Slivers of Light

Enjoy the eclipse.

It sounded like a metaphor, more than half a year into what has seemed to be a descent into darkness. I smiled and opted for a more traditional farewell as I parted ways with an old acquaintance. Have a good day, I told him. 

Maybe it's not a coincidence, the astronomical event to end all astronomical events making its way through our country's heartland tomorrow. For two minutes and 40 seconds tomorrow, not too far south of here, the moon will pass between the earth and the sun and cast a huge shadow of darkness upon us, teasing us with a ghostly sliver of light from the solar corona that we dare not view with the naked eye. And then, back to daylight.

Two minutes and 40 seconds can seem like an eternity, not unlike the seven months and one day since our country was hijacked, seven months and one day of averting our eyes, afraid to stare directly at even the smallest glimmer of light.  We are long past believing the shadow will lift any time soon. We keep our dark glasses on, knowing it's not safe.

Who knows, though, maybe it really isn't a coincidence, this eclipse of 2017, visible in totality only here, in the United States. A swath of temporary blackness bisecting us, reminding us of our eternal flame, stoked all these years by the best intentions, even through periodic blips of hate and indecency, a flame far too powerful to be extinguished.

Maybe, I sometimes think, we needed this eclipse, in the way people sometimes need to hit rock bottom before there's nowhere to go but up. Had 45 and his band of deplorables (and, I refer here not to the desperate folks who were duped by false promises but to the ones who knew better all along but chose, inexplicably, to dance with the devil), been beaten down, many of us would still be in the dark. We would have had no idea what still lurked in the shadows, the thriving underground world of hate and ignorance that has suddenly been invited to remove its hoods. We would still be hearing about Hillary's emails, the root cause of all that is evil.

Maybe, just maybe, the ghostly sliver of light that we dare not view with the naked eye will grow bigger and less lethal, now that the eyes of so many holdouts have been peeled open. We have been forced to reflect, and we may just be ready for some daylight.

Modern Dance

The wedding season continues.

My friend, the grooms mother, half joked about her relief that nuclear war had been stalled for another day. I spent much of the day in the noble pursuit of bash worthy hair and makeup and pondering such earth shattering decisions as Spanx or no Spanx (I chose breathing over beauty) and whether anyone would notice that the shoes under my glittering gown were tacky and cheap. On that item, I chose discomfort, if only to not embarrass my mother, who wasn't even invited.

I barely paid attention to the news, had not really digested the enormity of what had happened in Charlottesville that morning. A twenty-first century version of Kristallnacht, right here where it could never happen,  went virtually unnoticed. I was vaguely aware of some unrest, vaguely aware that 45 was still spouting ridiculous apocalyptic rants like an old fashioned schoolyard bully. My dad can beat up your dad. My nukes are bigger than yours. Vaguely aware that though the net continues to gather momentum, we are still only in the early dawn hours of the twilight zone presidency, with no relief in sight.

As always, I hated my hair. The hair lady did exactly what I had asked her to do, but, as always, I was surprised to see my face still looked the same. I still await the curling iron that can smooth out wrinkles. I comforted myself with the prospect of makeup. Ah, again, surprise -- me, staring back at myself from the mirror. I put all my eggs in the basket of my dress. My Spanx-less dress, revolutionary and daring, a middle aged woman's version of bra burning. The day was turning to shit.

All while Charlottesville was burning. The kinds of things that just cannot happen here are happening here, and we find ourselves surprised, shocked really. (It brings to mind my Uber driver in New Orleans right after the election, mocking me for not knowing how close to the surface racism and hatred has always remained.) And, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, across a small sea on one side and a large sea on the other from a country that has devoted three quarters of a century to protecting the world from what science has enabled us to do, just because we can, two buffoons are having an atomic penis war, a frat boy contest to see who can best write his name in the snow.

My Uber driver, that day in New Orleans, told me he gets up every morning and he feels lucky to be alive. To have his children and his grandchildren and to see the sun and to chat with all sorts of people from all sorts of places as he transports them from here to there. And he reminded me that unless you take action, complaining is pointless. I think about my wise Uber driver every time I shake my head and roll my eyes in despair and wonder what action there is I can take.

In the meantime, it's wedding season, and we party like it's, well, some other time, and we revel in each others joys and we look forward to all the upcoming celebrations. And we complain about our hair and our makeup and our bodies even though there's not much we can do to change any of it. While the world teeters on the brink and Charlottesville burns. And we feel lucky, each day, for the reprieve, so we can continue to enjoy the good stuff.

Jogging Memories

I drove by the house I grew up in the other day.  Not the apartment building of my childhood, not any of the apartments or condos or town homes I landed in, briefly, along the way. The house I grew up in, from the time I was about thirty-four.

It wasn't even finished yet, the suburban house in the kind of neighborhood I used to drool over as a city kid, the kind of neighborhood I later began to dread as I embraced the kind and gentle (relatively speaking, for a New Yorker) urban life on the north side of Chicago. We were lured by the promise of fenced in back yards and cavernous two story family rooms and decent public schools.

My first morning there, I went for a run. The darkness and the quiet frightened me, almost as much as the young black boy had, down in the city months earlier, when he had reached inside his jacket for an imaginary gun while I sat in my car, boxed in at a traffic light, my two children sleeping ducks in their car seats. At least I could see him. Here, I could barely see the reflective stripes on my running shoes. I wondered what unknown evils lurked within the opaque suburban dawn.

As it turns out, though it wasn't all what one would dream it would be behind a white picket fence, it wasn't all bad. All sorts of memories flooded my brain as I drove by the old house -- the firsts, the joys, the challenges. Our swing set had been felled years earlier by a micro burst, but the loss seemed startlingly fresh when I noticed the new people had installed their own swing set, on the wrong side of the yard. Where the old cobwebbed trampoline was supposed to be. I wondered what other changes they had made, what else they had done to dismantle the life that had once belonged to us there. There, where I raised three children and grew up alongside them, or at least tried to. A jumble of years, memories of rude and not so rude awakenings in the quiet early morning hum of suburbia. By the time I left that house, I felt as unfinished as the kitchen had looked the day we moved in.

I went to a party in the old neighborhood last night, blocks away from that house where my kids -- and I -- grew up, a stone's throw away from my oldest daughter's best friend's house. There were a few familiar faces, but I felt like a stranger, not unlike the way I felt on that first morning run so many years ago. At the party in the old neighborhood, everybody still seemed forty-something, the way I used to be. They seemed so young and content, relieved by the relatively new found freedom of raising older children, but not yet struggling with the puzzling irrelevance that overtakes you when they actually leave. When the band packed up and the eerie darkness and quiet settled over the large yard, I wondered what unknown evils lurked beyond the orange flicker of the fire pit. I felt unfinished, still, and uncertain.

I am back in my townhouse, one suburb over but seemingly a world away, the house I am growing up in these days. The rumble of the train only a half block away is my security blanket, the steady stream of headlights reassures me. I will go for a run in the morning, a slower, more plodding run than that run so many years ago. It will hurt more, but I might not feel quite as lost. Still not quite sure, though, how I got here, or what lies ahead.

Remembering Adam, Always

I Googled "28" today. It's a number, just a number. The number between 27 and 29, which, I suppose, makes it somewhat unique.

On the 28th of every month for the last year and a half, I have more often than not thought little about it, at least at first. An ordinary number, an ordinary day, even though, a year and a half ago, just after I had licked the last remnants of nachos off my fingers and given up on the thin film of airy bubbles resting on the bottom of my pina colada glass, just before I was about to settle in for a poolside nap before my next snack, the 28th became anything but ordinary. 28. A number just after 27, the age my friend's son had just turned only a few weeks earlier. A number just before 29, the age my friend's son would never reach. She told me by text that he had died, apologizing but noting there was really no good way to tell me.

Adam would have been 28 now. That is not something I ever thought I would say, all those years ago, when my friend and I spent seemingly endless hours watching our kids play, wishing away the time, some days, so we could feed them dinner and clean up their messes and bathe them and finally relax. When we would call each other for support or advice or just to complain, or, more often than not, to laugh about something one of the kids had said. When we would fill lazy days away from our offices with idyllic trips to museums or the Planetarium or the zoo or just the neighborhood park, lazy days that sometimes made work days seem a welcome respite. Years later, when we visited colleges together, worried together about where they would end up, arranged a celebration for them, together, when they graduated from high school, I would not have believed that Adam would never be 28.

Our plans for this 28th of July have been undecided until yesterday. We will meet, five of us and my friend, at Adam's grave. We will bring our own chairs; my friend will bring the coffees and the treats. We will share memories, we might laugh, we might cry. There's no playbook for visiting the grave of your friend's child, the one who referred to you as his other mom. Or one of his other moms. There is certainly no playbook for my friend's mother, still processing -- without much success -- the loss of her grandson, and her own daughter's pain.

My friend claims that we are the ones who have held her up, helped her make it to this 28th of July, a year and a half later. That day, 18 months ago, when everything went horribly wrong, everything became blurred. I somehow packed my bags and flew back to Chicago and made myself "present" for my friend, and for everybody else caught up in this most surreal fog. I remember very little, except for every word of that text.

The fog has lifted, for the most part, but not one of us has yet to fully accept that Adam died. I have visited his grave before, but still, the reality of it all eludes me. Today, as six theoretically intelligent and strong women gather for coffee around Adam's grave, as the six of us babble incessantly and no more or less incoherently than we usually do, I will think about Adam, rolling his eyes. If he could tell us how ridiculous we look, he would. If he could set us straight, he would. But he will let us do our thing, and he will know how much he is missed.

Small Victories, on the Streets Where We Live

I held on to my 86 year old mother with something just short of a bone crushing death grip as we made our way through Times Square the other day. A roiling sea of people moved in every direction, and I was far more concerned that my mom, still recovering from a broken hip, would be felled by by an errant elbow or, maybe, a baby stroller than I was with the kind of dime store terrorism that has come into fashion.

The concrete blocks that rose up at regular intervals on the sidewalk seemed more of a nuisance than a precaution. To many, they were nothing more than a good place to sit (though I would bet the sitters were actually undercover cops). Broadway had been closed to traffic for a few blocks, with New York's finest lining the intersections in an obvious show of, if not force, at least presence. It took me longer than it should have to realize that this wasn't simply an ordinary urban pleasantry -- a pedestrian mall for the weekend. This is "us," now, always following closely at the heels of the latest threat. Liquids pass with ease through airline security now that ordinary cars have become weapons.

Our foray into the Times Square subway station was even more death defying. It had nothing to do with the fear of becoming a sitting duck in an underground tunnel stinking of urine on the off chance some lunatic decided to blow things up that day. I was too busy wrapping my body around my tiny mother -- centimeters behind her so she wouldn't notice -- as she insisted on navigating the maze of stairs and ramps without holding on to me. Kind of the opposite of teaching a child to ride a bike -- I was pretending to let go but hanging on for dear life.

My mother, in her own special (and infuriating) way, is doing what everyone else was doing in Times Square the other day, and in places people tend to go all around the civilized world. She is determined to live life as she always has, to not let a little broken bone or some surgery stand in her way. She is not thinking about terrorists; she is living life, on her terms. Her bucket list may seem uninspiring to some, but to her,  a day at the theatre, a walk through Times Square, a crowded subway ride, and dinner with her children is like shooting for the stars.

The thought of the car plowing through a crowd in Times Square only weeks earlier floated through my mind briefly. Not "terrorism," they said, but I think we can all agree it wasn't a random act of kindness either. Still, as I held on to my mother and did my best to keep her safe, I marveled at the sheer number of people out to simply enjoy a beautiful summer afternoon in New York. Small battles won by all of us, every day.

The Big Easy Going

A handful of us had found shelter under a long wooden overhang that allowed for precious few dry spots between the drips. A man walked by, enjoying a brief respite from the downpour. "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes," he reassured us. We waited ten. The rain came down even harder, though that hadn't really seemed possible.

There are lots of things to love about New Orleans. Passersby always say hello, and astonishingly well-behaved dogs walk by without even bothering to sneak a sniff. One gentleman under the overhang offered to share his umbrella. Another offered to buy me a coffee. I was content to wait it out, enjoy Mother Nature's show for a while. Anyway, in New Orleans, you're never too far from a warm and cozy place to take a load off. In this case, in fact, only about six inches.

Another love-worthy thing about New Orleans -- the mouth-watering Wifi passwords. Croissant. Strawberry. They even tell you what it is immediately, no need to beg. A virtual warm welcome, topping off the sweet aromas that manage to sustain my feelings of hunger no matter how many meals I eat here. The rain stopped long before I finished my snack; I was dry and sated, just in time for lunch with my daughter.

Though my wanderings through New Orleans have taken me past a fair mix of mansions and shanties, I know there are broken down sections that somehow escape the eye of an average, self-indulgent tourist like me. Still, there is an aura here, a content-to-be-alive kind of aura, where endless hours of porch sitting on a brutally hot day seem downright productive and fulfilling. Even the alligators in the bayou appeared to have a keen appreciation for just being, gliding peacefully through the muck as we humans winced at the stinging rain drops and the roar of our airboat's motor.

This morning, before I head back north to a reality of harsh self-judgment and unrealistic goal-setting and days of pointless referenda on the inadequacy of my existence, my daughter and I will tour an old cemetery and cap it off with some beignets. A mix of inspiring epitaphs of lives well lived and a delectable reminder of how to do just that.

Rollin' Down the River

It's like selling an ice cube to an Inuit, I think, taking money from hapless Northerners for a "swamp tour" somewhere near New Orleans in late June. But suckers are born every minute, and my visits to NOLA are winding down as my youngest child approaches her final year in college. Somehow a boat ride through mosquito and alligator infested sludge made it to her bucket list.

As if reptilian predators flashing toothy grins as they zealously guard their turf is something unusual these days. Yawn. At least these alligators are just doing what nature intended them to do. I yearn for the days when the bucket list was filled with more wondrous things, like restaurants and art galleries, when I could simply enjoy the cuisine rather than "be" it. 

Assuming I survive (more on that, hopefully, in a later post), I will miss my visits to New Orleans. A place where, if I close my eyes, I could swear Matthew McConnaughy is the guy chatting only inches away from me on the sidewalk. A place where gaudy strands of beads adorn fences and trees, and where there always seems to be a parade, even when you are not at risk of being hit by, say, a large cabbage being flung by a drunken reveler on a float. A place where I always get some sort of life lesson from my taxi drivers, and sometimes even emerge with a receipt and a doggy bag filled with homemade Cajun treats. A place where "Taco Tuesday" is a  thing -- a serious thing. 

Mostly, I realize, it's not about missing New Orleans, though it is certainly one of the more exotic destinations in the continental U.S. This is my last year of college visits, those happy jaunts that began, for me, ten years ago. D.C. and N.Y.C. offer their own special charms and perils, just as NOLA does, but each college visit conjures up sweet memories of visits long ago. I am reminded, always, of that four years in each of my children's lives that seems to pass in a blink. My mixed feelings of pride and relief and loss and a healthy dose of abject fear triggered by their imminent official launch from the nest. Their independence and competence is nothing new by this point. It's just, suddenly, very real. 

As we cruise through the swamp this afternoon, I will be on high alert, as I have been for so many years, confident that I can keep my daughter safe, even overpower an alligator if I have to. I will swat away mosquitoes and stare down toothy reptiles, and I will start to wonder who will protect her when we are no longer drifting alongside each other, in the same boat.