A world of certain difference

"America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions." -- David Simon

In my last post I whined about change being hard, but what's funny is that the large-scale changes, the big structural stuff that people vote for or against, has never scared me. I am honored to bear witness to such change, in fact. Whether those big changes ultimately end up being good or bad, they are almost always a sign of progress, and almost always the result of good intentions. And I get to watch them happen. I get to say, I was there when that happened. I remember what I was wearing. I remember the toast we made.

I spent years being afraid of the smaller changes, the graduations and relationships and walks outside in daylight. One day I was grilling eggplant for my dinner and a fleet of butterflies rose up outside my third floor window and poof, my fears flew away, smoking up into a gray plume disappearing. The oil sizzled and cleared and I wondered what I had been holding on to and why.

I learned, worked, to find my fears' roots and dig them out on spring days. I am lucky I had the space and tools to do that. I wish we all did, so our fears, large or small, could be dissected enough for us to realize there's some bit of beauty, of freedom, in them. In realizing that part of what we do here, all of us, is just swim along in the current of changes we never thought we wanted, trying to find our own air.

In between

After dipping into canned hurricane provisions for lunch today I realized it was time to go to the grocery store. And not the bodegas across the street, which, while lovely and have served me many a pint of ice cream in times of need, only offer so much (and little to no fruits or veggies). The neighborhood is weird today, three days after the storm, like I'm looking at it through a wobbly plastic filter that's making everything seem slightly off-color. The grocery store was crowded but poorly stocked, missing things I didn't expect -- cheeses and black beans and eggs. I am not complaining; just observing. An old 90's Gin Blossoms song was playing and I started to tweet "Grocery stores always play Gin Blossoms. #notcomplaining" but I stopped myself, feeling too frivolous.

Yesterday was the first day I really left my apartment, going for a long walk along the East River and up through Brooklyn Heights, bolstered by the rescue mission of my sister out of Hoboken, a town still in desperate need of help and evacuations. I felt positive yesterday, now that she was safe, like we were through the worst and things were back on the "normal" meter.

Today is different. It's November 1st and my concerns have shifted. I am worried about the fact that "normal" is gone, replaced by something new. I'm anxious about the election; that many people who would have voted can no longer, or that it will no longer be a priority. I'm worried, selfishly, about how I'm going to get to work once power is back on. And I'm thinking about my hometown of Long Beach Island, and the city I lived in for a decade, Hoboken, and the city I live in now, New York. And how all of them will be different now. And how change is hard.

Everyone's talking about rebuilding better than ever and how we'll get through it and sure, all of that is true, no doubt. But just once I'd like us to be allowed to mourn for a while, to at least acknowledge the sheer weight of what is now different, before we have to "be strong." I don't know the state of my family's house on Long Beach Island -- the home in which I grew up; the home my ancestors built in 1921. I've only been able to see its rooftop, taken from an aerial photo. At least it is still standing, I told myself. At least there is still a roof to be seen.

And they are just houses, a part of me knows. But most of me knows they are more than that. That house is love and history and family. That house is a front porch and an outside shower and the attic stairs where my boyfriend fell down and fractured his foot just last month. That house is gin & tonics and friendly ghosts and a secret closet I've never even seen inside. That house is news of my baby brother's arrival and a recurring nightmare I had as a kid and Cabbage Patch Dolls under a Christmas tree.

We are all safe and lucky, always, just by sheer nature of being born Americans, where we have things like FEMA and insurance and a general, collective agreement that destruction like this cannot stand. I know all this, and you do too, but still, we're caught in between normalcy and non-normalcy, and I've always been bad with in-betweens.

Sandy

There are risks no matter where you live, and this week I'm thinking about my island hometown, which is currently underwater. Living on the sea is always a gamble. Today, on LBI, the bay has met the ocean. It's not the first time and it won't be the last, but it always breaks off something inside me. When I was in middle school a(nother) big storm hit my town. My family lived on the lagoon for a few years, in a rental on a quiet street way at the edge of town, where you could see the Atlantic City casino skyline on clear days. We watched the water breach the lagoons, creeping up our backyard. We were so busy watching the back I think we forgot to watch the front, where the water surprised us, dribbling under the storm door, turning into a river.

About six or so inches came in that day. I remember leaving for higher ground -- our neighbor, just a few houses down, wasn't flooded, so we hung with her, eating weird canned soup with a metallic aftertaste and trying to keep ourselves occupied. We lost photos, but nothing else irreplacable.

A few years later, the island flooded again and lost power. I was at my summer job at Fantasy Island. We all got to leave and I joined the gang of 14-year-olds tramping through thigh-high water to the 7-11 where we could get Slurpees, because priorities. That day felt wild and free; it felt like being 14.

Now my grandmother has left our island home; my parents on the mainland have been evacuated, and people are tweeting pictures of my beloved hometown streets -- the mini golf courses, the closed seasonal shops, the restaurants and dunes, covered in a mix of ocean and bay, waves overlapping.

So, yes, the sea is always a risk, but is it wrong that I find it a preferable one to anything else? I can't imagine a tornado; I don't want a basement to hide in; the fault lines in California make me nervous every time I'm there and it's too quiet. No, I'll take a sea any time. The water always recedes.

On this rainy Friday

I dreamt of lying on benches, waiting for trains, with quotes circling the air like thought bubbles I could reach out and touch. I fell asleep feeling guilty about how the days pass so quickly; sometimes it will be dinnertime before I know it, and I've spent an entire day only talking about work, and there are never enough hours to call my mom. But I woke up to rain and a new attitude, humming the Demi Lovato song I haven't been able to get out of my head. Several months ago I told my sister about a book she should read, only I got the title wrong -- I was supposed to say The Age of Desire and instead I said The Age of Miracles. And it's a good thing I forget titles as often as I do, because she then read The Age of Miracles and said, "Morg, it's not about Edith Wharton like you said it was, but I think you should read it anyway."

I finished it last night on the train home, savoring every moment. (And then I read the acknowledgements, where the author thanks people I know, and I was reminded again how small this planet is.)

I can't stop singing Tori

A few weeks ago my friend Joe, for whom I was wearing my favorite Tori Amos concert tee back when we first met when I was a mere 18, asked me to contribute an article about my relationship with feminism and Tori's intersections of it for PopMatters.com. (Talk about full circle.) PopMatters has been running a Tori spotlight all week, and today my post, "Reflections on Tori Amos and the Feminist Movement," went live. In the few weeks I spent writing the piece, I've reverted, hearing Tori lyrics whispering to me every part of every day. I've been YouTubing old videos and live performances, hitting repeat on my "best of Tori" playlist, and generally just enjoying my renewed Tori love.

Hope you enjoy, too. And here's a song for today. (It's humid and rainy here in New York, and my body feels gummy, and I'm having hankerings for Londontown, so this felt appropriate.)

90

Her earrings sparkled, hanging from droopy lobes in a way that felt like a risk. He wore a cowboy hat, which I'm told was out of character, but then so too was the restaurant, all fake western memorabilia and country music, and besides, people change. I watched the Pistol Annies on the television; I can get a little bluegrass myself, and I still remember the country line dancing we did in high school, the day my trig teacher cleared out the cafeteria and showed us the moves, her tight jeans secure under a belt with a big brass buckle. It was a surprise party. He moved well but slowly, overwhelmed by so many faces. This one, though, he knew: the old woman with the earrings, with the curated lips,  with the silver hair piled high like a movie star. The one who said "I love you" to him over and over, her hands grasping his cheeks, and his hers, and they stood like that for minutes, whispering 90 years of life to each other, while the party turned into a reunion around them. I don't know who she was, and I can't even imagine what that age must feel like.

I have grown short of grandparents of my own. Tell me, what does 90 mean when you were born in the midst of the Great Depression? When you lived through world wars and civil rights and moon landings and a technological shift that changed the world so immensely? Is it an accomplishment or a curse? Maybe when I'm 90, if, I'll be wishing for things I used to have, or mourning the things I'll never see. Like my parents versus my great great grandkids; like the Mars rover versus a colony on Mars. Like another night with my lover, or another piece of pie. There is so much to miss, both forward and backward.

I can't get their moment out of my mind.

The drive home felt like big sky and autumn, like pumpkins and apple picking. There was green and blue everywhere, so bright it hurt to look, with clouds we'll never see again. And still I thought of the two of them, the way they held on to each other, and the sound a life makes when people pause to mark it on a clean fall day.

Gimme a...

"Where'd that world go, that world where you're a kid, and now I can't remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of a dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything." There is something wrong with the F train these days, and some nights it actually leaves me near tears, because we all just want to get home, presumably, and we never can, at least not in the time we thought we'd be able to. So last night I'm waiting, and waiting more, and brushing condensation off my forehead, which is just another way of saying I was sweating like crazy, because everyone knows Broadway-Lafayette is the hottest subway station in the world, and did I mention I am ready for summer to be over?

And I'm waiting, in a rush, but no F trains come and when two finally do, they're so bursting with people that none of us can get on without risking our lives. And even though I desperately want to get on, I enjoy my life a lot, so I don't push myself in, I don't make the other sweating, smushed people hate me for smushing them in even tighter.

So I read. I read to distract myself from the heat and the anger and the near-tears.

And then I read that passage above, from Megan Abbott's Dare Me, and just like that, there is no subway station, there is no New York, there is no long work day and no jerks leering at me and no exhausted pregnant lady next to me (won't someone just give her their seat already), there is just me and a book, me and my own memories of high school cheerleading, where a new coach came and tried to whip us into better shape, just like in the book; where I took my varsity captainship and shoved it because I had my own awakening at the start of senior year that, wow, I actually hated almost everything that squad had become, and even though I missed the competitions, I missed the lights on my face during pep rallies, my senior year became more about me.

The myth of the cheerleader so often misses the mark -- there are complicated layers to cheering, at least to me -- the power and the flounce and the ponytails all swirl into something kind of dangerous for a lot of us. We start thinking we're invincible.

Dare Me is the first book I've read where the author gets it. She gets what the cheering is all about, what it's for. And who.

August memorials and memories

This week the shadows changed. I saw it on my street this morning, walking to the F train, the very one that's made me miss two yoga classes this week. Augusts are funny -- still sticky, but there's a cool tone to the air that wasn't there before, and everything feels just a little off center. One summer in college when I worked at a jewelry store on the island I tried to explain to my dear friend, the store's owner, how easy it was to squint just the right way so that everything looked as rosy and fresh as it did in May and June. I never wanted summers to end back then, only that's not entirely true; I think I mostly just wanted to make sure I captured them.

Anyway, my friend told me there was no way August could look anything like June, because the shadows always gave it away. They've moved a few degrees, a move that can't be hidden by a squint.

I know she's right, and I see it now. The island would always clear out in August, but we'd still be there, singing to the Indigo Girls behind closed doors, watching the sand blow by, waiting for school to start. Now, even in New York, August feels still to me, frozen. It feels weirdly quiet. The interns at work have left. It's cool enough for sweaters on early mornings.

Today B. and I went to pick up our friend's CSA share while he's out of town and passed a group of people holding a makeshift memorial service on the front stoop of a brownstone. One stumbles upon many things in front of Brooklyn brownstones -- free books from people cleaning out their shelves, old toasters and printers that say "Take me! I work!" in wobbly handwriting -- like this whole borough is hosting a neverending garage sale. But I've never seen a memorial service.

They each had fold-up chairs and there was one empty one, on the top step, with a photo and "1953-2012" printed on it. It wasn't sad. Everyone there seemed joyous, and I thought, that's the way to do those things. On a stoop in August in Brooklyn, watching the world and the weather pass by.

I guess I can't trick myself out of August by squinting. It's here, and just like that, it'll be gone.

On hard books

This is a serious post: how difficult should books be to read? I think back to my college days (English major here), where I was reading for hours a day -- Dosteovsky and Coleridge and Rich, Melville and Dillard and Chaucer in its original English. I would be tired, spent after some of those books. Rejuvenated, too; like I had just run a mental marathon.

There's a burst of rebellion I think many English majors succumb to post-graduation when we're suddenly free to read for fun in more ways than we could before. For me, that meant lots of chick lit and bestsellers; then I joined Scholastic and my pleasure reading became almost exclusively YA. And then I started writing YA for real, and studying the genre. And then I realized how many amazing books I was missing from other genres and started to make concerted efforts to expand. Now I think I have a nice balance of reading material, but still -- there are so many good books to read, and not enough time.

Except.

It is no secret I read a lot of children's books...and, well, some of them (considering I have a penchant for old series from the '80s) aren't always the best quality. I mean, that's a can of worms right there (because any book that gets a kid to fall in love with reading is a good book!). But the actual text of some of the stuff I've been re-reading is on the weak side. (I love it, but still.) And as a writer, lately I've been struggling with what I read for fun, and whether it's (perhaps negatively) influencing my writing.

I am a writer who is mostly inspired by other writers -- meaning, reading a fresh poem triggers something in me, or getting lost in a new book makes me rush to finish so I can get back to my own. I have read some ah-mazing books lately -- The Vanishers by Heidi Julavitz, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller...but I've also just come back from vacation, and a few days of illness where I wanted my comfort books, so I've been reading some not-so-complicated books lately, too. (Like my beloved Baby-sitters Clubs.)

There's something to be said for making your brain hurt now and then. So I'm taking this list of the 10 Most Difficult Books from Publishers Weekly (some of which I've read -- but only some) and thinking: do I need a month of "hard" reading? Do we all? Should my reading be about challenging myself, or about comforting myself? What's my role as a reader -- what's my obligation to the world's best authors?

Where should I start?

Vacation blurbs

• 

  A road trip; a house dinner; unpacking; sage burning (because who doesn't need a little cleansing now and then). On the front deck we circled around each other as night fell and tried not to feel awkward as we lit the fat bunch twigs and waited for the smoke to transform us.

• A red crescent moon disappearing over the bay, startling in its speed. We stood on the docks and toasted to the end of the world, because if the moon disappeared like that, surely we would be next.
• Early-morning thwacks of tennis balls on the courts across the street as I ran sunburned hands over my beach towel, hanging over the deck, to test for dampness. It stormed what felt like every night, and in the mornings our bathing suits and the deck chairs still dripped, fat drops falling through the cracks in the deck below our feet.
• One single, perfect beach day, bookended by many great-but-too-humid-or-too-cloudy beach days, where we all sat on the deck tearing up bread and taking our time with a slow breakfast and fast conversation. We got to the beach late, so we stayed later than any other day, long after the lifeguards jumped off their stands and drug their boats back to the dunes; long after everyone else back home was getting ready to leave their offices.
• A club, surrounded by 21 year olds in miniskirts who were trying so hard to be something someone, anyone, noticed. I had a fleeting pang of sympathy for them, because oh my, does life get better once you stop trying to impress everyone.
• Seagulls and snapper turtles and clams under our feet as we paddleboarded out into the bay, getting our sea legs, circling the marshes I'd never before seen up close. I fell in, splashing underwater until I realized it was only thigh-deep.
• The full seven days, which after last year, is all we could ask for.

Turquoise friends

Last week I got a pedicure in a shiny turquoise blue, and today it matches my shirt, and it makes me think of my dear friend K. in London, whom I haven't seen since September. These days I only see her twice a year or so, and even then that's just luck, based on her annual jaunts here and my annual jaunts there. If people are colors, she is turquoise, or aqua, or chlorine blue -- whatever you want to call it. She is bright and clear and smooth and vivid. At her wedding she wore satin turquoise heels and he wore a turquoise bow tie and the bridesmaids wore turquoise dresses and so here I am, 3,000 miles away, thinking of her because of my toes, thinking of the baby's breath in her hair and the bagpipes playing and the walk across the Royal Naval Academy in Greenwich that fine spring day in our heels.

All of the best people in my life, except for my family and a couple of childhood friends, I've met mostly as an adult. Is that normal? Is it a result of having changed so much in the past 15 years of my life, of, to borrow a phrase from a book I'm currently reading (The Vanishers), giving birth to my true self and then willing those people into existence?

As a teenager I couldn't imagine where I'd be in my early thirties. Did I think I would have friends scattered across the world, with accents I'd never heard, with careers and lives and perspectives that make me shine? Did I know things would be this incredible? I mean, is anyone where they thought they'd be, with lives they thought they'd have?

Portraits of a weekend spent unwinding

The pool was greenish and cloudy with a fine coating of dead gnats. In the dark, on the deck, I stepped on the remains of a slug's trail; it wound, dark and wet and fat, across the red wood and down the step onto the cement patio. The power went out at 2am, and I watched the lightning storm, so full of rage it never gave the night sky a chance to be night; so full of rage, it brought down trees and rooftops and cars and people.

But then there were these moments, too: the cheer from the neighborhood when the power kicked back on at noon. A platter of grilled fruit -- pineapple and peaches coated in caramelized sugar, hot from the flames. A clear, blue-er pool where I read half of Summer Sisters, because that's what I do in the pool every summer. B. in the hammock under the shady tree, relaxing in a way I never see him do. My dad on the deck, rockin' out to his iPod Touch (a recent prize) as he read his Kindle Fire (his Father's Day gift). My brother confessing high school indiscretions to my mother.

On the bus ride back to the city, I found $30 in singles someone had tucked in between the seat and the window. Was it some server's nightly earnings? Some runaway's stash? Should I donate it or use it or leave it?

I kept it. It paid for our tickets back home.

"I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it."

We're fond of tossing out Fitzgerald quotes like candy at my house, and the title above is a favorite, but I swear, it didn't occur to me until someone pointed it out this past week, on the day of the summer solstice itself, that the problem with summer solstices is that from here on out, the days shrink rather than extend, like summer is over before it's ever even begun. Tonight I was reminded of the NYC blackout of August 2003. Have I ever told you that story? Sometimes it feels like a perfect party trick, like this little ticket stub I keep in my pocket and pull out whenever someone mentions their subway being stuck or how hot the afternoon has grown. "I was at the big game," I can say.

I had taken the day off work and my sister and her friend were visiting. We had big plans for the day and tickets to the Indigo Girls at Central Park Summer Stage that evening. We'd browsed through the Village and then hopped on a train (I want to say it was ACE, but that's just me filling in the blanks) and it was hot, a hot hot heat that left our faces moist as we waited underground. K., my sister's friend, was one of those girls who was highly particular about her face and, quite simply, never touched it. Like, hands on face was off-limits, de facto. (The bitch had beautiful skin.)

So there I stood waiting for a train, wiping sweat off my upper lip and feeling judged by her for doing so, when finally one came, and it was crowded but cool, and it was like the whole platform heaved with relief at the change in temperature.

And then, ten minutes into the train ride, we stopped.

The short version: there was a blackout, city-wide; after 90 minutes we finally saw a conductor who informed us we'd be evacuating; it took another 90 minutes for that to actually happen, for us to stomp through underground tunnels, mice at our feet, hands on cool underground walls that I shudder to think about now, for a firefighter to pull me from a manhole in midtown as people snapped pictures.

I couldn't get home that night -- all the tunnels and bridges were closed to traffic. So we drank in the street -- leave it to New York to turn the day into a party -- and we watched businessmen in suits direct traffic and we assumed the concert had been canceled and we ended up back in my office in Times Square, which was running on a generator, and we played games and used the phone and ate free food from the cafeteria and slept on borrowed couches in executives' offices. Somehow the text I had sent while still stuck underground had gotten through, hours later, telling my mom we were okay, since someone had whispered the word "terrorist" while we were still in the dark train waiting to find out what had happened, and it hung around my brain like a lingering smell of dinner.

We barely slept, and in the hot, gray early morning we hopped on a bus; they were parked on the corners outside of Port Authority, which was still technically closed, and we were just hoping to get through the tunnel back to the Jersey side, since the benefits of a Hoboken apartment include the fact that you are mere steps away from both the Lincoln and Holland. It turns out the buses were all just kind of meandering, shipping people for free over the Hudson and then dumping them in various mall parking lots. So when we got on and got through the Lincoln, I pushed the yellow rope to indicate a stop and the driver's head jerked up.

"Does someone want to get off here?" He called back.

"Yes," I shouted, hoping that was an okay answer.

"Why?" He wondered.

"Um, I live here," I confessed.

"Lucky," my seat neighbor said.

We walked the half a mile back to my apartment, in the same clothes, needing toothbrushes and deodorant but overall, not too much worse for the wear, and discovered my apartment had never even lost power.

It was a free day off work, I remember. And somewhere, people have pictures of me being hoisted out of a manhole on 57th Street, probably aching to wipe the sweat off my upper lip.

Friday night

The driver took the scenic route home, down the West Side Highway, lights versus lights, a face-off over the Hudson River. I can never decide which view is more beautiful. I was coming from one of my favorite nights in a long while, just one of those dinner parties with best friends where every conversation clicked, every morsel consumed loved, every moment exactly as it should be. I indulged in a car home, to my new new home, and the driver played Rum Diary on the DVD player and I collapsed against the leather seats. On my left, New York pulsed and played. On my right, the water moved but it seemed like the boats just stayed still, like they couldn't decide if they were real or just buoys; just extra thoughts some sailor artist had.

I didn't expect this car ride home to be full of so many memories. Here was midtown with all of my old haunts, the places that changed me most, I think, all those years ago. My old office. Then further downtown, my current office, my favorite walk, the corner where he kissed me the second time, which I sort of think of as the real time, because second kisses are more important than firsts.

I like this tour from a car. I am so rarely a passenger in cars, a circumstance I don't miss, but which occasionally reveals itself to be extraordinarily useful in this place of underground living. Who are all these others, on the road past midnight in their own cars? Are they going out or, like me, going home? Which do they wish they were doing?

Which do you?

Image via

A history of flying

I saw all the headlines about how the mystery of Amelia Earheart may have been solved, but I couldn't bring myself to read the stories. I preferred my own: that she slipped into a parallel universe and led a sister life, maybe, or that she landed in some utopian island with a manageable brain injury that wiped out her memory and went on to form new, even better ones. Whatever. I just didn't want to know the truth yet. The narrative around her, for me, sufficed. Because it meant we got to all dream up our own endings. But then I saw this piece from Gawker, and that bit about the freckle cream, and oh my, how I would now like to know what happened, really for real, not just speculation. I want the details. I want the noises, the wind, the shade of polish on her nails. The rise of the tides. Where her goggles ended up. And maybe that's why I never wanted to find out in the first place, because there would never, could never, be enough information about it all unless -- and even that's sketchy -- there were some kind of play-by-play that didn't leave out a second of her own inner monologue as the plane went down.

I've always favored the little moments and the small details. Why did she wear that cardigan? What was his expression when he made that phone call? Where did she go to buy the milk? The big ones, the big choices, are usually decided far in advance and happen over time, rendering them less shocking, so that when they do occur -- when someone moves or gets a new job or buys a car or has a baby -- everyone's already used to the idea of it.

I moved last week and now I'm in a different city, a different state even, with a different person, but those are all decisions I made what feels like a long time ago and just took a while to get here. So now I'm playing with the little details: where should this picture go? Which cabinet should be for mugs? How many ice cube trays do we need?

Where should my goggles end up?

Writing utensils

Two or three years ago for Christmas, I asked for a particular kind of pencil. I was writing my first manuscript at the time, and my friend, a writer herself, had gone crazy for this pencil and told everyone she knew that it was the best writer's tool ever.

And I wanted to be like her, so I asked for it, since my family is always asking me what I want for holidays and I never know what to tell them, since I have everything I could ever need. (Except a popcorn popper. But that's on my birthday list this year.)

I am here to announce I barely use this pencil.

Tonight I'm writing a chapter that's due Friday and I'm deep into it, sitting at my desk, the sirens and music of Hoboken leaking through my open window. It is warm out, y'all. Warm and the kind of sticky that makes me kick off the sheets in bed and wake up with a damp hairline. (Or perhaps I am just sensitive to heat, as I've been told.) And I'm alternating between writing in Scrivener and reading this synopsis I have and I went to grab a highlighter and noticed the pencil, the infamous Christmas pencil, instead. And here I am, clicking it to lengthen the lead, and drawing a tentative line with it, and realizing the truth of it all is that I just don't use a lot of writing utenstils of any kind, let alone the lead kind.

The other truth of it all is that I have the most incredible mother, who asks me what I want for Christmas and then listens to my answers, and keeps a meticulous list of what she spends on each of her four children and one son-in-law and evens it all out to the penny because she is so concerned with equal distribution of presents.

I went down to my parents' house this past weekend for Mother's Day, and on Saturday night I finally had dinner with my mom alone, just the two of us, which we never get to do anymore. I admitted to her that I still hadn't gotten her her Mother's Day gift yet. The clock was ticking -- literally, there were mere hours until the day itself, and if you know my hometown, you know there's not much in the way of boutiques there. I hadn't even gotten her a card.

And my mom, the champ she is, pulled into the Walgreens on our way back to her house, laughing the whole time, where I ran in and joined the dozen other slackers in the card aisle, and picked out the best card I could find. It played music and had a fairy with wings that really flapped on the inside, which made it a winner.

She's a winner, too. She's the biggest winner I know.

This pencil, however, is not. (Sorry, Sarah. I know you love it.)

Image via

Moving

I’m moving in mere weeks, across a couple of rivers and into a whole new state. Right now is the time for inertia, though – too early to start packing and selling and donating; too late to reconsider (did we pick the right place? Is this all a mistake?). So for now my move is all just in my head, and in the lone document I had to sign. There are things I’m giving up. A car , which I am glad to leave behind. Cable. (It's an experiment, but I think I'll survive just fine.) A shared wardrobe.

There are things I'm gaining, too. More things than I can count, I think.

Today I got a sunburn on the back of my neck and in the shape of a V on my chest, and ate fried Oreos and street food, and patted my parents' dog, who I call Grandpa, because he's mellow and observant and quick to sit. Back in my apartment, my family asked how K. and I were splitting up our furniture. Everyone seemed concerned. But it's easy to decide. I'm losing my favorite bookshelf, the one that houses all my Baby-sitters Clubs, but I'm keeping the antique framed print of the John and Jackie Kennedy; K. is taking the turquoise curtains, but I'm snagging my grandmother's sewing chair, with its so-old-it's-ugly print, an identical pattern to the one on a footstool I came across in a vintage store in my new neighborhood a few weeks ago.

By the time I realized I wanted that footstool, though, that it did indeed match the chair, it was gone.

Shiny churches and grandchildren

I once read that extended families exist only because grandmothers refused to die on time, and I don't know if that's true, but I watch my own mother, now a grandmother of her own, and I can understand why one would refuse to die, because who would want to give up the hugs and falls and ripped books that grandbabies bring you? I sat through a Catholic funeral yesterday and am exhausted just remembering the standing and sitting and bowing and repeating and singing, all of these motions that mean nothing to me but meant everything to my dead grandmother. Mostly I watched the singer, who had a lovely thin voice, and the altar boys, who kept biting their hangnails and scratching their backs, while Jesus and Mary twinkled in the Philadelphia sunlight above them. I was in Quito, Ecuador once, and I touched the walls of the church in the city square, and they were literally paved in gold while a hungry crowd begged for my American change right outside the gates. It felt...excessive, in a terribly uncomfortable way, as yesterday did, too.

After the service I went with my older sister to pick up my niece and nephew from their daycare, and it was naptime, and there in darkened rooms were three-year-olds laid out on tiny little mattresses like a living checkerboard. I tickled my niece's palm to wake her and she stretched, all long and so big already, and after a moment of confusion -- what were her aunts doing there? -- she smiled, her cheeks flushed and her curls all pulled out and flattened, and just like that, she was up and ready for an afternoon of unexpected playtime with us. We hopped like frogs and read Dr. Seuss and the morning, and its cemeteries and tears, slipped away, already a memory.

My grandmother had a photo of us all  -- her grandchildren and great grandchildren -- in her nursing home bedroom, even the babies whose existence she could never remember, and my mom would point to each of us and say our names. Occasionally, my grandmom would even remember them herself. I guess that association is what we're always striving for. "She was ours," we can say, "and she knew our names."

Connections to machines

In San Francisco for work this week, in an old Army barracks in the Presidio, where sheets of mist rained down on a grass so green I had to squint, I thought about Adrienne Rich. Look any good little feminist English major, I read a lot of Rich in college. I have notes scrawled in my copies of her books, the "used" stickers from my college bookstore still yellow, still peeling, and tonight I will pull them off my shelves and page through them, re-reading my favorites, wondering what I was thinking when I scribbled things like "A nostalgic look at her mother" or "A love poem I'll never write, because I have no connections to machines." I have no idea what I meant back then.

So I read the news on a 10-minute break during my conference and thought, this can't be right, what are people talking about, where are the tears? There was no announcement made, no CNN breaking news alert. Then I realized so few of us care about poets, let alone feminist poets, which is not something I'm sad about necessarily, because it's just a thing that is, like my curly hair, like my mom's anxiety over flying.

I lived off campus senior year and have a distinct memory of my Rich experiences. I cut across the campus, and there's that green grass again, only this time in New Jersey, and walked into Bliss Hall, the door landing heavy behind me, the English and Women's Studies offices on my right and left, and carried Diving into the Wreck with me into a class, where I presented on Rich to what felt like, at the time, thunderous applause. And she deserved it.

The New Yorker said it best: "The ringing, defiant poetry of Adrienne Rich, who died yesterday, at eighty-two, articulated the frustrations of women who came of age along clipped paths in the nineteen-forties and fifties, only to discover in the sixties and seventies the extent of their longing to tear up the grass." And if anyone ever needed proof that I'll always identify more with the second wave of feminism than the third, it's right here, in the fact that I feel like a woman in this quote, despite being born in 1979.

What's on your nightstand?

I try to check in with The Hairpin regularly, and today this post about The Secret History caught my eye. (Oh, apparently it's actually on The Awl. It's cross-posted, I swear!) For starters, what a great book, right? But this is what grabbed me: "Do you have a guest room? Put this next to the bed." I have two tiny nightstands (not even tables! Just stands! They barely hold a lamp!) on either side of my bed (or on one side, staggered, depending on my mood) and I always, always have books on them. The books, however, are not my TBR pile. They're just...books? That I own? That one night I felt like reading a passage or poem from, and failed to ever put them back in their appropriate shelves? I'm not sure.

Right now there's a Margaret Atwood Selected Poems copy and, if I recall correctly, a copy of my boyfriend's graphic novel. And maybe something else? What does it mean that I can't remember, that I haven't touched the books on my nightstand in months?

Here is what I'd like to put on my nightstand, as a way of defining myself, my life, my mood right now:

• The Hunger Games (I saw an advance screening last night -- Gary Ross even came! -- and wowza.)
• William Blake's collected poems (For some reason, spring = poetry to me.)
• The Baby-sitters Club Super Special #2: Baby-sitters' Summer Vacation (I know I joke about the BSC a lot, but I'm actually not kidding. I always want to be reading them, particularly this one. It is a permanent nightstand book for me. In fact, when I'm home next, I'm going to take it OUT of my special "favorite books" bookshelf, the pretty one on display in my living room, and put it on my nightstand. Just to make me feel good. Love you, Ann M Martin!)
• The Age of Innocence (Goodness, I'm a broken freakin' record sometime. But I re-read this every summer, and I'm working on a writing project related to this, and it's just my jam. And it's so pretty! And adult!)

I've never lived anywhere, ever, that had a proper guest room. But when I do, I'm going to take the Hairpin's advice and leave my copy of Donna Tartt on the nightstand.

Um, except my copy is electronic. Damn.