air at 35 miles per hour, she figured (and, the mother of three ball-playing boys, she knows these things). that hard-beaned hardball made a beeline straight to my little guy’s forehead, which set him “crumpling” (her word) to the ground, upon which he couldn’t remember my phone number, and kept saying the same thing over and over. oh, and he was dizzy. and he thought he might throw up.

now, mind you, i’d just the week before heard a tale of precisely the same thing, a kid on the side of a ball field taking a bean to the head, how he got rushed to the school nurse, who thought not so much of it, so he went along to his after-school playdate, only to start getting droopy-faced within the hour. that poor kid wound up in emergency brain surgery before the sun set, and now, thank god, is a-okay. though he won’t be playing ball for a long long time. or ever, if his mother has anything to say about it.

so, with that fresh little spectacle shining in my head, i took in the scene with my very own head-bonked boy, and before you can spell “concussion,” i’d speed-dialed our trusty pediatricians, who wasted no time in sending me to the ER we live so conveniently close to. (note to mothers of boys: when house hunting, be sure to clock the door-to-door distance to your nearest friendly emergency room. it comes in handy.)

not-so-long story abbreviated: dear boy didn’t even need a CT scan, though of course they ruled his head bonk a by-the-book concussion. and, worth mention, his big brother did a memorable job playing ambulance driver, clicking on the bright red flashers only to be stuck in traffic behind the north shore’s slowest-ever driver, meandering lazily down the express route to the hospital. and, happy ending taken up a notch, we walked out of that ER into the arms of a thrashing summer’s storm. hallelujah!

but this wouldn’t be a tale worth telling if not for the prescription that came with the bump: no TV, no computers, no reading, no contact sports.

egad.

for how long we must endure this, we do not know. we see the concussion doctor monday. so for now, and through the weekend, we’ve turned back the clock and we’re playing like pioneers, minus the covered wagon.

yesterday we filled the day with this list of exotica: two boys — ages 10 and 11, mind you — baked, from scratch, an apple pie. yessiree, they sliced the apples, dumped the sugar, sprinkled cinnamon with vigor. they rolled out the dough, crimped the edge (in remarkably poetic undulations). then, because both share the initials TK, they drew out a lance from the kitchen junk drawer and lanced away at their letters, a cris-cross of hard-edged consonants nearly doing in the pie top.

while the apple pie did its oven dance, they did what bakers do: they tried their hand at texas hold ’em, a poker variation, then moved on to black jack and dominoes. ping pong served as minor interlude, along with a promise from our head-bonked one that he would not, absolutely not, come crashing down on the sharp corner of the table.

later in the evening, yet another little fellow wandered by. he took the bumped one out for ice cream, and, quietly strolling the lanes from there to here, they returned home for a long night of not-oft-seen board games. checkers, monopoly, and the fierce pursuit of plastic real estate.

so goes the old-fashioned, turn-back-the-clock life of the forehead compromised.

and, of course you’ve guessed that the point here is that gifts sometimes come wrapped in odd packages. say, ones with purple-green swirls just under a little boy’s forehead curls.

it is rather a refreshing, if taxing, way to spend a summer’s day, exercising the imagination, steering clear of pursuits that might potentially jar that tender brain of his.

deep inside, i long for just such summer days. for the gift of building tree forts (though at the moment, the fort is grounded, not cleared for take-off). for, perhaps, lying upon a summer’s couch, listening to the words of a mama turning the page of some fine adventure tale. and, pray tell, how about a lemonade stand, peddling from-scratch lemony-sugar potion, at the turn-back price of 5 cents a glass?

sometimes it takes a klonk on the head to get us seeing clearly. and if that’s the moral to the hardball story, well, then, i wish we could have gotten there without the goose egg hatching on my little fellow’s forehead.

how do you dream of spending a summer’s day? one spent the old-fashioned way?

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July 6, 2012

practice realignment

those calls do not always come in the form of a phone ringing, but this one did.

it was early monday morning, i was minding my business, taking a stroll on the round-about that is the basement treadmill. phone rang. i answered.

“hullo, this is the lynn sage breast center at northwestern memorial hospital,” said the voice on the other end of the line. i felt a grand canyon of unanswered question gouge into the empty space between her last utterance and the silence that fell after it.

“yes,” i finally spoke up, voice creaking, begging to know what was coming next.

“the radiologist…,” i heard her say, then something about my last mammogram, the one two weeks ago. “abnormal… they’d like you to come back… as soon as possible.” so flowed the hyphenated string of words, the sound of my heartbeat drowning out whatever came between.

and so my week began with a crash and a boom. we scribbled in the appointment, the voice and i. it would be first thing the morning after the fourth of july independence holiday.

next up, the pounding of the digits on the phone face. tried to call the mate. he wasn’t there, and i wasn’t leaving that message. so i called my mama. rounded out my life list of swears-in-front-of-my-mother with a new addition, the f word. glory be to the heavens, she echoed it right back. it was a morning for firsts, all right.

and so began a 72-hour trip to heck and back.

that’s all it takes for a girl with an imagination like mine to see her whole life unspool before her eyes.

you thought you were headed to cambridge, i sassed myself. not without an oncologist’s phone number tucked there inside your pocket. you thought you liked your curly wild silver hair? imagine it missing. and so it went, through most of the week.

i saw fireworks through eyes that wondered what the morning would bring. i took a shower and barely glanced down, for fear that the sight of those troublesome lumps would make my knees buckle under right there beneath the pounding beads of shower stream. i pictured myself sprawled out on the couch in the bay window of the cambridge three-flat. wondered how i’d lug the groceries up the stairs. wondered if chicken broth and saltine crackers would be the mainstays of my cambridge foodstuffs.

it’s the reality check that tumbles us to the ground. it’s the fear of God that shakes us to our core. it’s that rare-enough interlude when we feel the world as we know it slipping through our fingers, when we can’t quite close the gap, can’t contain the fall.

i can’t say that it was wasted time, not at all really. it’s that top-to-bottom accounting of one’s life. weighing out all the bits, sifting through to what matters, what matters fiercely.

why, setting the table seemed a joy. grilling vegetables, pure pleasure. holding hands with the ones you love. listening to my college kid speak these words: “not you, mom, you’re invincible.” standing in front of the mirror, deciding that unruly mop atop my head, it’s who i am and i am not about to surrender it. not without a tussle anyway.

i consider all of it a practice drill for sizing up the joint. it’s not a bad thing — how could it be? — to take inventory of the whole of your life, to divide it into piles, this here’s essential, this does not amount to a hill o’ beans.

and in the end, all that mattered was boiled down to one short list, one simple prayer: dear God, let me live out my days being a mother to my holy blessed children. let me be there, God, on the days when they need me most. let me get that little one straight into high school, please. let me filter down into their backbones and their spines. let my sparks of light illuminate the darkest corners of their soul. dear God, give me sunrise skies in the mornings, and starlit domes at night. let me dwell, quiet, in the garden. let me smell the roses on the climbing vine. dear God, let me walk beside the ones i love. let me hear their voices, peals of laughter; let me brush away their tears when next they fall. dear God, give me the simple joy of sitting together at breakfast, of taking to the front porch with a tin of pie and two forks. give me blueberries piled high. and the unbroken blessing of a day without a worry.

but most of all, dear God, give me one more round with my little boy. he’s not ready yet to run without me at the finish line.

and sure enough, i signed into the special room yesterday morn, the one at the end of the long hall, the one already filled with too many other women with too much worry etched into their cheeks, their eyes, the corners of their mouth. we sat there, a sorority of holy desperation.

until at last they called my name. pointed the way down the long hushed hall. there, behind a door marked “A,” as i went to set my coffee mug on the top shelf of the skinny locker, as the nice lady handed me the hospital gown, instructed me to leave the ties in front, before i saw it coming, the coffee came tumbling down, all over me, on my once-white t-shirt and khaki shorts, dripping down my knees, straight to the tops of my garden-stained toes.

“may that be the worst thing that happens to you today,” said the nice lady, as she grabbed a hunk of tissues, mopped me up.

a long dull 45 minutes later, after the ladies with the magic wand pressed it back and forth, over and over, across the top of the lumpy place, at last came word that in fact the coffee spill had been the worst of it: “go home,” the attendant said.

simple as that. it was all over. the radiologist read the images, determined nothing lurked there.

“that’s it?” i asked.

“that’s it. you’re done.”

i climbed off the table. shoved open the door. walked back to the locker where my stained clothes hung.

i spent the rest of the whole long hot day whispering these simple words: thank you thank you thank you God. thank you, one more time, for the breathtaking chance to wrap my arms around my boys with not a worry in the world.

in the end, that was it, the only prayer that mattered. and the one that, this time, was wholly answered.

what was your last close call? and in the end, what’s on your short list of most essentials? the things you cannot, will not, live without?

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November 25, 2011

bountiful

welcome to the fourth annual marking of steering-clear-of-commerce, the day after that great feast of thanks when most of western civilization seems to crank up the greedy and run, grab and dash for the nearest big-box extravaganza.

why, news reports already tell us of the lovely southern california woman who hauled out her red pepper spray last night at a wal-mart, while crushing in lines for an x-box, and let rip on the shoppers and children huddled around her.

makes me want to run to the woods and holler.

but then, running to the woods is the whole point of the chair’s annual backs-to-the-mall celebration, as we attempt in our collective ways to battle the rampant commercialism and turn instead to the contemplative powers of very full bellies, and very deep thanks.

and so, we begin.

my long list of bounties this year, the sumptuous morsels that stuff full my heart, begins but does not end with the simple fact that there are two boys asleep in beds not far over my head.

there is a long and muscular fellow who these past delicious days has been showering me with the through-and-through sense that he is the very same fellow we dropped at the college gate. only perhaps he’s been thinking harder than in a very long time. perhaps, too, he’s traveled landscapes far livelier than the ones he traveled when anchored here in the leafy little town we call home.

no small feat, this reunion of hearts, discovering the boy who’s been gone, who’s been decidedly far-off in miles and minimal emails, is in fact still deeply connected, seamless, and, yes, he still makes me laugh so hard i am gasping for air.

right up with that blessing, come the ones that spring from the little fellow who has not left the roost. the one who leads with his heart. the one who leapt right into the lap of his big brother the other eve, thought nothing of plopping himself like a second scoop of ice cream into the very same chair, a kid who cannot stop oozing a rare brand of tenderness. it’s as if he knows as deeply as i do that the simple act of his being here is nothing short of answered prayer, science-defying miracle.

this old house is a blessing, too. the way it reaches out and wraps me in its sun-streaming windows, creaky old floor boards. the clouds of heat that come from the firehouse stove, the one that simply and solidly cooks up whatever i ask.

and then there is the garden that wraps this house, that nestles it into its place on the planet. the grove of old pines, the branches that each and every spring welcome the wren, and in winter harbor the hawk, the hawk who makes me shudder, afraid as i am to watch him swoop down and capture his lunch.

of all the gifts that garden brings, and it brings many, it’s being home and feast for the birds that i count as its most sacred calling. for there is something about the flutterings of the birds, the way that scarlet banner, the cardinal, posts himself just beyond the window, the way the blue jay rattles the bush, and the sparrows keep up their chatter, that sings to the depth of my soul.

i might be among the few who salute the cloudy skies of november on my long list of blessings. ah, but those angora gray skies, they comfort me, hold me solidly, harbor me.

yes, sunlight streaming in is a beautiful thing, but it’s almost too awake for me. i’ll take the somnolence, the introspection of a gray day any day.

and i’d be amiss if i did not mention how grateful i am for hearts that continue to tick, day in and day out, despite the trials we toss their way, as we worry and fret, then, without notice, shriek in deep joy and excitement. poor ol’ heart, the one that landed in me, might not have realized it was signed on for a roller-coaster ride of significant proportion.

i am deeply grateful for the creature comforts that await me each morn when i rise from my bed. for the coffee beans that sit on the shelf of the freezer. for the cranberry-studded corn bread that fuels most of my mornings. for the old blue calico pitcher that charms me. and the coffee mug that fits snug in my palm.

i am grateful for the schoolhouse clock that ticks on the wall.

and the smiles that greet me along my way, from the security guard who sits in the lobby of the tall gothic tower where i go to work each tuesday through thursday, to the checkers at my grocery store, the ones who know the names of my boys and who can tell who’s home for dinner by the plenty i toss on the checkout line.

i am grateful for a mama who comes two times each week to cook up a dinner, and tend to the boy who walks home from the bus stop.

i am grateful for faraway family, the ones who keep watch from afar, and who relentlessly believe in us, most especially the ones in new jersey.

i am grateful for a brother and sister in maine who seamlessly weave themselves into our every day, despite the thousand-plus miles. i am so deeply grateful that the woman my brother married is now, in every way, my sister. i am grateful for each one of my four beautiful brothers. and, too, for my new york city sister who regales me with tales from the front and keeps me in stitches.

i am eternally grateful for friends, most especially for the ones who pull up their chairs, and offer up words of wisdom, and unfading love.

i am grateful for the chorus of saints in my life, the ones i turn to when i don’t understand the ways of the world, or need to talk through some nettling worry. i am grateful for strangers who dish up kindness. i am grateful for neighbors who come to my door with platters of cookies and tubs of tomatoes.

i am grateful for anyone who loves words, and most especially for anyone who tells a great tale. i am grateful for old friends, and ones i discovered as recently as just last week.

i am grateful for editors who dollop careful consideration.

i’m not supposed to write about him here, but i am mighty grateful for that tall fellow i married, the one who’s stuck by my side on our considerable journey, the one who helps me steer this sometimes teetering ship. the one who has taught our boys to be very fine men. the one i still love to listen to, across any dinner table. but most especially one filled with great minds, and great hearts.

i am grateful, come to think of it, for all the old tables in this house. the ones where i set out the plates, the banged-up hand-me-down blue willows, or the lipstick-red diner china.

of all the treasures in my life, most often it’s the spread at the table that captures the deepest richest deliciousness. it’s where bellies are filled, but far more so, where lessons are learned, and laughter is launched.

if there is a birthplace for bounty, it’s right at the table, the one rung with so many chairs.

happy day of bountiful blessings, my chair friends, so many blessings and marvels they spill straight from thanksgiving onto the glorious annual day after. no discounts allowed.

what’s on your list of bountiful blessings?
and, before i sign off, happy blessed birthday to our sweet sweet azk, a father-in-law for the ages, a wise man, a good man, a gentle man. big big hug, and many wishes for yet another bountiful year. love, bam xoxox

p.s. that spread up above, that was turkey day brunch at my house yesterday, while the tv blared football, and my sweet baby bro from toledo with his beautiful wife drove in for a day of feasting. i was mighty grateful to get to do that spread, my one dollop of turkey-day cooking and baking….

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July 22, 2011

the gift of ahhhhh….

the morning around me, at last, is gray. like an old cashmere blanket pulled from a chest, it wraps me.

the dirt in the garden is dark again. puddles pool at the curb. the leaves, nearly every last one of ’em, are beaded, are shimmering, what’s left of the wee-hour rain.

holy respite this morning. as if the whole globe let out a sigh. started to breathe again.

too many days in a row here, even at dawn, it’s been bright white when you awake. the sun, working overtime. as if someone shuffled off to bed, forgot to turn down the thermostat. ol’ sun, just cranked through the night.

when you start out the day dodging the heat, plopping ice in your coffee, mapping your walk to the train by tracing the shadow, sticking close to the side of the street where the shade falls, you know it’s an uphill of a climb.

and now, as with so many sieges, it’s taken a pause. given all of us mortals, or at least the ones who get prickly in heat, a chance to inhale, to shake off the sense we’d entered inferno.

i’ve been holding my breath all week, knowing, trusting, the end would come.

all day yesterday i was tracking the cold front. so much so that the people who type all around me found themselves wholly amused by my weather refrain.

thing is, i grew up with a mama who lived and breathed for that cold front, when the winds took a hook, made a drastic, resuscitating U turn. stopped their unrelenting howl from the south and the west, where, fueled by the desert and infinite dry, dusty plains, they’d reached insufferable digits, and then, without flutter or warning, they’d turn right around, come off the lake, that long lean ever-cool lake that is chicago’s cooling station.

why, my mama would yell, closest thing to a hallelujah i ever heard, “cold front! cold front! open the north windows!”
and we’d all start the cold-front dance, all of her hot little chickadees. we’d bang up the stairs, shove open the double-hung panes on the side of the house nearest the wind-change, then we’d whirl into the yard where we’d stick out our arms, making like bi-wings parked at an airfield, and we’d spin and laugh till the last drop of sweat was absorbed.

then, to polish it off, we might troop back to the kitchen, where we’d plop the last of the frozen kool-aid cubes, the ones poured as bright-colored potion into the clanky old metal ice-cube tray, the ones we had to wait for for hours, the ones that made your tongue and your lips and your chin and your knees (if they dribbled that far) an odd shade of red. a red that wouldn’t go away without scrubbing.

seems me and my brothers just grew up believing in the cold-front refrain. we knew it was coming, sooner or later.
and once it came, all frolic came out.

our house growing up wasn’t necessarily filled with frolic, but that cold off-the-lake air, it made my mama dance. and we leapt right along.

not a bad lesson, when you think about it. knowing full well that the hot air will end. that if you endure it long enough, that sense that someone’s kicking your head, and you’re about to buckle right at the knees, that odd knowing your poor heart is trying so hard to keep ticking, it all up and evaporates.

once the cold front comes. once the winds turn around.

and so it’s been this week. we put up with hell to get here to the reprieve. where gray, and not bright, is a beautiful color.

hey, someone open the windows.

how did you survive the heat siege, which seems to have swept the whole country, ‘cept for marquette michigan where the weathermap tells me, they clocked a measly 78 degrees?
and, speaking of lessons, was there one particular lesson you learned over and over, one drummed in your head when you were a kid, one that comes in handy now that you’re all grown up, and the one now charged with deep understandings of the rhythms of life?

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June 10, 2011

a sigh like no other

i feel it from deep down inside my lungs. from the bottom of my rapid-beating heart. from the tips of all my limbs. i think i even feel it from my bum.

the sigh of not just summer’s launch, but a sigh that’s never been.

here we are, the clock ticking toward the holy hour when the school bell will last clang, when my fourth grader will leave his little school, the high schooler already no longer a high schooler.

these are the first few hours of pure summer oxygen. when all the cares, at last, are gone. when the summer lies ahead, no need to rush from bed in mornings, no need to turn out lights at 9 or even 10 at night. no need, gosh darn it, to stir and cook and put square meals on plates. we can choose, if we want, to slice a watermelon and call it dinner.

summer is the season of so many choices.

and this summer, this holy blessed summer, is the summer in which i can chart–as if a meteorologist tracking storms or humidity–the pressure lifting like a swiftly-rising puffy cloud, the pressure evaporated, gone.

no college essays due. no dabbling with the SAT study guide. no memorizing state capitals and abbreviations. (it’s darn-near comic, often here, having two boys with feet so far apart, one in elementary world and the other all the way to college.)

and this holy blessed summer, i don’t even have to worry about the bus for camp racing by before we’re ready. camp at our house this summer consists of a company of two: one’s the counselor, one’s the camper.

my college-bound boy will spend the summer days, or at least my work days, on adventures with his little bro. they’ve picked a town-and-country theme (or at least the older one picked it, the little one isn’t big on any theme that’s absent a ball and ballfield). the big boy will teach the little one all the things a boy should know: how to bait a fish hook, how to use a compass, how to travel on the “el” train. he’ll teach him how to cook a hot dog on a stick. and, perhaps, how to bench press, oh, 30 pounds.

i had no forms to fill out for this summer. no tetanus shots come due.

i might as well toss all alarm clocks. and wrist watches while we’re at it.

we are running without rigors of where to be when.

we are, for the first and perhaps the last time, this summer exploring what it means to be without a long list of must-get-dones.

we are letting brothers be brothers. we are letting boys be boys.

we are, so help me, going barefoot. making ice cream. picking berries. watching clouds go passing by.

we’ve earned this respite from the madness. and i am claiming every ounce of it.

so many saturday mornings we’ve been jarred awake by alarms telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we must be dressed, be out the door.

i’ve whispered, sighed, moaned, “this is crazy, this is no way to live.” as i’ve watched myself mad-dash from here to there to everywhere.

and this is the summer when the billboard in my head reads one simple word: SAVOR.

savor slumped shoulders, the load finally slid off, the back-tightening worries, gone.

savor screen door slapping. savor breeze blowing through the porch. savor fireflies. savor whispers on the front stoop till the moon is high above.

savor being together with both boys, the heartbeats of my life, my loves.

savor oars swooshing through the water. savor sand between the toes. savor tomatoes sliced and salted. savor peach juice dripping down my chin.

savor all it took to get us here. savor that we’ve made it. savor two boys who both consider it a blessing to spend the summer bumming ‘round together.

savor nights without homework, and mornings without racing, rushing, panting, shrieking.

savor every blessed drop.

it’s time to sigh the deepest sigh. it won’t last forever.

and just how do you plan to spend your summer’s vacation? what’s on your wish list of summer joys?

my little one (up above) asked last night if he got “special breakfast” since it was the last day of school. why, of course. out came the red “you are special today” plate, and the turkey bacon and the pancakes with sliced peaches and maple syrup. that little guy is playing in the little league world series this weekend. game one’s tonight, unless the rains don’t stop. games two and three come saturday and sunday, all three played out in an idyllic little ballpark here in town, a place that’s a throwback in time, with dugouts and a flagpole and a snack shack where hot dogs are $1.25, and rice krispie treats are just a quarter, and brownies too, all made by a woman with her hair twisted in a bun atop her head, a woman named bonnie who hovers over the place as if a mother hen. it’s a place with an old-time scoreboard just like the one at wrigley field, with tin numbered squares, carted out beyond the cyclone fence by little kids pulling a red radio flyer wagon, who try inning after inning to keep track of all the runs. not a bad way to start the summer, playing it like a scene from some old-fashioned movie, kids on a playlot, slugging, sliding, pitching, catching for the world series trophy. we got lucky this year, and my little slugger found himself on a team with true all-stars, the kinda kids whose names will be whispered around town for years to come. we are going along for the ride. and some ride it is…..some start to summer, indeed.

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Category: blessings