Sorry Grateful

Many of the high school students I accompanied had a real fetish for the music of Stephen Sondheim.  Knowing he wasn't one of my favorite composers, they would sheepishly hand over their music notebooks open to a tattered Sondheim piece.  Several of the boys latched onto "Sorry Grateful," a song with a melodic line and rhythmic feeling which are just as odd as it's title.  Even though I heard the song dozens of times, I always cringed at the juxtaposition of these two words.  "Sorry" and "grateful" never seemed to work together in my mind. Today, though, I feel as if they finally make sense to me, this odd combination of emotions piggy-backed on top of each other.   Perhaps I'm feeling sorry enough for myself this Thanksgiving Eve that I can tap into the memory of adolescent angst which serves as a magnet for introspective songs like these.

You're always sorry You're always grateful You're always wondering what might have been...

You're sorry-grateful Regretful-happy Why look for answers Where none occur?

You always are What you always were...

Confession time.  I'm one of those people for whom holidays are simply - alright, I'm going to say it - agonizing.  I fall into a huge, funkous depression every year around this time, and it lasts clear through until January 2, when I heave a big sigh of relief, pick myself up, dust myself off, and start living again. 

This may have its roots in the horrendous holiday celebrations I was forced to endure when my in-laws were still around.  My father in law, an evangelical charter member of the John Birch Society, usually launched into his "Armageddon" speech right about the time we passed the first platter of turkey.  My mother in law would do her best to quiet him, which usually involved her own brand of excoriating criticisms and declamations.  My husband would continue eating through gritted teeth, until, grim faced, he would push angrily back from the table.  "Enough!" he would  shout.  "I can't take this anymore."

Ah, yes.  Sorry grateful.

My anathema toward the holidays could also stem from a regrettable pattern of childhood illness which always found me laid low at Christmas time with bronchitis or asthma.  Whether it was the cold weather, the forced air heat in the furnace, or (as my mother insisted) too much excitement, I was inevitably too sick to attend the annual Christmas party with all my paternal aunts, uncles, and cousins.  Unbeknownst to my mother (whom I'm sure thought I was just as glad as she was to be spared this hoopla) I was heartsick every year when I had to stay home in bed while my dad went off alone to the party.  I didn't care so much about the sackful of presents he brought back for me...I wanted to be right smack in the middle of all those noisy kids and laughing adults.  Instead, I was tucked safely into my bed at home, slathered with Vicks while the vaporizer chugged and hissed, filling the room with hot, moist steam.

Ah yes.  Sorry grateful.

Where's the grateful part? you ask.  Well, I'm aware I have a good life - always have.  I'm grateful for my health, my relative wealth, my home(s), and most of all, the people who love me.  But every holiday season, I go looking for something that just isn't there.  A sense of well being or belonging, a feeling of excitement or anticipation - all the things that the world prods us to hope for during this season.  I keep hoping it'll turn up, but it never seems to be there.  This year, with my family more fragmented by distance than ever, that elusive spark of holiday happiness seems completely out of reach.  More and more, I feel myself turning inward, longing for a closet to crawl into for the next six weeks, so I can come out into the clean light of a new year with all that holiday nonsense cleaned up and tossed in the dust bin where it belongs.

Sorry grateful. 

All of life is an alternating pattern of sorry grateful, everyone knows that, and Stephen Sondheim was only one of many composers who capitalized on this dichotomy.  I really want to be happy during the holiday season, I'm really sorry that somehow I just never can be.

And I'm truly grateful when it's over.

Grateful

A short post today, to accomodate all the holiday busyness... During these days to focus on thankfulness, I'm certainly grateful for the wonderful community of writers and friends who have gathered at this writer's roundtable for the past few months. 

If you have a moment to write during these next days, you might share your thoughts on the people who have inspired you in your writing journey.  For some, it might be teachers or friends, for others, lovers or children.  Perhaps it's an author whose work you admire, and whose words set your fingers itching to pick up a pencil.

Enjoy the feast 'round your dining room tables tomorrow. 

We'll reconvene here soon.

Realizing Life

So it's snowy, blowy, and cold here in Michigan on this Monday afternoon.  I'm home now, so I don't altogether mind this weather, and in fact am rather comforted by the ability to stay indoors with my dogs and potter around the house for a change.  Of course there were places to go this morning - a quick trip to Joe's Market to get some pears for my salad lunch tomorrow, a stopover at the Classical Bell rehearsal to fill in for a friend during their last hour.   But then, I was home, not gone long enough even for Magic and Molly to miss me, for they were still curled up in their sleeping chair by the window when I came into the house. I really enjoy the particular way snow illuminates a room - it casts such a sparkling, clean glow on everything, especially when it's first falling.  For some reason it makes me sentimental, and today I'm recalling other snowy days in my life, when there was a small boy in the house to entertain and nothing but time with which to do it.  I'm sure it seemed as if I had pressing concerns in those days, but now looking back, there was really nothing more important (or there shouldn't have been!) then reading the pile of picture books we kept on the coffee table or helping him arrange his fleet of Matchbox cars around the perimeter of the bed.  There were no reports to write for work, no music to learn, no one who needed transportation to a store or a doctor's office. 

Life was simple then, and I just didn't know it.

Friday night I attended a high school production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder's classic play about life in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire at the turn of the century.  The play was unusually well done by high school standards, and I felt that most of the main characters really "got" the message Wilder was trying to convey about the precious nature of everyday life. 

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" Emily Gibbs plaintively asks from the grave.

Probably not.  Certainly most days I am mostly irritated by life...by the constant running to and fro, the endless worries about health and money and the state of the world, the forever nagging feeling that I should be doing something other than what I'm doing, should be more productive, more effective, more proactive.

So this afternoon, instead of persisting in a mad dash through Monday, I consciously slowed my pace to match the gently falling flakes of snow, settled into my chair with a blanket and hot tea, spent several minutes scratching Magic in that favorite spot behind his ears, gave Molly equal time by rubbing the nape of her neck, and then read two chapters in a new book one of my friends loaned me yesterday. 

Nothing exciting here on a snowy, blowy Monday. 

 Just me, trying to "realize life."

I hope you're realizing yours today, too.

Time Tested

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.~Susan Sontag

My mother's friend Marie loved antiques - her house was a veritable museum of quilts from the Amish, and glassware from the Depression.  Even her dining room furniture was antique, an old pine table and chairs which, for all its loving refurbishment, still bore the nicks and scars of its ancient and former life.

My mother occasionally went "antiquing" with Marie, the pair of them driving off in Marie's little red Mustang convertible, brightly colored babushka's tied round their freshly done beauty parlor beehives, traveling out into the country to look for estate sales and resale shops.

My grandmother, left behind to babysit for me, would complain vociferously about my mother's forays into the world of antique shopping. 

"I swear," she would grumble, plopping my lunch plate onto the red Formica table in our kitchen, " I don't know why anyone would want that old stuff.  I had enough of old stuff like that when I was growin' up...why I surely don't have any use for it now."

I sat quietly munching my toasted cheese sandwich, not daring to mention that I rather liked "that old stuff." It sent little shivers down my spine to caress the soft patina of Marie's dining room table, knowing that some other child perhaps a hundred years before had touched that very same spot. 

My mother never purchased much on those jaunts.  Occasionally, she'd come back with a piece of glassware - a china pitcher or a teapot.  Once, she brought home an (almost) complete tea service that was said to have belonged to Henry Ford (the first).  I remember fondling those paper thin china cups, imagining Mr. Ford coming home after a day of supervising cars being built, and settling down in his parlor to be served hot tea in this very cup.

I have that tea set now, nestled into a corner of my china cabinet.  The sugar bowl (which was missing its lid when my mother purchased it) is in daily use and sits on my kitchen counter.  There are a handful of "antiques" in my house, and I can tell you the story of each one.  The Nippon china tea set that was a wedding gift to my mother in law from the doctor whose children she babysat.  The pink cookie plate that belonged to my paternal grandmother, a woman I never even met,  but whom everyone tells me I strongly resemble.  The ruby ring which belonged to my Aunt Sally with the date of purchase (1892) engraved inside the band. 

It's the back stories that make these possessions more than just "some old stuff," and give them an essential value and importance, that make them unique to our own personal landscape. 

Although I don't actively seek out antique objects for my home, I rather cherish these few that have fallen into my possession.  They've stood the test of time, and connect me with a small portion of the past. 

I like that.

inspired by Cafe Writing

Small World

When the Imagineers at Disneyland created that Small World ride, I don't imagine they had any concept of just how small the world would one day become. You all know what I'm talking about...email, cell phones, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Skype - who could have forseen the multiplicity of ways in which our world would become so embraceable.  Certainly I'm grateful for this miraculous explosion of communication.  It allows me to monitor (forgive me, Brian!) the activity of my only child, who, as we speak, has taken up residence in a country over 10,000 miles away.  So while Brian is on the other side of the world (quite literally) with the right click of a mouse button I can see that he's "online and available to chat," or that, four minutes ago according to Twitter, he was "up early and ready to get to work for the day."

If you're a parent, you know the value of those small touchstones when you're dealing with the well being of your children.  How we must have worried and obsessed in those days before this plethora of instant communication!  But now this ability to keep tabs on everyone we care about has reached epidemic proportions.  Look at the recent explosion in popularity of Facebook.  We can be cyber "friends" with everyone from our old elementary school classmates to our attorneys and financial planners.  It's fun to check  everyone's status during the day, even if it's only to see what Carol is making for dinner, or whether Leigh's baby finally slept through the night.

But it's especially satisfying when it gives you the ability to find out what your kid is up to at any given moment, especially when they're a world away.

So here in the 21st century, the world is definitely smaller, and I believe that's a good thing.  And don't you think that this ability to connect with other human beings makes us more appreciative of each other?  Certainly this renewed interest in the minituae of other's life has to mean more than just purient entertainment.  It has to mean we recognize the value of connecting with one another on ground level, that place where humanity converges irrespective of race, creed, or politics.  That place where the most important things are the love of family and the satisfaction of a life well lived.  Where all that matters is knowing your husband still loves you and your kid is safe.  That place where the world becomes small enough to fit into a terrabyte or on the head of pin.

It is definitely a small world after all.