Re-Cap

I sort of panicked when I logged in to the old blog and saw that I hadn't written a post in over a week. I don't know what's happening to me, but I'm finding it difficult to get the words down and out. I feel a sort of pressure to write well here -- to write something meaningful, to exercise the muscle for the offline writing, but that takes so much out of me. I used to come here and just gab on some days, and I kind of miss that. Do you? I feel that we have a whole lot of gab to deal with nearly every single moment in the clusterfuck that is our country right now. Why should I add to it?

Here's some gab: Henry was home for nearly a month and is already gone and back to college. It was wonderful to have him home and weird, to tell you the truth. It was like he never left. The fighting with his brother, the piles of clothes on his floor, the empty cereal bowls and crusty spoons left out, the boxers on the floor of the bathroom -- shall I go on? But left he did indeed -- back in August and now again, last week. I actually remember what that experience was like -- to leave for college and then to come home. To have your parents still -- your parents. I cringe at how I probably was insufferable then. Not that Henry was insufferable -- to the contrary. There's a certain amount of angst, though, that comes with the age. We live in weird times and seem so much closer to our children than we were with our own parents. At least I think.

In other news, I did a reading on Sunday with a couple of dear writer friends. We were part of Diane McDaniel's Backyard Literary Salon and read from works-in-progress. I had done a podcast with Diane a few months ago, and she invited the incomparable Chris Rice and Tanya Ward Goodman (who also did podcasts with Diane) to read, too, along with her own writing. We had a really great turn-out of about sixty people, got over our jitters and stood up there and rocked it. I think the others would agree that it was glorious. There's something awesome about expressing yourself in amazing company -- I felt galvanized to keep at it -- to finish up MGDB*.

I so rarely like to post photos of myself all alone, but the inimitable Carl Jackson, Bird Photographer Extraordinaire and love of my life (!) took these and I actually like them. I'm trying to shed some vanity in 2018 and get over my snaggle tooth, my chins and roundnesses. I'm trying to consume less and create more.

Hold me to it.

*My Goddamn Book

Happy New Year 2015!

I had a small party last night, and the last friend didn't leave until after 2:00 in the morning. I cleaned up the mess, checked on my chicks (one in Switzerland, one at a friend's house and one persistently awake) and fell asleep around 3. I drank a few glasses of champagne but this morning I feel as if I drank a few bottles. That's mainly because Sophie was up nearly all night, and while I left her to her own devices for most of it, I periodically woke up to check on her from three until around six o'clock when it became the day. So, 2015. I'd make a resolution or two if I believed in them, but if there's anything I've learned in my fifty-one years of revolving around the sun it's that my intentions are just that, and while I might set them, send them out into the shadows of the future, they'll probably not return as I intended. So, everything is the same and everything is different.

Today I resolve to not get dressed, to lie around and eat slice after slice of white bread toast.

I love the new year -- it really does afford possibility, doesn't it?

Happy New Year to everyone!

What my friends and I are doing now that our children are all back to school

especially for Sally M.

Kiki di Montparnasse, Therese Treize de Caro et Lily
Brassai, 1932

via dreamdogsart

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

One Night Dream

Those two girls (because we decided we prefer the term to ladies) came to my house yesterday afternoon, picked me up and drove me down to Manhattan Beach. We checked into a swanky hipster hotel with a rooftop jacuzzi.

We sat there for a few hours, drinking champagne and then beer and nibbling on calamari. When the sun started going down we went back to our room and changed for dinner. Here's our room:

Can you believe?

We walked into town and down charming little beach streets.

Although a tad on the precious side, here's the house I chose to buy for my alternative life:

We walked down to the beach and then along the beach until the sun set:

Then we walked back up to a wonderful restaurant, were seated and champagne was presented, a bottle of Dom Perignon from a friend who couldn't be there. The view of the ocean was spectacular:

We ate mussels and french fries, burrata and heirloom tomatoes, and I had wild sea bass for a main course. We drank champagne and had tiny sugared donut holes dipped in butter and jam for dessert. We then walked -- or rolled -- back to the hotel. The girls got into bed, and I took a bath. I think you need to see a photo of that, right?

Ha!

Seriously, though, that bath was awesome. I sprinkled in some bath salts and waited for the tub to fill up. You can't see it in the photo, but the tub was rigged for what the hipsters called Chromotherapy.  Evidently the pulsating lights -- both in the tub and overhead -- triggered certain feelings. Pink for romance, blue for tranquility, yellow for creativity, green for whatever, red for passion.We got a kick out of it -- at one point I slid the panel open and peered out at my friends who were reading in that bed. I told them that I was feeling POWER (that was the purple light). I settled for blue and relaxed for nearly an hour.

This morning, we woke up, ate a small breakfast and then I went PADDLEBOARDING! The instructor was about as cute as I could have imagined -- a dark-haired, dark-skinned surfer boy -- and he patiently instructed us (mainly me, because I'd never done it) on how to kneel, paddle a bit and then stand up. The first time I stood up, I kind of freaked out a little bit and had to go back to the kneeling position, but when we paddled out to a glassier area, he made me stand up and from then on to the end of the hour, I DID IT! There were sea lions barking and moaning on the buoys, we saw sting rays below us, the sky was hazy and peaceful, and I did it. Despite my feet going numb, I felt good and think I might be hooked to do it again. I wish I had a photo to show you, but then again, maybe I'm glad that I don't. I'd prefer you think of me looking like this:

I'm back home, rested, relaxed and energized. I'm still 49 years old but very much looking forward to being 50.

Next, mermaid tattoo?

Lucky

Vermeer

Last night I played cards again with a group of friends. I'm not a card player, and I have no strategy, but I'm lucky and I won. I drank bourbon on the rocks, two times, and I laughed my troubles away. Some players have edges even at a round table. I'm all curves. She's going down, is what they say right before you show your hand. If I could blush, I would, I said, my face pale hot. Later, someone said That's the last time I play with someone who doesn't play cards. I held my cards over my mouth, kept my secrets.

Malibu

I can't believe how fortunate I am, sometimes, to live in this glorious place. Yesterday, we left our house around 2:00 and arrived in Malibu shortly afterward. We spent the rest of the day there, just south of Zuma, with the best of friends and family. My baby sister Jennifer, her husband and three children are visiting, so they got a good taste of true southern California beach life -- very, very cold Pacific ocean, brilliant blue skies, dolphins, huge rocks, the setting sun. We ate fried chicken and salads, played and laughed. The only thing missing was Sophie who was in school for the day, but given how chilly it got when the sun started setting, I was relieved that she had stayed behind.

My nephew Charlie

My sister Jennifer and I

My niece Claudia and behind her my nephew Harry

Out all night

There were margaritas with fresh-squeezed lime juice. There was Rotel cheese dip, guacamole and chips. There were beloved friends. There was a lot of talk about books and movies. There were many games of a card game called Onze that I'd never played before but managed to rise to the task with the help of drunken friends. There was so much laughing that I nearly wet my pants (not panties) a number of times. I left at 1:00 in the morning, a time that I haven't seen, awake, in a long, long time. I am lightened by laughter and drink and cards and friendship.

Last night, Sophie, Oliver and I had the great good fortune to spend the eighth day of Hanukkah with some new friends. Henry was playing lacrosse in Santa Monica and The Husband was working, but the three of us were feted with delicious food, including the best latkes I've ever had, an interesting discussion of the Hanukkah story, and much laughing over the shouts and loud voices of three boys. Sophie had a pretty huge seizure at some point in the evening, but our friends had the perfect couch for having a seizure, and their response was calm and caring and a witnessing, which is all our family asks for and which is so often difficult to do. Thank you, dear Jenny and Mark and your adorable boys!

Today is another gray and rainy one in Los Angeles, and it's with a heavy heart that I continue our Christmas traditions of baking and the more mundane Sunday ones of laundry and straightening up. I want to walk down the middle of the street with other mothers and perhaps tear at our hair and wail. I want to scream, loudly, about the terrible storm of mental illness, obscene amounts of guns and ammunition and those who profit from them, the seeming indifference of many to the justified measures for eighteenth century fears that have no place in a twenty-first century world, and a culture so steeped in violence that it justifies the most vile of entertainment as art. Two weeks ago, I argued with someone over the United States Senate not joining the rest of the world in ending discrimination against and ensuring equality for all disabled people. I told her that I was ashamed of our country, and she told me that this was unfortunate as we lived in the greatest country on earth and the freest, and I could only think in the loneliest sort of ways how little I agreed and how I felt more connected to the world in general than to this fellow citizen. This is a time where pride in country has no place and where humility and reckoning and love of humanity supercedes all. But I wonder at the ties that bind us, how differences are becoming more and more stark.

I want to walk down the middle of the street with other mothers and perhaps tear at our hair and wail.

Instead, I'll sigh. I'll wring my hands, tighten my lips and toast coconut. I'll wipe Sophie's drool and wonder whether her weight gain is causing the step-up in seizures and whether I might need to adjust her medication. I'll be grateful again that The Friend Who Loves Jane Austen made it safely to Los Angeles with Sophie's medication in hand. I'll admonish Henry and Oliver to clean up their room and separate their darks from their whites. I'll sit at the dining room table and help Oliver to trace out the rooms in his house, 1 cm = 1 inch, while Aimee Mann sings of snow and Christmas, the twang of guitar merry and bright.

Gratitude

I have so much of it for friends like Gretchen. 


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