Threads, Bits and Pieces of Gratitude and Exercise

Santa Cruz, CA

I'm reading a children's book called Cloth Lullaby The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. I have a weakness for children's books, have quite a collection that I keep adding to, and this one complements a recent exhibit I saw downtown of Bourgeois' work. Really, it's so beautiful I could cry:

With the remaining fabric of her life, Louise wove together a cloth lullaby. She wove the river that raised her -- maternal pinks, blues in watery hues. She wove a mother sewing in the sun, a girl falling asleep beneath the stars and everything she'd ever loved.












Speaking of tears, last night I shed some. Unbloggable. Oliver came home late after a Dodgers game and brought in a package that had been left outside the house by the mailman. It was addressed to me in beautiful handwriting and wrapped in the prettiest paper, but I couldn't figure out who had sent it. Honestly, I was feeling not a little anxious and unsettled from the unbloggable, so when I opened the package up and found a pound of artisanal coffee, a mermaid sticker and a beautiful note written by a long-time reader of this blog, I really did start crying. I am moved to action and advocacy by your writing, she said. I won't "out" the kind and generous person who sent me this gift, but I am filled with gratitude for her and for this community and for -- let's face it -- the bountiful universe. As my friend Carrie says, There are no accidents.

Last weekend, I was in Santa Cruz with my dear friend Tanya Ward Goodman (whose book Leaving Tinkertown is a must read) and Kari O'Driscoll, whom some of you might know and all of you should know as the writer of The Writing Life. We rented a little house near the ocean and spent two and a half days walking, eating, writing and talking. Mostly writing. On one of our walks, Tanya and I discussed the tyranny of gratitude -- how there's a whole business dependent on the concept of gratitude and how it's unrealistic and often depressing to be or feel grateful. I compared it to the tyranny of exercise, but that's because I hate to do it and Tanya had pressured me to get out of bed, a place I vastly prefer, and go on these long walks along the coast. I think Tanya believes walking and writing go hand in hand, and given her output I guess I'm going to have to surrender to that tyranny. What did happen is that I began the reconfiguration of MGDB*, and I think I've finally found the key, the flow, the whole shebang.

I'm going to surrender to gratitude as well as exercise because it's filled me up to overflowing.

*MGDB stands for my goddamn book which I know is an ugly, ugly thing to say and hardly grateful, but it's good isn't it?

Moody Weather

Santa Cruz, California

At the intersection of Edgewood Place and La Brea I let my eyes drift closed even as Oliver's voice ran on, its cadence the cusp of boy and man. I could see the light still red the parking lights of the car ahead of me firm. I was in the left turn lane and if I'd gone straight when the light turned green I might have entered a certain street in Newport Rhode Island where I lived during the summer after my sophomore year in college. Through my half-closed eyes I saw the intersection and the used bookstore at the end of it where I bought a dog-eared copy of Crime and Punishment from a bearded man who told me your eyes are moon pools. That was the summer I rode like crazy in a borrowed car to Hartford and up an elevator to a room and a shower and a door that I opened to a boy I loved who told me later it was your hair, wet and that one phrase lasted or made it last, it seemed, for years. But I'm in an intersection in Los Angeles, my eyes closed my son's sing song, my eyes open and then closed then open and now it's green and even as I turn left and away it's almost like water is there instead of road, the moon pools into tides and I'm a mermaid, tail curved beneath another's dark arm.