Saul Good and Co.

For U

Well Prince died, and that sucks. It sucks that he'll never make any more music (though I'm sure he's got troves and troves yet unreleased). It sucks that I'll never get to see him live--my #1 concert bucket list item. And of course it sucks that his strange, hot, fancy light has been extinguished from the earth, though it will re-ignite every time a person drops a needle on a record or presses "play." Like Bowie, what the loss of this mythical human brings up for me is not the physical absence, because it's not like I knew him personally or ever would, just initial shock and sadness, and gratitude for the body of work. Once again what it drives home for me is how music is such a powerful conduit and uniter and memory trip.

I was listening to "Diamonds and Pearls" the other day, it made me think of Niki. That was one of our songs. We had a lot of "our" songs, and more than one Prince one, even, as our friendship was so connected by music in general. But "Diamonds and Pearls" was particularly huge for us. So listening to it, I wasn't driving my own car over the BU Bridge anymore, but was suddenly a passenger in her mother's brown wagon, Nik at the wheel, doing endless loops on a freezing December night. I can even immediately recall the scent of the car's air freshener. We would drive and talk and listen to tapes over and over. It was some of the best time I've ever spent. It was a complicated experience to be overcome with that memory. Such a happy one, and then, well.

With Nik, I realize that when Prince died, she lived for me again, briefly, and I had to go through remembering that she died again. Additionally, Nik is the first one I should have thought of, and she wasn't, and I don't know what that means. It took me days to make that visceral connection. Maybe it means that now that over three years have passed I'm just getting over that initial instinct, I've accepted that she's gone and it's less painful to know I only have memories. But if that's the case, I don't even know how to feel about that. The thing about having an amazing bond with someone is that when one party goes away, the other speaks a dead language. Nobody else can understand you exactly the same way. Prince and his music had specific meaning for us. And Phife Dawg's. And I got news about a former Digable Planet member that was just SO GOOD (thankfully) but the conversation stopped with me. I can talk about some of these things with other people, but the translation isn't just right. So that's where the loss of Prince is hitting me, I guess you could say. With a much more personal loss. 

On the other hand, it also helped me to think of another childhood bff and how much we loved Prince and how between Purple Rain (the movie and the album) and the frank conversations it prompted with her and her mom, I gleaned a much more comprehensive and accurate sexual education than most kids I know so for that I'll be forever grateful. "Darling Nikki" (NIKI!) might be straight-up filthy, but it also offers up some real teaching moment opportunities. So suck it Tipper Gore, I guess. 

Anyway, goodbye dear Prince Rogers Nelson the person, and never goodbye to your legacy. And because the look is everything in Paisley land, here's my homage to Prince's passport photo. (The purple is unintentional, I just have way more purple clothing than I would have guessed.)

All Sixes

Kids. We make them from parts of ourselves, and yet, even as we might want to take the credit for how they turn out, there's only so much control we have beyond the usual fun stuff like discipline and modeling behavior. And even then... well, you know. It's these guys' jobs to make themselves into themselves, and ours is to let them. And what an amazement, what an honor to witness the evolution from helpless baby to original human person. At six, ours is showing himself to be awesome, smart, sweet, snuggly, creative, curious, dramatic, strong-willed, and delightfully weird. 

There's more to say, there's always so much more, but I'm better expressing after the moment has passed. I just can't let this boy's 6th birthday go by without a public declaration of gratitude and infinite, indescribable, unquantifiable love. I intend to keep creating as long as I live, but I'll never make anything that comes close to him. Happy birthday, HR. 

Dearly Beloved

My body is a temple. Unless there is something to be celebrated, in which case set fire to that holy ish and burn it to the ground. Between the GO GO GO of a wedding weekend in NYC and the full-force assault of seasonal allergies, I feel like the ending scene from last night's Game of Thrones premiere (that means something to you, or it doesn't - no spoilers!) You may have noticed that as I age, "chill" has worked its way into my writing as a favorite verb and adjective. And it's true, I generally like everything to be at right about *here*. But sometime's the occasion demands UP HERE. And this past weekend celebrating our friends' joyous union, it was all WAYYY UP HERE. 

Highlights:

• four grown ass adults in a minivan, delirious from hours of parking-lot travel conditions, being painfully close to our destination and screaming Poison's "Nothin' But a Good Time" as if we were being judged on volume and enthusiasm.
• hanging out with a dear cousin who lives in the city.
• walking around New York for any reason, even just to grab coffee, I just love the energy there when I'm a visitor.
• getting dolled up, getting my nails done, wearing a dress I love, seeing everyone in their finery, so fun.
• the lovely bride and groom and their wedding itself, at a beautiful location. Two adorable people getting hitched, their way - sign me up.
• dancing. So much dancing, PERFECT music (the groom and I have identical taste). I was in heaven.
• the people! The best people, a mix of faces I see often and those I get to be with too infrequently, it was a real friend-bomb. Love love love.

 

We got to sleep in a bit one morning, but beyond that we were just out there living the life. It's the only way I know how to do it, it's just not in my nature to half-step the good times, even if I pay come Sunday night (and Monday morning and...). It's worth the price of admission. We spent wayyyyyy too much time in moving (and barely moving) vehicles over the past few days, I didn't take nearly enough pictures, and I missed the Passover seder, including my boy reading the four questions, which tugs at the heart a little. But for the most part I give the weekend a hundred stars out of a hundred. 

(Thanks Jen for the photo - I didn't even get one of the bride and groom, dang!)

Congratulations to our friends as they embark on married life! (But really, congratulations to me for getting so lucky to have them in my life and getting to be part of their celebration.)

Blood and Stone

When the inspiration dries up and you're looking into a white box: that's when shit gets real. 

While I do believe that I should only be writing here when I have something I want to write about, it doesn't do me any favors to go long periods of time without creating something, both keeping the joints from rusting and lending credence to the concept that successful artists don't rely on having a muse. So I'm doing a little bit of work here, once again, of writing for the sake of it, ideally to open the floodgates. I will admit that it was nice when those ideas marched up to me, everything isn't always nice. 

I've been thinking about family a lot, which is not unusual in any way, but it occurred to me as I was waiting for my parents to get to my house this weekend, that I've never not been excited to see them. Or anyone in my family. But I have a great relationship with my parents, lots of people don't, and I feel lucky for that. Not that we haven't argued or disagreed along the way, but I can't think of a time when I didn't feel that way. They are great people in general, and I'm happy that HR gets to be close to them. Family, of course, informs much of my writing. Maybe it seems like cheating to go back to that subject to derive inspiration, but whoever said this game was fair? More on that, um, forever. 

Anyway, I've had this pic in my phone for a couple of weeks, seems as good a time as any to share it. 

Anchor Leitmotif

I have this dress. You've all seen me in it, it's the Golden Boy of my dress collection, though it is red. I bought it on a whim at a TJ Maxx eight or nine years ago, and it's up there as the best $20 I've ever spent. This isn't really about the dress, though.

If you've followed me for any amount of time, you know that I went through the very annoying business of plantar fasciitis and subsequently gave up running, which was my main form of exercise, as well as an important mental and emotional release. I got depressed for awhile, when I was recovering. I didn't feel like myself for a long time because I was missing that element, and I gained some weight, which I can't entirely extricate from the not-great feelings. That spawned a quasi-quandary, which sent me back and forth with my mindset both privately and publicly. I tried to be constructive about my displeasure, and really think about why it bothered me. In that time I've written extensively about my feelings regarding beauty standards and the pressure to look a certain way, and I always want to reject it. I don't want my appearance to be that important to me, nor do I want to be the type of person who projects that thin = better. I do not believe that AT ALL. But I can't deny that I felt messed up in my body for the greater part of the last two years, and it didn't help that it bothered me that I couldn't let go of how upset I was about it all. Not that I feel shame for wanting to improve my health and fitness for its own sake, but in that pursuit it's hard to get away from the idea of looking a certain way as a by-product OR motivation.

Two things happened along the way that pushed me to where I am today: 1) my long overdue rekindled yoga flame 2) my most recent physical.

Regarding number one, obviously I reconnected with yoga hard and fierce. I didn't forget what it used to do for me, exactly, but I had sort of shelved it as a thing I'd pick up again when I had the time and resources, and when I was forced out of running, it turns out that gave me the time. And then I found the resources. The major way my body failed me via my injury led to the way I turned my feelings about it all the way around. I'm not saying that yoga made the poundage melt away or that I have a coveted "yoga body." At all. I'm the middle aged lady in class with the muffin top (side note, to the person who invents muffin-top preventing yoga pants I will buy you a pony of solid gold). But I go anyway. Because the sweat is good. The challenge is good. The peace is good. It puts me all together and settles me in a way that nothing else does, well actually running did, but this, as it turns out, is better for me because I'm stronger than I've ever been and I feel like I can practice in some form for the rest of my life. Shout out to yoga, but really also, shout out to my own body. I have to appreciate what this body does - it is a beautiful functioning machine that, even when hobbled, even when carrying a bit more flesh than I would have preferred, allowed me to grow. I'm proud as hell of the progress I've made and what I've accomplished so far. My plan is to take yoga with me for the rest of my life for that reason - what it does to improve and maximize the potential of my physical shell is a major consideration, but even more importantly, it helps me be more appreciative of the shell I've got to work with. I overlook that way too much in service of fitting an ideal, even as I rage against it.

Regarding number two, I was really, really bothered by the number on the scale at my January check up. Not the number itself taken objectively, just that I could see how easily a few pounds crept up on me every year. And I didn't want to just accept that as a part of aging when I know I could do something about it. Even as I work every day to accept myself and take my yoga-borne appreciation in stride, I didn't think there was anything wrong with making an effort to eat and drink more mindfully, and bring in some other regular exercise. Nothing crazy, just focus and consistency. I'm not interested in getting obsessed with my routines. I've been supplementing my 2-3 yoga classes with a few sessions of high intensity interval training per week, usually with hand weights. Between 25-35 minutes, that's it. But doing that has made a huge impact on how I feel about myself. Yes, doing that type of workout has changed parts of my body in the past few months in ways that running ever did, but I can't hate running because it made me feel so great through and through. This arrangement makes me feel great in a similar way. I have been able to move the scale a bit, but if I never get any lower than I am right now, and I'm not going to make an effort to, I am in a just-right place. The total combination feels like balance, and apparently balance is what I need to be my happiest me.

 

Back to Golden Boy. This dress has been with me for almost a decade, and it's a magic dress, because it's worked for me no matter what state my body has been in. It's the perfect dress for making me feel put together. And I put it on this morning and thought, damn woman. This is the best you've ever looked in it. And I know I think that because this is the best I've ever felt. When I bought the dress in 2007 (I think that was the year?) that was around the last time I felt so comfortable inhabiting my sack of bones, and it made me feel like a million bucks then. But now I weigh more and my proportions have....changed, and it really, really comes down to the same thing: it's not about the aesthetics of my body and whether it's pleasing to other people, or even myself. The dress is the physical representation of something that's so not physical. I took a picture today, but only for posterity, and not to share here. Because in the end, it's the same dress, it's just the person inside who has been through a lot of mind-fuckery and come out the other side. I don't want to pin that to one way I've looked at a point in time. I don't want to buy into patriarchal societal bullshit. It's so dumb, and such an endless tale. Body image, such a fraught, fragile and complicated subject. But me in my red dress at age 41, we cool.

I could be put out of commission again at any second. Golden Boy could disintegrate, or I could cease to fit into it, or I'll have to tighten my purse and give up my studio membership and those are things I'll need to deal with as they happen. But I have to have faith that I can come back to the image of the dress and what it represents for me even when I am not in control of my physicality. I am absolutely a-ok with aging (what's the point of fighting it?). I just need to keep remembering that I have the power to feel this good about myself. It takes some tinkering, but it's all in me.

And that's your quarterly dose of allllll this.

 

 

 

100 Years, 100 Re-reads

Today Beverly Cleary is 100 years old. 100! And still a sharp and lovely mind. She belongs in the holy trilogy of influence that began when I was a kid: Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Judy Blume. Those three and their work, which I read and re-read to the point of requiring second copies of most of the titles, have everything in the world to do with why I write, and why I've always wanted to write. They are responsible for so much of the magic of my younger years, and how I think and view the world. I can't overstate it. Like the New Yorker article's author, Ellen Tebbits was a favorite of mine, but I've lost myself in Sister of the Bride so many times I could recreate the bridal shower The Amys threw for Rosemary from memory. (Wedding bell ice cream molds! Alarm clocks! Seafoam green! Tootie Bodger! What a world to inhabit.) The Ramona books, obviously, were where it was at for me. I loved loved loved how Mrs. Cleary didn't shy away from the real circumstances of working class families and domestic messiness. I didn't know it at the time, exactly, but being able to read about families in a similar circumstance can be so powerful to a kid. Like all the best authors, she gives her audience credit. She just lays it all out there, lets her characters breathe, and the readers take what they need from them. I am dying to share all her books with HR, but he's not interested just yet. Maybe he never will be--perish the thought--but if that's the case, I'll find a way to deal. 

If I had to isolate the three most-read, most beloved books of my childhood, they are Ramona and her Mother, On the Banks of Plum Creek, and Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Also Charlotte's Web was another big one--and to this day I say it's my favorite book--but I didn't read much E.B. White beyond that book until I was an adult.  My teen years were informed by Sassy magazine and Stephen King and Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut and Toni Morrison, and I was bananas about The Catcher in the Rye when I first discovered it. But my heart, my roots, everything was borne of my auspicious introduction and subsequent love affair with Beverly/Laura/Judy. And whoa, am I seized with the need to revisit my entire library as soon as possible. 

Aside from my family and friends, there's nothing in the world I could ever love more than books, and I know it's because I was raised on a diet of the best ones. 

Happy birthday to a true American treasure. I'll be sure to squeeze a little extra toothpaste into the sink tonight in honor of dear Beverly Cleary.

Bottoms Up

I've been working on some projects, which is super cool and exciting, but it's making me less likely to come to this space to screech about things that are bothering me, or prattle on about my various obsessions. That's a very good thing, no doubt. To be productive and focused and branch out instead of just farting around in the comfort zone, that's the best. But I do miss the screeching when it's been a minute. If nothing else it's a nice outlet for me, a sandbox, a platform, an idea-generating tool. In that spirit, I don't have one particular thing to go on about today. More like, I'm mounting a one-woman, booze-free production of "I Never." Meaning that I've been thinking of things I've never done or experienced, for better or worse. I thought I'd put them out there for people to play along at home.

-I've been to a lot of places, but I have never been to New Orleans. I've been fixated on New Orleans for as long as I can remember, and one of my besties actually lives there, which makes it all the more ridiculous that it hasn't been checked off as a travel destination. That's it, NOLA in 2017 or bust. 

-I've never been to a prom. It just never worked out for whatever reason. I don't feel like I missed out on anything except for maybe a sweet-ass regrettable 90s fashion statement, but it's a fact of my life.

-I haven't seen or heard Hamilton yet. Get on that, gurl. 

-I've never had my heart broken, not in a romantic way. That's not a brag, just a realization. I've had my feelings hurt, my ego bruised. I've been rejected by people for whom I've had hopes or interest. And I've had my heart broken plenty in other ways. Life leaves nobody unscathed. But as for a love affair ending, nope. It's healthy for this to happen over the course of a life. Most people fall in love more than once, it's normal, and it helps you grow and learn about yourself, and life is so short and the world so big. When I was young and thinking of my future, I was super realistic, and I didn't go in with the intention that I would meet my one big love when I was a girl of 20 and that would be that. It's how it happened though, and obviously I feel lucky that it worked out the way it did. If Mike ever decides to kick me to the curb, well then I'll come back and drink with the vast majority of the population. But I'm confident the state of my valentine-shaped beating heart will remain intact for the foreseeable future.

-I have never cracked the spine of a book by James Joyce. Or seen Casablanca or Citizen Kane. 

-Never have I ever constructed anything out of papier mache. 

-I've never broken a bone, either, or jumped from an airplane, gotten a tattoo, fired a gun, been arrested, gone surfing, been to a World Series game, encountered my doppelganger or figured out what Meatloaf wouldn't do for love (though I have my suspicions). 

That's enough of that fun game for now. Cheers!