Life, A Love Story

See the balcony with the plants? We lived in that apartment when I was three until almost seven. The playground equipment hasn't changed.

                     

In a small library in a small town in New England in the middle of July, I came across an article about the joy of reading the same books as your child. I knew I wouldn’t remember the name of the article or the name of the woman who wrote it, but I hoped I’d remember her blog, cited in the little author bio at the end.

Back home in New York City last night, trying to think of what to make for dinner (after so many nights of big group dinners, I forgot how to think small), the name of the blog returned to me: Dinner, A Love Story. I scrolled through mouth-watering recipes full of fresh summer veggies. And oddly, as I looked at the pictures of lovingly prepared Tagliatelle, I felt a wave of nostalgia for the days when I was immersed in the blog world. Reading them daily and writing them as often as I could. It felt like a collaborative effort, a shared attempt at meaning making. During disordered days and in strange hours of the night I was carried along by the soothing lullaby of other mothers' voices. Theirs were exhausted, maybe a bit scratchy, even, like mine, but still the sound was gentle and reassuring. Words mattered more than sleep. 

In the world of shared daily writing, (and I think of it as a daily not only in terms of the schedule but in that the prosaic, everydayness of the world was something celebrate, roughness and unevenness and mistakes were okay, both in writing and in life), no one blog needed to offer an answer to the many questions being raised along with young children. But, sending missives from our laptops late at night, we were part of a collective effort, creating a tapestry of sorts. Maybe the pattern wouldn't be clear for many years, but it might emerge one day if we trusted the process. Letters had been my life blood for many years, but those were gone. The long-form email was over. Blogs were the closest thing we had. 

 

Blogs were new once, too, resisted by those who found them too careless, too rushed. Certainly no substitute for a researched article. They were closer to letters. I wouldn’t cite them as evidence of anything, other than one person’s experience. Books had to prove themselves, though once they did, they had a good long run. Socrates was skeptical of the written word, the effect it would have on memory and the difficulty of getting to the truth without conversation.

The premise of the blogs I missed seemed to be a promise to appreciate the everyday. As I heard music in the sounds of the recycling bin or mistook an actor for someone I knew or spent all day on the tarmac missing my cousin's wedding in the back of my head the blog asked me, gently, to connect today's events to yesterday's, to wonder—what does it mean? If I picked fresh sage and brought it home from the garden, then found it shredded like confetti about the living room floor, was that a poetic moment or just a mess? The possibility for something that signified was always right nearby.

*

“The Funeral” by Band of Horses is playing in the coffee shop across the street from the neighborhood where I now live. Two nights ago was the funeral for Jason Schneider, an editor with whom I worked during my publishing years and once briefly, last year, when he hired me for a freelance project. He was my age. He had three young kids, younger than mine. He was never a close friend, although he played in a band (Satellite Lost) and so we had that in common along with editing. All night I seemed to dream of him. I was meeting him for dinner. People kept telling me—you can’t be meeting him for dinner, his funeral is taking place tonight. In the dream I had to explain: he’s dying, but he’s not yet dead. He knows he has only a short time to live so when he was filling out paperwork he typed the year of his death (2019) and based on that Facebook misreported his living status.

The Tagliatelle recipes weren’t conjuring the moments that sought to rise above the everyday so much as they seemed to represent a steady domesticity. If anything, I have much more of that now than I did then. Two kids instead of one. Older kids (11 and 6) instead of so young. No more resistance to a new life. Happy to stay home in the evenings, in fact, happier than going out. Not in grad school anymore. Not interpreting Malory's Morte Darture in the evenings. Many of the friends who were keeping up that old lifestyle going out and being part of the city have given up, too. So perhaps it is simply that scrolling through Dinner, A Love Story gives me the pleasing sensation of a return to form. It is not the home with the lovely dinner I long for, but the home of the daily life elevated. As Ali Smith writes, “For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left–say we lost everything—we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself..."

A longing for form, one that’s been largely abandoned, given over for up-to-the-minute bite size pictures of lattes and feet, for the “Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation” as Maggie Nelson describes social media in The Argonauts.

I'm inspired by this piece by Asha Dornfest, "Can Blogs Rebuild America?" and by the enthusiastic responses. I have long felt like one of the last few people at a party, staying for the scraps of real conversation still possible in that nearly empty room. I've winced when I see the ads on my blogs—amazon discounts, scenes from science fiction horror. But this is the price of a "free" space. Is it worth it? 

I have felt something new taking shape for a while. Since ending my yoga/writing project last September, I've mostly stayed away from posting much of anything anywhere, and I've relished the quiet. 

I've reveled in making pumpkin-shaped cookies that went into the oven and into the mouths of happy kids and over to neighbor's houses but were never photographed, never needed to be. 

I've delighted in long afternoons full of slime-covered kitchen tables and cups of tea and, later, lovely crescent moons and startling comments made by my five-year-old and ten-year-old, now 6 and 11, that made me gasp, smile, wonder, none of which was documented.

I've listened to the quiet. I've been present inside it. But yes, I've also missed this form.

Jason wrote songs and played guitar, and helped other people improve and send their books into the world, but tonight I find myself wishing he could just chop parsley while the kids tear the living room apart. Sauté the onions until they're a nice golden brown. 

*

Over a year ago, at the end of June last year, Petra said, “I wish you could watch yourself grow.”

Everything was changing, molting, growing for her. She was going to be a “big kid” in the fall, starting Kindergarten. She wouldn’t have a nap anymore. The pretend play area would be cut in half.

I once started a growth chart for Wally, but didn’t keep up with it and eventually recycled it. I haven’t managed to put together more than one scrapbook. Watch yourself grow. What an idea. Commitment to a daily practice is the best way I know how to do it.

By August, Petra had lost her two bottom front teeth. 

“How can you be younger than Daddy if you’re taller?” she asked me. The lost bottom teeth made her seem younger, interfered a tiny bit in her speech, gave a new kind of vulnerability to her face. 

Now she understands that a certain point you stop growing taller. “You are still growing,” she reassures me now. “Growing older.” 

She is too. From her vantage point, it doesn’t seem so bad. The key word is grow. Whether you watch yourself or not, make picture-perfect Tagliatelle or boil pasta into a pulp, you're changing and becoming something new, and you’ve stitched another piece of the tapestry you’re weaving, or accidentally pulled a thread loose, and maybe that's the way you prefer it, so someone else can join in, but either way, it means you're still alive.