Saul Good and Co.

Takeaways

Gee whiz guys, I write a halfway positive blog entry and within hours there's an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. COOL. I'm hesitant to court that kind of jinxery in the universe again by going on about things that aren't strictly horrible, but I'd like to shine a light on things that have kept me going over the course of this endless period of suck.

 

- I quit my longtime yoga studio after doing some serious thinking about what I want from my practice and re-examining yoga in our culture. I still love it, but I decided if I'm going to pay for instruction, it would do me good to seek out studios with philosophies that line up with mine. This led me to some great online classes through some local studios like 4 Corners Yoga and JP Centre Yoga, places I would not have gotten around to checking out if I had stayed in my complacent, mindless bubble. I also bought a monthly subscription (it's super cheap) to Underbelly Yoga, which I highly recommend, especially if you're a beginner, and if you like your teachers playful, profane and hilarious. Jessamyn is a personal heroine. 

 

- I joined a few groups to help keep me inspired and accountable, to push me out of my comfort zone and help me to be a better, more committed accomplice in the ongoing fight for racial justice. To my white ladies who want to do better, Becky's Anonymous is a cool community and a great resource. I've only been attending their circles for a few months, but I've learned a lot. 

 

- After a stagnant, unsettled few months of not being able to get into books, my library re-opened for curbside pickup, and I started making online requests whenever a book I'd heard of or always wanted to read popped into my mind and I read a TON. So much good stuff, just to name a few: Deacon King Kong by James McBride, Luster by Raven Leilani, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault, The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, the entire Jasmine Guillory catalog (too short but she's still writing!) and the almost-complete works of Joan Didion, another heroine. Books are medicine.

 

-Mike and I have been making a ton of Spotify mixes, and picking up a lot of new music along the way, which is good for our old butts. Music is also medicine.

 

-I have put a high premium on being cozy, My life is the pursuit of hygge and will be so as long as it has to be. I don't have a fireplace but invested in some high-quality candles and I have a full wardrobe of soft, warm clothing and I'm just riding this out. Yes I look forward to going out and dressing up again someday--I have complete envy when I watch a movie or show set in non-pandemic times--but for the forseeable future, I'm about that homebound life. About making the best of it, anyway.

 

I'm still working full time and I'm trying to write with varying success and I'm having fun with my latest social media endeavor, and I'm spending way too much time obsessively following the news and I'm worried about all my loved ones all the time. All in all this is how I stay occupied, relatively sane and sometimes even happy. 

Don't it Feel Good

See you in hell 2020, I'm going to take a cue from the staggeringly hard-won results in Georgia and start this year INSPIRED. Inspired to be a better person, every day. To write. To move. To have the hard conversations that scare me. To volunteer my time, energy and resources to help end systemic racism via ending systemic poverty, voter suppression, police brutality and carceral violence. To make up for lost time in restaurants and bars and clubs and airplanes and highways and in the faces of my loved ones as soon as it's safe. To put clothing on my body that isn't strictly activewear. 

Look, time is arbitrary. I know that. The change of a calendar year is meaningless in a lot of ways but it's not entirely without meaning. We have a chance, because the year changed, to make real change in this country. To further the fight for what is right and just for all, to distance ourselves from corruption and to make strides to heal the Earth and its people. I truly believe this and embracing that belief makes me sit up straighter, breathe deeper, hope harder when my first instinct for so long has been to hunker down, cowed, too scared to hope. 

I don't do resolutions, and if last year taught us anything it's that making plans is like peeing into the wind but I DO occasionally have goals and giving them a loose calendar year structure helps me stay accountable. This year I am going to get my damn book published and finish a draft of the sequel. That's roughly 359 days to make good. Piece of cake, right? I've got more that I want to do, a fuckton of a lot more, but that's the only one that gets a timeline for now.

Welcome, 2021. Welcome, love and light. 

Here's My Story, Sad but True...

This will likely be the last time I write in here before it's 2021. I will not be trying to make any kind of "year in review" post because, well holy feck, you know why. If any of us are still here by New Year's Eve, let's call it a triumphant end. As I steep myself in memories of holidays past, it's clear that no matter what, when we look back on the Christmas of 2020 it will be considered singularly memorable. Let's get to it, and may it be the last of its kind.

 

I haven't much mentioned my dad's side of the family yet in these flashbacks, but my paternal side--though I only get together with them in the summer these days for the most part--is synonymous with the Christmases of my youth. Let's start with Christmas Adam. My dad is one of six kids, most of his siblings stayed in Maine, but the eldest, my Aunt Judy, moved away in the 1960s and always lived "away." It was so special when she and my uncle and cousins came home for Christmas, it was one of two times a year I really got to know them. My parents would throw a Christmas Eve bash to celebrate the sibling reunion, cramming everyone--the Perry clan as well as some friends and the overlapping Glazier side--into our tiny apartment somehow. It was always the best, so much once-a-year food and festive chaos. I actually loved the day of the party, helping my mother clean and get ready was fun for me. At some point it was decided that the party would be moved to the 23rd, which my dad, with his characteristic cerebral wit, dubbed "Christmas Adam." I can't remember the last time we had this party, I was probably a teenager, but Christmas Adam was the bomb.

 

Christmas Day unequivocally belonged to Aunt Sue, the third of my dad's four sisters. I don't much write about Aunt Sue, even though she is deeply beloved, because she died too soon and even thinking about her and the times we had together still feels too raw, too painful. But you know, fuck it, since all my most cherished memories are served suspended in pathos jell-o anyway. It's just my way, as is layered experience the way of life. It hurts to think of the good times, but it's worth it to share them with those who were there, who know, who help to keep them alive and give new life. 

 

Aunt Sue and her husband Tom never had kids, but they loved to entertain, and Christmas Day was her crowning glory. She never slept as it was, but the days leading up to the party were a frenzy for her, cooking and cleaning and stocking the elaborate bar and getting ready for the onslaught of family and gifts, then the inevitable open house for other relatives and friends as the day wore on. There were at least five types of homemade pie and a continually replenished buffet. The living room was a mess of wrapping paper and turned into a dance floor where she'd teach us to shimmy to Dion and Sandy Nelson. There were games and games and games out the wazoo. It was loud and boisterous and exhausting as a guest, and I can't imagine what it took out of her as a host, but every year she made it happen for us. God I miss that party, but I miss my aunt the most. She should have had so many more years. She should have had so much more life, in general, but I'm thankful for what she contributed to all of ours. I really wish I had a picture of her to go with this, but she was never big on being photographed.

 

I had this whole thing about the best gifts I gave to myself this year, but that can wait, I think. Love and light to you all, Merry Almost Christmas Adam, and may the new year bring health and good coffee, UNO tournaments and living room dance parties. 

 

Let It

As you probably know by now, Christmas Eve is my #1 part of the holiday altogether, and I've loved every one, every tradition we've observed over the years, from the after-Christmas mass meat pie and presents with my cousins on my mom's side at our grandparents' apartment to making visits to Sam and Carmella Spadea, the parents of my mother's best friend (my godmother), who were the absolutely loveliest and most darling Italian couple who plied you with homemade treats before you could get in the door to our grown-up cousin gathering around the kitchen island at my aunt and uncle's house to every sleepless sleepover with my siblings and HR's increasingly hilarious letters to Santa to accompany the beer and nachos we leave out for him. That, to me, is the show. The best part is the giddy anticipation.

We are in the throes of our first snowstorm 'round these parts, and I'm reveling in it, working while wrapped in my softest, warmest garments, sipping coffee and listening to the "Peaceful Piano" holiday station on Spotify. HR is at school (online) and Saint Mike is outside doing the first of a billion rounds of shoveling. Winter will get old for me in a month or so, but at this moment it's all coming together. It makes me think of my favorite holiday memories, and how so many of them--specifically the Eve portion--were made memorable because of inclement weather. 

1) When I was 11 or 12, we got a wicked snowstorm on Christmas Eve. I don't know if we even went to church that year, I just remember a flurry of changed plans, making spaghetti from a box for dinner instead of the usual elaborate spread and canceling our typical visiting rounds. My mom got a call from her cousin who lived a few blocks away, I think she was having the blues, so my parents decided to bundle us up, throw my brother in his sled, and trudge through the blizzard to spend time with her and her family to cheer her up. I don't know any of the adult specifics, and it's possible we kids bitched about being cold or inconvenienced all the way there and back, but in my memory it was a magical adventure.

2) I was already married to Mike at this particular time, most of my cousins were adults, my brother was maybe in college, and nobody had kids yet. We stayed up late at my aunt and uncle's house eating and drinking beer and hooting and hollering like we always did when we were all in town at the same time. Tony and Denise's house on Maple Street was always home base for the grown kids. We'd go there after Gram's house to do our own Secret Santa exchange. My sister's now-husband was newish at the time, we didn't know much about him except he was a huge Patriots fan, and whoever drew his name got him a small Pats football that talked or made some obnoxiousness when you threw and caught it. That night it snowed, and nobody was in good shape to drive to boot, so Mike and I, Katie and Dave and Nick (maybe my dad? Not sure) walked home to our parents', down the steepest hill in town, slipping and sliding and playing catch with that stupid football all the way in the hushed and glittering landscape.

3) Two years ago? Three maybe? We loaded up the car and headed north to spend a long chunk of holiday time in Maine. Mike, HR and I were going to go straight up to when my folks live, spend a few days, then go South to my brother's house and meet up with my sister and her family there. On the way up, we got caught in nasty weather so made a detour to stay with my sister for the night, and we got some bonus time with her and my then-baby nephew. The ride up the rest of the way the next day was treacherous, but featured some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever experienced. I think we had to juggle a lot of our plans that year but ultimately we were together at my brother and his wife's house on Christmas Eve and the next day the kids got to go out and play in the snow and it was pretty damn idyllic. 

Almost all of the houses we used to visit are in the hands of different owners. My grandfather is gone. The Spadeas are gone. The cousin get-together takes place sometime later in the winter, sometimes not at all, and that's just life, baby. I get to collect these memories, the kind that make people get all het up about having a White Christmas. And growing up in New England makes you resilient as hell. 

 

Confessions of an Elf School Dropout

I've been thinking lately about what's at the heart of holiday magic, what it truly means to me when I make that reference. A big constant is family (hi have we met, etc.), and since gathering en masse is not so much in our plans this year, that's probably why I'm fixating so much. To compensate. I've also been thinking in specific about who created the warm memories for me and my siblings, and that lands squarely on the shoulders of the women in my family, my mother in particular. She busted her ass to give us little ingrates the insane Christmas mornings we cherish. We were not a family of means, but my mother used the holiday to combine delivering our big ticket fantasy items along with things like clothes that would last us throughout the year. It was understood that this was everything in a lump sum and it worked fine for us, though I can't imagine how much planning and coordination that took. She'd send us away for an evening just so she could wrap everything. When I look back it's not the really the presents that stood out (I got some AMAZING presents even if my favorites were always books or clothes), but the creativity and the knowledge that she worked so hard just to make it special for us. My dad, meanwhile, has always openly hated Christmas but I give him credit for still giving it a go for us, including putting in the 3 a.m. assembling duties.

Now that it's my turn to provide the holiday sparkles for my own kid, I fall short. I say that with good humor - what has been most therapeutic for me as a parent is being open and accepting about my strengths and not-so-strengths. My mom's love language is gift giving, she's a genius at it to boot, and I'm more of a words of affirmation/physical touch gal. Can't exactly wrap that up in a bow, but I digress. Who knows what my kid will take with him about the holidays when he's grown? He has the good fortune to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas with two big extended families that adore him. In "normal" years the three of us take a trip up the coast for a December getaway - we get a hotel with an indoor pool, walk around Portsmouth (which is generally v. festive), eat a lot, sometimes see a show. That's a forged tradition that he seems to love. Every Christmas morning up until now has been spent with my parents, and my mother is still the one doing the heavy lifting there for her grandsons. Of course I want the feeling of special-ness that I experienced as a kid for my own, yet I can't guarantee that will happen no matter what I do. Even if I can barely be arsed to make sure every gift is wrapped. I'm at peace with that. How much is feminist pushback, how much is it just not being my jam, I don't know. Some things are worth the effort to make extra special, and in my opinion, some things are better when they are just chill. I wrote a whole thing a few years ago about that, specifically about food, but it applies all over the place when it comes to holidays and life.

I also wrestle with the materialism and stress associated with the holiday, which is more about me than about my kid but it matters what I project and center. We always make a big deal of getting HR to help select charities to give to as a family, and we dedicate one night of Hanukkah to making a charitable gift instead of receiving one, and he seems to be getting something from that, but down the line who knows what will stick? Only he can say. 

In that spirit, I will end by putting a plea out there that if you are in a position to give right now, please consider local mutual aid organizations. The pandemic has created a devastating situation as you know- in Massachusetts we're experiencing the largest relative increase of food-insecure individuals in the nation due to Covid-19! Giving to these organizations ensure that direct aid is getting to people in your own community, and if you need help as well, this is the place to start. 

Merry Friendsmas

Growing up I assumed that holidays were reserved for family. I spent the big days with my family, and didn't even consider something like calling a friend until the day after. I don't think anybody ever told me this was the way it was, it was just something I felt. As I got older and my friends became such a part of my life, that shifted. I wanted to be around my chosen companions all the time. I'll never forget the first time my besties Niki and Tanya called me up to go for a drive on Christmas night. I assumed my parents wouldn't let me, but we had already done the family thing that day, and they were probably too tired to fight but also understood that I was growing up and that my friends were my family, too. We formed our own traditions, the three of us, and our goofy Christmas rituals are as dear as any I have in the treasure trove of holiday memories. 

 

I think it started the year we were juniors, when we could all drive and it opened up not only our shopping options but our ability to get together amid our own parents' hustle and bustle. We'd set aside a time to get together in the days leading up to Christmas, sometimes it was that night, sometimes later, to exchange gifts and eat and crack each other up and generally operate as our blissfully incomprehensible unit. The unspoken rules were that we gave each other sincere cards (the sappier the better) that we customized with our trademark sarcastic remarks, a heartfelt gift and a joke gift. One year Niki gave me a journal wherein she provided her own foreword with a history of our friendship, accompanied by a truly heinous holiday pin. One year I got Tanya the Blackstreet CD but put it inside the case that housed one of my CDs that I knew she hated. I didn't have the heart to pull a long con, so I told her to just open the CD case already before the evening was over.  Nik worked at Toys R Us in college and she managed to get me a Tickle Me Elmo when they were in high demand - HR still has it! These fingerless lace gloves were my joke gift to Nik that year, but if anyone could rock them non-ironically, there's your girl.

Always, ALWAYS there were carmelita bars, a dessert my mother made (Happy birthday Mom!) that became our official holiday treat (food is its own separate holiday THING for me, more on that another time). We kept up the sacred tradition for as long as we could. Eventually Tanya's parents moved, so she didn't have a home base in town. Nik moved to Florida, so her coming back to our hometown wasn't an every year thing. I can't even remember the last time we got to spend the holiday as a trio, but I'm sure I have a picture commemorating it somewhere. Yesterday was the anniversary of Niki's death, 8 years now, and I'm still not 100% fixed in my mind that we won't reunite for our usual US-fest. Yes I know it intellectually, but the heart has its own intelligence. What I wouldn't give for another competition to top each other with terrible gifts, another round of carmelitas. Tanya and I live far apart, but someday I hope we'll get together at Christmas and Nik will be there, the fizz in the champagne, the star on top of the tree.

 

When I was a kid, I couldn't relate to Scrooge or Oscar the Grouch or anyone who could say that Christmas was anything other than whiz-bang joy and wonder. I just needed to live long enough to lose somebody, to get that life is heavy and memories are a heartfelt gift and a prank sometimes, too. 

Squint to Change Your Perspective

It's December 2020, and things are about as dark as they get, yet I'm feeling as Christmas-y as I have in years and years. It must be a defense mechanism, making up for the state of the world (not to mention not knowing if it will be possible to see my family) by surrounding myself with things I associate with joyfulness like decorating my dumb little house and observing the rituals Mike, HR and I have cultivated over the years but with special, pointed fervor (Elf and spaghetti night! Getting HR out of bed with a smile by reminding him he has an advent calendar to open! Nailing down the perfect present as secret Hanukkah elves! Choosing our charitable organizations by committee!). It's not any different from what I do every December, which is typically a month with a shadow for me, simultaneously too long and too short, a little manic, a little depressive. The winter holiday season gives me mad feelings, yo! It's just that this year it doesn't feel so forced, and it's actually working to make my heart grow ten sizes, to spare a figgy pudding to me urchin soul, govnah.

I've also been getting a boost by re-living key holiday memories, and in that spirit, I thought I'd dedicate some of my historically rancorous blog space to sharing some of these lovely postcards from the past, to prove that I can too write pretty so there. 

December, 1990

My dad's youngest sister, my Aunt Patti, was super pregnant with her first baby. Her husband was deployed to the Middle East in the days of Desert Storm, and she was back in town, staying with my grandmother mostly, but she was at our house for awhile for a change of scenery and being the de facto apprentice to my mother's holiday baking mishegas. I was newly 16,  a sophomore in high school, a cheerleader for the basketball team. One weeknight I returned from an away game, exhausted, because it was very late and I still had homework to do and teenagers don't get a lot of rest to begin with. We had a big Christmas tree in the living room, a real, fragrant tree that required us to rearrange the set-up in the living room and gifted the house with the scent of pine for weeks after because the needles reactivated their scent in the vacuum cleaner bag. This one night when I came home everyone else was in bed but Aunt Patti was still awake, stretched out on the couch with her cute belly sticking up. All the lights were off except for the lights on the tree. I sat with her awhile, my aunt who was really like an older sister (we're 7 years apart), just settling my tired bones, knowing my night wasn't over but putting any thought aside to really breathe in the moment. I remember the experience so well, how the tree smelled, the way the soft multicolored lights offset the darkness of the room, the realization that if I squinted slightly, everything arranged itself in a pleasing swirl of merriness, the essence of holiday magic. Not just about Christmas, but about what the whole thing is supposed to represent. Industries have been built around this feeling, this fleeting concept. In some ways, every December is me chasing that moment. Every tree I've ever decorated has been influenced by the trees my mother painstakingly put together, from the choice of lights (always multicolored) to how they are arranged to the array of sentimental ornaments, placed just so. Even though my tree is fake, I light a balsam candle and every year I turn off my lights and squint and wait. If I'm lucky, I get one crystalline moment where it all comes together like it did the first time. 

My whole life can't be chasing memories, and I don't want it to be, but sometimes you catch them and hold them dear and if I can manage that at the end of this painful, incomprehensible year, I'm probably doing ok. 

Bring it In

Thanksgiving Eve is typically one of my top three days of the year, but I'm not going to complain about the fact that instead of jumping around in my skin waiting for my family to roll in for the holiday and the subsequent double-stuffed long weekend, I'm...not. It sucks and I'm sad as hell, my festive spirit is in the toilet, but I'll still make my cranberry sauce and watch The Wizard of Oz and hang in with my tiny pandemic crew and be glad that everyone else I love is smart and careful, safe where they are and nobody is alone.  There's so much sadness and need and pain all around us, so much more than any other year I or probably anyone I know has lived, it doesn't feel right to even pretend that it's holiday times as usual. Adjust, adapt, help where I can and hope for better next year. 

It's ok, though. It will be ok, if we work together to make it ok. Every day when I wake up, I'm still happy that I woke up. I still have a lot of love in my angry, complicated heart. I'm grateful, and thankful for my gratitude. Put some hugs in the bank for me, my dears. I will cash in as soon as I can (with interest).

Year of the 46

Yesterday I turned 46 and it was a wholly, all-the-way-through perfect birthday. I would have loved to go out with friends and family of course, but I made the most of my pandemic chill-down, which included an outpouring of love from Mike and HR and my closest peeps, a productive meeting with my racial justice circle, and probably the best donut I've ever eaten. Thank you to everyone who sent me well wishes, I am lucky to have such a crew. 46 just feels right in my bones. 

 

You know that I am Thanksgiving obsessed, so you can imagine how I'm feeling about that right about now. Usually at this point in November I'm in full-on planning mode, and right now I'm planning nothing and it sucks. I'm coping by surrounding myself with cheesy Hallmark movies and running and yoga and lighting candles and I will probably get my fake tree up in the next few days because why not skip to the sparkles? Still reading a lot, not writing much. It comes and goes. 

 

I've also started a social media project, posting choice bits of my adolescent diary on an instagram account because it's just too mortifyingly hilarious not to. Follow me @aroundthewaydork if "mortifyingly hilarious" or late 1980s/early 1990s coming-of-age dramz is your jamz.

I am still fully bugging about the aftermath of the election and the current state of public health. I'm a mess of emotions at any given time. Still, I'm feeling myself more than I have in a long time and that's not nothin'. 

 

Here's to 46 years lived, and however many more I get.

 

 

 

Song Sung Blue

Saturday was an insanely beautiful day, especially for November, so Mike, HR and I went around the corner for a celebratory al fresco lunch at our favorite place. We wanted to be around other people, within reason, and everyone we encountered was buoyant and smiling, well their eyes were smiling from what I could see. Like many urban centers in these times, the pub we love was able to take up what was formerly a very active street for their outdoor seating, and when you're having your meal you are privy to the comings and goings of the neighborhood on the sidewalk. At one point a little girl went by on her scooter, with a homemade sign on the front that simply said, "Yay!" When she passed by the entire clientele of the restaurant burst into cheers and applause and I was all tears and goosebumps. It was A. Moment, just pure and revelatory. 

It's safe to say I'm relieved and thrilled at the defeat of Mr. 45. I don't think that Biden winning automatically solves anything, and we have to grapple with the fact that almost half of the US population still voted for the incumbent. I don't want to take away from the deep exhilaration that comes from the promise of the end of a truly destructive administration, I relished the positive aspects and am very happy to see a woman of color in the White House after all this time. Biden seems like a good person who is dedicated to public service, sure, and that matters even though my politics are to the left of his left, but it galls me in my heart of hearts that he barely even squeaked by and only then because he's a safe old white daddy. My hope and my charge to this administration is to undo whatever damage they can, and keep putting in the hard work for justice and change. It's just the beginning in terms of making things right, not an end. If there's anything the past four years have shown us, I think it's that racism has always been there. It matters who normalizes and gives it a voice, like we've seen for the past little while, but ultimately it's everybody's ongoing fight, no matter who is in charge. The idea that in this day and age civil rights are given and taken away depending on whomever is in charge, that people should wait or accept a gradual doling out of their humanity in our society just because some people aren't comfortable with it or ready for it- I mean what the hell? That's egregious. Look pals, I know we're all in this together and have to find a way to live with each other and whatnot, but the truth is that I'm not a big person to begin with, and I don't see myself trying to be any bigger in this respect. Why why why would I want to reach out and heal with someone who thinks, for just one example, that separating children from their parents at the border is a cool policy? Fuck off into the sun. There is no moral equivalency. 

 

This isn't about winning for winning's sake. This isn't sports teams. I'm not even a registered Democrat. This is about the return of hope that science will be valued, that actual human lives will be valued, that greed and power can maybe take a backseat for once? What good is a "strong economy" if it doesn't serve all? What is the ultimate downside of medical care for all, housing for all, the end of food insecurity? How can we call this the land of the free if only a segment of the population has true freedom and they make sure to enact policies that keep it that way? If that's this country, it's not my country. When I talk about celebrating right now, I celebrate the idea that I could live in a place that takes care of its people, not a transactional republic of ego stroking. I celebrate the idea that election results signal that enough of us are rejecting this campaign of cruelty, deliberate misinformation, bigotry and stripping of rights. I celebrate, at the very least, the time and energy to be saved by not having to react to whatever thing the president is on about all day long. 

It's going to be a wild couple of months and I have no idea what's going to happen, but I have had a glimmer of hope restored in my soul and it's a blessed feeling to exhale.