Only Me To Blame ‘Cause Mama Tried!

Bobe (left), Meidele (center), Mami (right)

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone! I hope you’re having a gorgeous day, full of brunch or sleep or flowers or being left alone to curl up on the couch and read uninterrupted for a few hours (which is what I will want for Mother’s Day, if I have to have children to do it!).

Good luck to my cousin M., who is running a 5K today. All my love and respect and admiration to all you Mothers, Mummys, Moms, Mamis, Mamas, Imas, Mamans and Mothers-in-Law / Belles Meres out there!

Glorious Failure: That Wonderful Tonic Called Beer!

As I am constantly reminding everyone in general and you in particular, you poor, hectored readers, minimalism or voluntary simplicity or whatever, should not be about denial or asceticism, but rather about mindfulness and awareness, about choices. I once asked a Reform cantor what being kosher meant to her and she replied that she liked being aware of and in tune with her food; the act of checking a label or asking about the provenance of something kept her from taking her sustenance and, by extension, her body, for granted. I thought this was a good answer (even though I don’t think being kosher is a good idea… think of the lobster!).

Michael and I are in the middle of another Spendless Month. This month we are doing rather well, but how to handle our few failures? I admit, I become fanatical and shrewish about Spendless and nowhere more so than with regards to MyLove’s spending. I do not love coffee, so there is absolutely no reason why he should not stop drinking it. Ditto for beer. So easy to sacrifice other people’s vices and pleasures, no? Michael had a beer on Day 5, which was the subject of much discussion, but which led to my understanding that not every beer is created equal. You see, there are times when MyLove drinks beer because it’s there or it’s hot or why-not-seeing-as-he-loves-the-taste-and-does-not-like-soda. But there are other times, when the beer is absolutely necessary to the enjoyment of the moment. In this case, we were sitting with a friend outside the Dandelion Pub, on a beautiful spring evening, on our way to a concert. To have gone without would have been misery; his emotional and physical and circumstantial states cried out for a pint. Earlier that day, we had been to the Phillies game and both of us had heroically resisted beer and french fries. Would we have enjoyed beer and french fries? Sure. Was our enjoyment of the day diminished without them? Not really, no. Those beers were easily sacrificed and it was good that they were.

I know for some it may seem like a small and petty way to live, counting the dollars and measuring out the beer, but I disagree. We do not have enough money to do or have everything, but I do believe that we may have enough money to do and have everything we want. Michael MyLove says that the beer was delicious!

Have A Better Time Than Most Can Dream… You’re Better Than The Best…

I don’t have any portraits of Jonathan, which is sad for me (but much sadder for him, because it means that I will not stop hovering over him with a camera until I have the perfect shot. Sorry, Jonny!). This one of the three of them will have to do and for those of you who don’t know him, he’s the handsome one in the red shirt… I’m just kidding… he’s the handsome one on the right.

It was Jonathan’s birthday on Monday, May 6th and he turned 27. I missed the blog post, but I had dinner with him, with is much to be preferred. Jonathan is the smart one of the four (although this may be because he’s the only one of the four who ever stops talking and listens); the one who fixed a television with a matchbook as a child (true story, y’all!), the one who gives the best advice, the one who is most able to view all sides of a question and judge dispassionately, the one who thinks before he speaks, the one who’s good at everything he does, from cracking a complicated chord on guitar to figuring out how to splice four different electronic devices together so I can watch a movie on my birthday. In spite of all this, he’s also the most modest. Jonathan is the consiglieri, everyone’s Tom Hagen. And he has the best hair in the family, up against some pretty stiff competition (my parents have some pretty incredible follicular genes). Happy Birthday, my gorgeous brother, Jonathan!

I Want You Not To Go… It Was Good As Good Gold…

*I wrote this yesterday, but didn’t have time to review it. Before I re-read it I received news that my friend’s father passed away yesterday afternoon, peacefully and at home. I am so sad, that sadness that makes it hard to move. I logged in to distract myself and almost deleted this post because it’s frivolity does not reflect my current state of mind. But I’m keeping it; these small joys and reasons for gratitude stand. Tonight Michael and I will have dinner with Alex and Jonathan, which is absolutely the best thing for me. I am grateful for all of you, for every minute. Have a good night and take of yourselves, for my sake, my beautiful friends.

Sometimes you are happy for respectably disinterested reasons – the success of a loved one, say –  and sometimes you are happy because you bought something pretty. I would, ordinarily, encourage the former rather than the latter, but sometimes… Oooooh, Shiny! I’ll start with the more respectable joys.

1) My adored friend, D.C. has (and not for lack of goading and cajoling and pleading over the years on my part) put together an album of his music and it is, in all truth, wonderful and excellent. You are all part of the whisper campaign that will rocket this album to the top of the charts. Once it’s available, I’ll direct you to it. I’m just so proud of him; it’s no small feat in terms of focus and concentration, both of which are so much harder to sustain than skill or talent (although he’s got those too, and in spades, the bastard).

2) Michael does not, I repeat, does NOT have West Nile Virus. This is not as crazy as it sounds; he was in Austin recently, there were mosquitoes and when he got home, he had flu-like symptoms… far more phlegmatic characters than MyLove have freaked out on less evidence than that (there’s a joke in there somewhere, along the lines of “And believe you me, he was plenty plegmy!” Yuk, yuk, yuk…). Here’s to his recovery and death to mosquitoes!

3) I finally had my beautiful pearl earrings repaired… oh my darlings, I have missed you! My pearls make me feel all the best parts of young and wise at the same time.

4) I finally bought these long longed-for gorgeous glass straws. We’ve been having smoothies every morning and I am tired of the ice cubes clinking against my teeth. I now carry one in my purse and proudly wield it at restaurants and drive all the waiters crazy by ordering, “Water, no straw. I have my own… Aha!”. I wouldn’t have liked me at all if I had waited on me, so I’m not remotely put out when they forget. All part of the re-education.

5) Yesterday, Alex was offered a job, and a proper one at that. Those of you who remember job-hunting (and I hope you don’t; block it out, don’t look back!) know what a dreadful occupation it is. He starts at the end of the month and I am thrilled. Mazel Tov, Baby!

Addendum: 6) I spent yesterday with my mother and we had Shabbat and dinner with my Tia and my cousin and her husband and most beautiful genius children. I looked at pictures of them this morning to cheer myself and, wouldn’t you believe it, it worked!

I hope you all had a lovely week and a lovelier weekend!

In Fact My Heart Would Break Should You Not Take Me To The Fair!

 

On Saturday the weather was perfect and a friend invited us out to the Passyunk Food Festival. We gorged ourselves quite silly on Avocado Crabmeat Vichysoisse and Nerds Candy Mini-Cupcakes and then walked it off on our way to the PIFA Street Fair on Broad Street, which was really an excuse to combine dinosaurs, pirates, steam-punk stilt villains, glittery insects and ferris wheels, because, you know, why not? It’s confusing enough without explanations and it looked like this:

Combine all those things and you have the makings of a perfect day. Hope you had a good weekend, too!

May 2013 Book Giveaway

Happy May Day, my friends! Same as always; leave your pick in the comments, so that everyone can see it’s spoken for. I’ll mail them out by next Wednesday unless I see you in person.

Scarlet Feather and Tara Road by Maeve Binchy : Pure comfort food, like deep-fried, ham-and-cheese soup, as Lorelai would say. I’ve read so many of Binchy’s books and sometime they don’t hold up; they feel tossed off or formulaic. Circle Of Friends is by far the best and I have re-read it several times, but these two are the ones after that I like best. Big cast of characters, lots of action, Ireland, sweet rather than vulgar and a happy ending with some tear-jerking along the way. Good beach books.

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1990): This was straightforwardly satisfying; two American professors of English Literature, who know each other slightly, in London on sabbatical. One is middle-aged, spinsterish, frankly Anglophilic, the other is young, handsome and broken-hearted.  I’m totally the target audience and I don’t mid telling you that I related far more to the middle-aged professor than to the young one!

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954): But then, I should have loved this and instead I was bored and then irritated and gave up after 60 pages. I’ve been wanting to read this for years; it’s often hailed as the funniest novel in the English language. Everyone else in the book club seemed to like it, so I’m in the minority here. Perfect for academics (the eponymous hero is trying to get tenure and everyone in his sphere is mercilessly skewered and mocked).

The Use And Abuse Of Literature by Marjorie Garber (2012): Another book which looked perfect for me, but which I couldn’t get into and I gave up halfway. Possibly it was too academic for me? Who knows… It’s a discussion about what literature means and why it matters in a time and place where people are reading less and less.

Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen (1931): Oh, I loooved this book! I absolutely want to read it again, but it’s readily available and I really should be reading new stuff rather than re-reading, so I’ll pick it up again in the future. In the meantime, you should totally take it. It’s a history of the ’20′s, written almost as soon as they ended and the writer is subtle and charming and dry, his reporting is nuanced and immediate and every chapter touches on a different and fascinating aspect of the decade. It was very successful at the time and he did another one on the ’30′s which I want to read next, if I can find it used (once Spendless Month is over, of course!).

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818): Sometime remind me to tell you the story of the first time I read this when I was about nine. I was completely terrified and traumatized and have never read it since. We’re about to read it in my book club, so hopefully that will exorcise my fears rather than re-awaken them. You all know what it’s about, but maybe you don’t know how good it is. Find out!

Winter by Adam Gopnik (2011): I do love me some Gopnik. I have his two essay collections by the bed and I dip into them all the time. This one is based on a series of lectures he gave on Winter. I really can’t describe it better than the Powell’s description; I just read it and it says exactly what I wanted to say. This may be especially satisfying to read in the warmth of summer

Home Town by Tracy Kidder (2000): Kidder, whose Mountains Beyond Mountains I loved, writes this portrait of a small town in Massachusetts by finding a few interesting people and following them around for a year or so. I personally love this style of book; the most ordinary lives well told are absolutely fascinating to me and the quotidian events can be just as interesting as the outlandish ones. This one reads like a novel, whose main character is Tommy O’Connor, an Irish-American police officer born and raised in the town and questioning whether he should stay or leave. The book reads like a novel and is peppered with tidbits and insights: one particular favorite was “If you do all your growing up in the same small place, you don’t shed identities. You accumulate them.”

Resolution Round-Up April 2013

Cannot even handle the fact that it is the last day of April; I accomplished nothing and have been caught completely unawares by this Resolution Round-Up! Gah! Oh well, on to the humiliation, y’all!

1) Blogging: Was absolutely dismal this month, in terms of output. But I have a good feeling about May… starting… Now!

2) Reading: I got bogged down for much of the month in a collection of 50 essays, each by a different author about a different state (beautiful book, great gift). It was a mixed bag, but I discovered several new (to me) writers and states. But without a narrative to propel one forward, essay collections take a lot of time to get through. Maybe they’re better read in conjunction with other books.

3) Going vegetarian: This continues to be easy, which is still incredible. I am surprised to note that my occasional cravings for meat are almost exclusively for burgers, rather than other foods I love even more. Must be a need for iron or protein, so I’m trying to pay attention to and coddle those cravings.

4) Observing a tech-free Sabbath: This one fell by the wayside. My schedule is about to change, so I’m going to retool the Sabbath. This month will be quite experimental until we hit upon a formula that works. I still absolutely recommend this, if for no other reason than that it gives your favorite e-mailers and bloggers a chance to write something new. Today’s watched pot is a frequently refreshed blog or site; the more often you check it, the less new content is posted!

5) De-cluttering projects: Everything is pushed back; I want May to see the successful completion of Operation Wedding Dress Alteration and Operation Stamp Album.

6) Remembering birthdays: April is quiet. I only had one… and I was a day late! But my friend, S., is as notorious as I in this regard, so no fish, no foul.

7) Keeping in touch with friends: This was good month, primarily with Philadelphia friends, and I set up several visits for May, so all in all, I’m happy about this. Seeing you, my darlings, has been my greatest accomplishment this month and I am perfectly happy to have it so!

8) Doing push-ups: Ugh, those wretched push-ups! We’re not on speaking terms at present.

Tomorrow is both Book Giveaway and the start of a new Spendless Month.  This is a good time to troll; I do well on the Spendless if I feel you judging me (I know you don’t, you lovely people, but you can just pretend to in the Comments)! It’s also going to be 70 degrees and sunny. All in all, it bids fair to be a lovely day! Good night, my delightful friends!

Ask Me… I Won’t Say No… How Could I?

“Much is lost through the want of asking,” as the man said, so last week I asked. I got advice from trusted managers at work, found a proposal template online (comfortable in the knowledge that my boss would not read it; he never does!) and, after two days of scoping out his office for an opportune moment, bounced in there, made my case and bounced out, triumphant. Starting next week, I am working Monday through Thursday and I am off on Fridays. This is all I need, apart from your continued health and happiness, to make my life perfect. Because of various irons in various fires, I will not be any less busy than I am now, but I will have more time for the more important irons.

I will keep my health insurance, my paid time off and all my other benefits and perhaps I can make up the lower pay by organizing myself better. Some of the veteran readers can guess what happens next… That’s right, y’all, a Spendless Month starts on Tuesday, so get ready! I asked MyLove if he was okay with going No-Spend in May and he hesitated and said, “Well, not really. I had plans to hit that foreign language bookstore in Harvard Square.” So, here and now, I’m declaring that Michael gets a free pass in Schoenhof’s Foreign Books in Cambridge.

This change is a major triumph for me and it is possibly a permanent change; no matter how much I may like my job (and I do), there is so much else that I like much more. Travel will be easier because vacation days will go further. Ditto for spending time with friends and family. Errands can be done on Friday, leaving my weekends intact. If we have children, it goes without saying that less work is better than more.

I’m sure I bore you stiff with my constant harping on my desire to work less and just, as Zhivago says, live. But I can’t help it. Now that I’ve realized it’s possible, I can’t justify anything else. The same goes for living in major cities. Growing up, I would never have thought that I could live anywhere but London, Paris, New York, Gotham, Metropolis, etc.; I am an urban girl in taste and temperament. But then I lived in New Orleans and learned, among so many other lessons, that I can have a top-shelf life in a beautiful, interesting dive for the same price as a well-liquor life in a fashionable, over-priced club. Tastes and temperaments, to my surprise, can change. Am I still an urban girl? I’m an adaptable girl and my goal is to be a happy one. This wouldn’t work for everyone, but I think it will for me.

Anyway, next week is the first step to living in my ideal world, my utopia, where this will play in the background (and if you want the guitar break down, which you do because it’s Johnny Marr, go here; each of the three lines is stand-alone gorgeous). See you soon, my lovely friends!

I Remember My Heroes That Way… Life Still Applies…

There was a year, soon after we had moved here, that I went to shul every Friday night. I am a sociable person who likes quiet and I am a thoughtless person who is most often inspired to thought by other people. I love privacy in crowds; eating alone in beautiful restaurants; falling asleep while your roommate or lover reads; studying for finals in libraries with friends, not speaking, but able to look up and see them right there. I love people but I don’t necessarily want to be talking to them all the time. So I was happy at Friday night service, the hour of singing, thinking to myself undisturbed, surrounded by singing people, thinking to themselves undisturbed. The hebrew psalms act like prayer beads, providing structure while leaving my thoughts free.

My favorite part of Friday night service is the Mourner’s Kaddish, which is recited three times throughout the service by anyone who is in mourning (the other congregants remain seated and chime in with an occasional Amen or B’rikh Hu / Blessed be). Every week I went and, when other people stood up and recited the Kaddish, I remained seated because I was not in mourning. And every week I was filled with gratitude, sometimes to the point of tears, that I was not in mourning, that I had been so lucky to have had yet another week and another and another week with all my loved ones, not only alive, but even relatively happy and healthy. I eventually stopped going, but I miss that weekly exulting over you, my beloveds, the reveling in your existence, the gloating over your lives, like a miser counting jewels in a casket or a parent hovering over a recently ill and recovering child. With all my limitations, I have enough intelligence to be grateful.

A dear friend just let me know that her father is very ill and does not have much longer to live. He is a good, good man, by any standard, loving and kind and unafraid to show it, and he is an exceptionally good father to daughters; my friend used to worry about finding a husband because, based on her father, her standards were so high. There are no words, just fragments based on feelings I felt when my Zeide died and that are too painful to spend even the time it takes to type this in; the ache that her children won’t remember her father, the panic that she may have to find words to describe him to someone who never met him, the anguish of facing years and years of wanting to talk to him and not being able to talk to him…

We were never safe, we were never promised the next minute after this and we got it anyway. Every time I pass my synagogue on the corner or step out into a sunny day or see your name in my phone or have something good happen to me or have something bad happen to me, I am grateful for you. It will never be enough and I want so much more, but it is so much more than I had any right to expect. Take care of yourselves and each other, my friends. And, if the gods are willing, I’ll talk to you soon.

The Skies Above Are Clear Again…

Pictures, my friends. You’ll have to imagine the chill of before and the balminess of after yourselves.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

The sun is shining… Come on, get happy! MyLove is back and la vie est bonne, to paraphrase Robert de Saint-Loup. Off to BYWYR! I’ll talk to you soon, my glorious friends.