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?

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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.)

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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.

Roundabouts

Last night I did a bridge in yoga class, something I haven't done in literally years, and after the cracking and creaking I settled into it for just a few comfortable seconds before my arms gave up the fight. In high school, doing a front or back walkover was all I needed to stretch my body, and we'd turn them over like four-leaf clovers at any time of day -- on the track, in the gym, in the D-wing hallway after school, wearing jeans and flannels and Doc Martens. Even in college, long after I'd quit cheerleading and dance, on hazy spring nights we'd take to the grass and throw back handsprings and roundoffs and feel out our limberness. In retrospect it all feels very Dancing Shoes-like, when Hilary is learning "roundabouts" in the fields of the English countryside and Rachel is moodily reading some book. (I never know who I like better, by the way: sunny Hilary or scowling, thoughtful Rachel. Maybe Dulcie? Maybe they are each facets of the same?) (Read the book, it's the best.)

I didn't walk into class last night expecting to do a bridge, but I did one and today I'm not feeling so bad, not as sore as I expected, so there's that. What is the lesson, I can feel myself asking. What is the lesson that's not as obvious as the one we're all thinking?

Well, I don't know. I know this: tomorrow morning I'm flying to Charleston, NC, for some sightseeing and eating with my mom and sisters, and I can't wait to get out of New York, which has been bruising me far too often for my liking these days. (Of course, then she goes and delivers a 70-degree day like today, and even though I want to pout -- where is my winter?! -- it just feels glorious.)

Look-Backs, interrupted

Naturally, a day that comes around only once every four years is a day that gets people thinking about where they were in their life the last time this day came around. I've seen some great posts about it -- particularly this one from Mandy Hubbard, a must-read for writers (especially those of us on submission) -- but the funny thing is, I simply can't remember. Previous Leap Days seem to no longer be stored in my brain. I do Look-Backs a lot. I had a particularly vivid Cinqo de Mayo one year, and I remember marking the moment in my head that night and wondering where I'd be the next Cinqo de Mayo, how my life would be different; if. I have this compulsion to track progress, to say things like, "Here I am today, which is weird, because there I was at this time last week." Like this past Sunday at 7:15pm when I looked at the clock and noted to myself that it'd been exactly a week, to the minute, since I got mugged. "Remember those moments before it happened?" I thought. "Remember how different I was, just a week ago?" (The answer: not very.)

Anyway. The strange thing about today is that I can't do a Look-Back to last Leap Day. Because I don't remember marking it at all. In fact, I have no memories of any earlier Leap Days whatsoever.

So, to rectify that:

• I wore a new dress today, thinking I'd be at a luncheon that I ended up skipping. It's gray and smooth.
• I smiled a goodbye to my sleeping boyfriend this morning, who looked so intensely comfortable it made me hiccup.
• It's raining, and already feels like spring, and the corner bodega was selling small cartons of tulips in pastel foil wrappings, and it made me think of my mother.
• Tonight I have a girls' dinner with my favorites, and we'll huddle under a roof and toast ourselves.

There. Now I can remember this Leap Day for when the next one comes in 2016.

I was okay until...

Yesterday I flipped open a New Yorker essay by Jonathan Franzen about Edith Wharton and "her problem of sympathy," and I thought, How I love this magazine, and Edith, and this literary life. A moment later my attention was diverted by an American woman seated across from me, explaining the weekend subway changes en francais to some French tourists. "Oui, c'est parfait," she said to them, "c'est le train pour vous." They were grateful, with their "mercis" and their nodding. How I love this city, I thought. An hour later I was mugged. I wondered why it was me, not the French tourists, but then I felt glad it wasn't them, because what a way to ruin a vacation. This is a true story.

What to make of Franzen writing about Wharton, anyway? "You may be dismayed by the ongoing representation of women in the American canon," he wrote, and I chuckled, wondering if Jennifer Weiner put him up to this. Or if his publicist did.

In the article there's an image of Edith, black and white and appropriately garbed in early 20th century dress, and carrying a dog -- I forget the name of the breed, but it looks like the dog from "Frasier" -- and I studied it intensely. She's reading a book; there's sunlight filtering in through the greenery behind her.

I was okay with the F train running so slowly last night, because I got to read about Edith. I was okay, until I got punched in the face outside of it; until I had to cancel all my credit cards.

I imagine the French tourists would mutter, "C'est la vie dans la grande ville," if they knew this story. And really, c'est vrai.

Come to some stillness

The first down dog of each day is the hardest, of course, and I always have to ease my way into it; shuffle my legs and hips; pedal my knees; really work my way into it. After a few seconds, I always hear my yoga instructor's words in my head: "Now, come to some stillness." It is my favorite thing to hear -- it sounds so simple. Just stop moving. But it's so, so hard.

Somewhere along my way I lost my ability to push the world's mute button and just chill out inside my own bones, which used to be my proudest accomplishment. Last week as I took some post-surgery painkillers and tried not to move, I ended up basically exclusively moving. Little spasms in my toes. An itch on my shoulderblade I couldn't resist. It was like how when someone says "Don't think of a tree," you start seeing leaves falling from the ceiling, roots forming under your floorboards; your eyelids morph into tree trunk silhouettes and, of course, you fail. There is an entire forest in your mind in precisely the place you've told it not to be.

I had surgery last week. When I was coming out of the anesthesia and it was time to get dressed, I didn't know where to begin. The task felt beyond my capabilities. The recovery room nurse pulled a curtain around me and someone unearthed my bag (and it is just now occurring to me that I don't know how that happened, it had been in a locker and I'd had the key and now here it is, two weeks later, and I don't know.) and K. helped me up and into my yoga pants and favorite, paint-stained American Apparel v-neck. Something about having people in a waiting room for you, only there to see you through it, is too tender, too much, that between that and my bodily trauma I started to cry, that kind of tremble that starts in your chin, below your lower lip. The kind you're just completely powerless to stop. I was just getting dressed. I was fine. I didn't need to cry. I didn't know why I was.

"Yoga breaths," K. told me. So I pictured my studio, the fuzzy lights, the way my heart balloons up in there, and I stepped into my shoes and cardigan and just breathed.

Later in the car on the way home (the driver having been instructed to take the turns slowly and my goodness, it felt like hours but true to his words, I barely felt a jostle), the tremble came on again. I watched B. out the car window, walking to the subway station after saying goodbye for the night, and I saw a flicker of sympathy on the driver's face (the things they must see!) and I lost it.

"I don't know why I'm crying," I'd wailed, somewhere so deep on the east side I could probably hear the river if I'd cared to. I really didn't. I was fine. But my bed felt so far away, so many avenues and tunnels away, and I'd made everyone wait for me in a hospital, and I don't like to ask things of people, and I felt so desperate.

So I tried some yoga breaths, some more, and I tried to find some stillness, and now here I am, almost two weeks later, with stitches and scars and dead flowers and three new pretty vases to keep.

And I haven't done a down dog since before.

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What is important is this:

Sometimes when I write a blog entry it feels like I am actually just writing certain people a letter, people who I know are reading this blog. Dear friends, I say, here is a spot of my day/week/month. Thought you would like to know. So here you go, my week in increments:

I found a penny in the corner of the bathroom counter this morning at work. It was tails up -- bad luck, so I didn't touch it. A few hours later, another penny had joined it. This one is heads up, which isn't important. What is important is this: is someone picking up pennies and putting them on the counter on purpose? Who would do such a thing? What does it all mean? [Edit from 5 minutes after posting this: NOW THERE IS A QUARTER ON THE COUNTER, WITH THE PENNIES. I am not kidding.]

Last night I had an amazing meal and an excellent time with some friends, and I caught myself falling down that rabbit hole of gratitude. (Surely helped by a dirty martini.) I got home too late to feel anything but indecent today, but I shall reward myself with an overdue reiki session this evening. My bones are calling out for it. I worry that I sometimes listen to my body too much, or not enough, but never just the right amount. My back hurts, I'll say. But maybe I just carry too much on my shoulders; maybe I just shouldn't have skipped my favorite yoga class this week. I need sleep, I'll think. But maybe it's just the weather, or the week, or the fact that when I'm home I like to watch the midnight episode of Friends before succumbing.

I am obsessed with Kate Christensen's blog, and if you aren't reading it, you should stop reading this right now and go here. And then cook me a meal from it.

Anyway, I think it is about to snow, and everyone here is kind of humming with it, like a perfume someone dropped over our block of SoHo. I am hoping it starts to feel like January.

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Pearl Street love

• This summer I vacationed on Pearl Street in Beach Haven, my hometown, my heart.
• I have lately taken to wearing my deceased grandmother's ring; it's shiny and antique and makes me think of her, which is a strange, new feeling. We weren't close.
• One of my other grandmothers (this one) still lives in the Beach Haven house in which I grew up; it's an historic site on the island. (Literally.)
• In 1960, the Baldwin Hotel in Beach Haven, situated on the very same Pearl Street mentioned above, burned down.
• GHOSTS.

These are swimming in my head today. That's a picture of the Baldwin Hotel. Isn't it just gorgeous?

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Goodbye, hello

I'm back in New York today, and it feels like an abandoned library, quiet and dusty, like someone forgot to put out the “closed until the New Year” sign on the bridges and tunnels. And I am okay with that. I love working the week between Christmas and New Year's. Really. I turn on some music and clean my office – physically and digitally – and try to shore things up and get new things started. So maybe this is the emo music Pandora is playing for me right now (live "Landslide" cover from the Dixie Chicks…live "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters" cover from the Indigo Girls…you understand, surely), but I’m feeling…pensive? Contemplative? Moody and swoony at once?...as I try to nail down the feeling this time of year always brings.

Last week I finished something big, and am using this time to catch up on the rest of my life, on the books I can rarely ever read without guilt (I should always be doing Something Else with my time, after all), the shows I kept DVRing, which forced me to dodge spoilers on Twitter, the clothes I kept meaning to put away, the floors I kept meaning to sweep, the emails I kept meaning to write. This week, I shall do All the Things.

Meanwhile, I will wait for it to get cold. I want to see my breath puff out in the shape of my words. I want to wear my puffy coat. I want to start longing for warmth.

And meanwhile again, I will send a little thank you to the stars for making 2011 a year to remember, and I'll start suspecting that 2012 will be the best year yet, because they all seem to just be getting better.

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The art of letters

As with most things in my life, I go through phases when it comes to writing Christmas letters. This year, I'm back on the horse, inspired by some beautiful cards I found at a shop in Hoboken, where three separate sales clerks asked me in a span of 75 seconds whether I needed any help (the answer all three times was no). I've spent the past few days choosing my list, choosing which card goes to whom, choosing my words. Choosing, at its most basic, whether I wanted to be sentimental or not; whether this was a time for saying I love you, I miss you, thanks for a great year, my life is complete because of you. I bought a silver pen, thick and fluid, which looks amazing against the red envelopes but a bit dim on the white ones. I am sorry to those of you for whom I chose the white cards over the red. You are missing out on some gorgeous ink.

There is something about writing things down on paper that feels more risky than it used to. Several times I started a message and then went to erase it before forgetting I couldn't. I am so used to writing on screens and deleting at will and never needing to commit to my words until I'm ready to hit the Send button that I froze; the meanings I meant to convey may have gotten muddled as a result. But the cards are stamped and sealed, and I don't even remember what I said in them, and there's now no way for me to check.

How did we all used to survive like this?

As I was scribbling them the other night, I told B. I wished I had been a Victorian lady so I could write letters all day, just spinning exhortations about missing friends and lovely years and taking turns around the garden, which I would surely have if I were a Victorian lady. After a beat, he burst into laughter and told me that was the most untrue statement I've ever made.

I think it was a compliment.

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All the girls here are freezing cold

The lights moved over me but mostly, I was thankful for the darkness, the space to embrace some stillness. Next to me, T. was silent, a hand over her mouth, eyes straining to watch the French quartet, whose strings were plucked with something between precision and abandon. They were beautiful. We had just had an overdue conversation -- she's one of those friends we've dubbed "the extra Baden sister" -- that was cut short when the lights went down and the music started. I'm having trouble writing this post, and have stopped and re-started multiple times. I don't want to be dramatic. But it's hard not to be when I think about Tori Amos; my life with her. This weekend I saw both shows at The Beacon; I've lost count, but I think they were shows 41 and 42. (It's important to note my number is actually quite small in comparison to many other Tori fans; I remember talking to some people at a show during my college years who were on their 100th viewing, and that was 10 years ago.)

The thing is, Tori is a barometer for me. She is a photo album. When she sings "Beauty Queens" and leads right into "Horses," I cry, remembering being 16 and 17, sitting on the carpeted floor of my bedroom in front of my 7-disc CD changer; how I was a senior in high school, driving my first car and stalling out on a perfect Fall day, what that meant, who I thought I was. Then she pulls out a U2 cover, and then does a "God"/"Running Up That Hill" (Kate Bush) mash-up, and I think about being 15, or 22, and the same things happens -- a tide of memories.

I hope everyone has a musician, or something, they can mark their lives against the way I can with Tori.

My best girls either came to the shows with me or met up with us beforehand, or after, and it was like I felt the shift happen right under me: that, before, wasn't a memory, but this, here, now, is.

A rambling post about rain and attitude adjustments

I am suddenly fond of hoods on jackets, which is lucky, because last night it spitter-spattered harder than I anticipated on my walk home, a fine mist that steadily turned into a shower before disappearing altogether. I was just tucking my hair under my hood, marveling at how quiet the streets of SoHo were -- it felt like the neighborhood was all dressed up in holiday gear, with no place to go -- when I passed a mother and her pre-teen daughter. Arguing. "Adjust your attitude right now," the mother seethed. I couldn't help it -- I laughed. That line had been a favorite of my dad's when I was a kid.

My parents are fascinating parents. (Fascinating people, too, but that's a different story.) Without getting into too much detail, they both come from non-traditional (for the fifties and sixties) family homes -- one from a single-parent household, one from a twice-divorced household -- and now, as an adult, I glom on to those bits of their childhood, their life, whenever I can, because what they experienced is so incredibly different from the childhood they gave me. I honestly don't know if they made this decision consciously or not, but their mandate as parents has always been very clear: our children come first, and we will break the cycle; we will build a family of best friends.

It's amazing how well they succeeded. I sat at a long makeshift table last week, lined with 25-ish people, my favorites, my flesh, my heart. One of the centerpieces caught fire, and my former-fire-marshall father just laughed. And I thought about attitude adjustments, and how I felt loved and cherished and special just by simply being a part of them, and how that's the only attitude I really need.

Anyway, back to the angry mother-daughter pair in SoHo. Oh, darlings, I know your pain; I remember it well, the way I would pick and pick at my mother's scabs until she would snip at me or, worse, cry. (I am not proud.) It's funny, the way we can get so mad at the people we love most. Like loving them gives us the permission to also hate them, even for just a moment, simultaneously.

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It's the most wonderful time of the year

I am sitting here researching pie recipes for Thanksgiving. The house across the street has twinkling lights strung up over its windows. This week I'll drive out to my sister's place in PA, which feels like such a holiday thing to say, where a big group of 20+ of us will enjoy each other's company (and, hopefully, enjoy some delicious pie) and toast our gratitude and shower kisses on the babies.

I am an autumnal, wintry lady, one who feels most like herself when the leaves have turned and begun falling; when frozen sparkles have formed on car windshields and my scarves have formed a messy burst of colors on the floor of my coat closet. (Or, perhaps I just need to clean out my coat closet.) So this week and next, this line between one holiday and another, one season and another, has always felt like it was meant for me. I float through it, hug everyone a little tighter, and hurt my cheeks from smiling so much.

I have a crazy amount of things to be thankful for. That has always been the case, but it feels even more true this year. Yesterday I was speaking at a conference for students and stumbled over my words for a moment as I tried not to say "Well, I'm just a lucky person" while explaining my career path. Because, while I believe that's true, there's also work involved, and an attitude, and a required perspective. K. likes to enforce the Thanksgiving rule of everyone announcing one thing they're thankful for this year before we break bread, and if we do that this year, I will have too much to say and will have to skip my turn.

Plus, it's always hard to top my cousin J.'s answer from 2006-ish. "What am I thankful for this year?" She said. "One Tree Hill. It was a great season."

Let's see what show she invokes this year.

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Names

None of the women in my immediate family have middle names. (For context, the men do; my extended family does too, mostly.) It used to be a point of contention for me; I used to long for an extra word to call my own. One car ride nearly two decades ago, probably, I declared I'd take my twin sister's name as my middle, if she would take mine as hers. If you know K., you can probably guess that she declined the offer. (Of the two of us, she's usually the one who tried to stray from the idea of our twinship, at least moreso than me.) I dropped the idea.

When my older sister named her children, those two munchkins who light up my life in ways I couldn't have comprehended, so much so that I worry I may never love my own hypothetical future children as much as I love them, she gave them middle names. She gave them with thought, with weight; a history.

Somehow the subject of middle names came up last weekend -- a family joke-fight (you know the kind) where my mom and my aunt bet on how their mother, my grandmother, spelled her middle name. (For the record, my aunt won. Sorry mom.) But isn't that funny, that my grandmother's daughters didn't even know for sure? A call to the eldest sister in Florida, my other aunt, had to be placed. Documents were unearthed. And finally, someone just called up my mom-mom and she solved the riddle herself. (As is the family way, there's more to the story; it turns out, she gave her middle name to her eldest daughter as a middle name too, but changed the spelling, so the confusion on all sides was justified.)

The outcome is, middle names are weird, but also beautiful in a family-history-is-neat-and-important kind of way, and now I'm considering taking her middle name as mine. Morgan Mae.

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Celebrating

One Thursday night, when I was in my mid-twenties and thought nothing of dancing in hotel bars until midnight, every night, while putting in 12-hour workdays, I watched a coworker of mine order a glass of champagne during happy hour. She liked champagne, she said. She wasn’t celebrating anything in particular; it was just a Thursday. I hadn’t known you could do that.

Now I wonder why we don't all do it more often. There is something to celebrate every day -- some new stone turned, some smile won, some baby born or trip planned or book finished or even just a day when the sun rose and set like usual, but spackled unimaginable colors across a hardwood floor.

I like to make occasions out of things. I always have a bottle of champagne on hand, just in case I come home one evening, reeling from an exciting email or phone call, or even just when I just feel that kind of breezy happiness that requires acknowledgement. When new or old friends come over, I like to set out cheese plates and fancy napkins; I make new playlists. It is important to solidify moments. And it doesn't always need to be with cameras. Sometimes the documentation in our bones, our minds, is enough.

After a completely excellent day yesterday, the kind where you wander, not at all lost, and end up in perfect places at perfect times, we finished out the evening in my family's favorite restaurant, and I ordered a sweet, bubbly Moscato. It reminded me of California and France and Ecuador and New York all at once, and I got caught up in counting my luck, at how much of the world I've seen and loved and the people I know and how good they are, which never ceases to amaze me, even though I get to live it every day, and I raised my glass.

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