yes, there is a holiday card

I wasn't sure what I was going to do about the holidays... I didn't celebrate Diwali this year--it was too soon after Amma's funeral. 

But Christmas wasn't a holiday I typically celebrated with her, so I thought I'd be ok. But no, it has been brutal. After I came back from NYC, I don't really know what happened between Monday and Friday? 

And now Christmas is less than a week away. Or a few days away.

I didn't feel putting together a family holiday card this year, but last week I realized that this was the last year my mom could be on one (grandparents and sibs are usually on our holiday cards) so I had to make one. And mom loved our dress-up shenanigans, so I ordered us some tinsel wigs.

Pic: The best we could do. Max was very offended by the idea of wearing a wig. And did A (behind me) not know his face was completely obscured? We were already late for trivia night and friends were waiting, so there were no retakes.

not a sparkly post

My sweet sister has been breaking my heart on the regular. This morning, we both just sat in silence at a loss for words on how to comfort each other. 

The other day she said she was more worried for me because I'm the "sensitive one" and all of this is probably more difficult for me (she's the younger one!). 

She's making a trip to a temple this weekend because she said her wish about Amma was granted. (?????) What wish, I asked in confusion. She said: "Like a fool, I asked that Amma be released from the ICU since she hated being in there by herself... and a promise is a promise." 

I told her I'd be taking the deity to task for doing such a bad job. Yes, you were supposed to release mom from the ICU... and keep her healthy. 

This sent me on a tangent about how my mom loved (and taught me to love) the poems of the 17th century Bhakti poet Ramadas (a pen name, which translates to "Rama's devotee"). He famously embezzled money from his (Muslim Sultan) employer to refurbish a Rama temple, was caught, thrown in jail, and then wrote a lot of angry poetry to the God Rama scolding him for his inability to rescue him. 

One famous and irreverent poem called "Ishvaku kula tilaka" reminds Rama of the many pieces of jewelry Ramadas bought for him with his embezzled monies and asks Rama--"What? Did you forget? Do you think your dad bought all that for you?" lol. So rude! It's actually in a tradition called Ninda Stuti, where the devotee assumes a familiar relationship and goads the deity before seeking deliverance. But that's totally what I would be doing... 

My mom would have thought this was hilarious. We would have sung "Ishvaku Kula Tilaka" together and then followed it up with "Palluke Bangaramayena" (Can't you reply? Have your words become as precious as gold?).

Back... with some secrets

We made it back ok! We even enjoyed our surprise road trip. Things could have gone wrong, but they didn't. StephLove recently asked how Big A's health was, and I actually had to stop and think about it. While my mom was in the ICU, Big A was making trips to the E.R. as a patient with unexplained FUOs and then... we just stopped going as the fevers faded. No diagnosis or explanation, but I'm grateful things didn't go wrong-er. 

We returned to a full house. Nu was back from the week they'd spent volunteering with St. Jude's in Memphis, At had spent the weekend at home taking care of the puppy sibs, and homecoming was loud and loving. The kids brought the tree up from the basement, and we're officially in holiday mode now.

Secrets: I didn't buy a single thing in New York. (Like not a single keepsake or souvenir or even any presents for the kids.) 

Big A and I did our usual thing at the beginning of our weekend where we seriously contemplated moving to NYC after retirement and then scrapping it as we realized afresh that we'd have to give up too much to be able to live even half as well.

I think we're going to do tinsel wigs for the holiday card this year. 

And in the laziest hack ever, our tree goes into storage completely dressed, so all we do at holiday time is unzip the tree cover and plug in the light cord. 

Pics: Nu's photo of At, Max, and me with our freshly decorated  uncovered Christmas tree.

the reckoning

A lovely last day in the city where we met and fell in love two decades ago.

Es Devlin's Congregation at the Perlman Center (poetic) , the Ruth Asawa retrospective at MoMA (brilliantly wintery) and a leisurely linner at a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant where my curry had all the coconut milk I craved and my papaya salad was liberally laced with chillies. 

Presumably because of the tiny snow storm, our flight home kept getting delayed... from 7 to 9 to 10 to 11. And went through a similar number of gate changes. I guess we can't say we were taken by surprise when our flight got canceled. 

There are no other direct flights until tomorrow, and Big A has to work Monday night, so we're going to rent a car and drive through the night to make it home. 

Pic: A glimpse of Congregation.

mild disappointments

Today was series of mild disappointments, the kind that happen when you're too hyped up for something. 

The show that was critically acclaimed and came so highly recommended was... alright. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't terrific. Liberation takes place in Ohio in the 1970s around a group of feminists, and Big A who grew up in Ohio in the 1970s surrounded by his mom and other feminists found it rather underwhelming. Same (despite my differing biography). I really loved the mini series Mrs. America (Hulu, I think) and expected something with that level of punch.

The friend I was so looking forward to meeting... I couldn't wait to get away from them. I seemed to get on their nerves no matter what I said. There's a lot of love between us, but they seemed to be able to see secret agendas in a lot of what I said and did. And that was exhausting. (I didn't have any secret agendas.)

Dinner was at an upscale Thai place (Chalong), and it was good, but I love regular Thai food just fine, I guess? Big A told me that the Thai government actively promotes Thai restaurants worldwide as part of their "gastrodiplomacy" program. Wild.

Pic: Our Liberation  playbills and the beginning of a baby snow storm.

in NYC

Left home at 3:30 am this morning for a weekend trip to NYC with Big A. 

I tend to give away a lot of our extra cash to GoFundMes and buying groceries for internet strangers, and Big A who makes way more than I do lets me do what I want, so when he wants to live large once in a while, I play along. 

Here we are at Le Benardin, eating plates of perfectly arranged art, having possibly the best meal of our lives... (and definitely the most expensive). 

There was a bisque with tarragon foam that I will dream about forever. And it's time for me to wonder again why I don't use things like parsnips and tarragon more frequently in my cooking. (I only seem to use parsnips at Thanksgiving and tarragon on summer rolls.)

going strong today

I'm at best skeptical about workplace personality assessments like Myer-Briggs (unscientific!)  and prone to scoff at stuff like Enneagrams (cultish!); however, I found my CliftonStrengths assessment was eerily accurate.

I really liked the focus on strengths rather than on perceived weaknesses and found myself agreeing with an assessment for perhaps the first time. My top five strengths (at this moment anyway) were "Learner, Achiever, Belief, Input, and Positivity."  (Here's a quick reference to the 34 strengths.) 

But as we learned at my table where there was another "Learner," the way we were described in our individual reports were very different because of the other strengths our Learner selves leaned into. My individual learner strengths combined with my positivity, achiever, belief, and input made me a very strong teacher. Yay!

I spent four hours with some terrific people exploring and learning to "name, claim, and aim" my strengths. I got to take the test for free through the college, but High5 and StrengthsProfile are said to be similar. I really want everyone I know to take the test.

I'm surprised Empathy wasn't in my top five...

And why is Creativity not listed as a strength at all?

taking a message

in the swift silence of dreams 

or their silent swiftness 

I know what it takes 

take it from me, what I feel 

now is only the strange 

weight of grief

not grief itself--that may take

lifetimes, I doubt anyone

can take that from me

______

Pic: A frozen Red Cedar.

vanity x 2

The podiatrist took a ton of x-rays today and thinks that my toe is healing great; YAY! It looks wonky, messy, and swollen--but I guess it's what's on the inside that counts? (But it does mean I'm not cleared to wear cute shoes on my trip this weekend; boo.)

I'm so inspired by this medical visit that I think I might finally call my Primary Care for an appointment to try to figure out if we can do something about the daily nausea. I thought it was a side effect of grief, but it hasn't gone away. Not eating all day and then eating only in the evening (when the nausea abates) for the past three months has been hell for my metabolism and is really making me look rather... puffy. (I'm pretty sure I'm doing this for health reasons too and not just vanity.)

Pic: I loved this glimpse of a rainbow alongside a green-light (although not for me, I was waiting for my left-turn arrow). It's a sign, right?

the unopened suitcase

12/11 UPDATE:

Friends, you're all so, so kind holding me in your thoughts and figuratively holding my hand over the distance in this. I wimped out + ran out of time and the suitcase remains unopened in the garage. 

Perhaps it's something I'll do when the kids are here over the holidays? I won't be doing it alone, and they'll get to choose what they want to keep before I give things away.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

That heavy suitcase of mom's things I brought back from India remains unopened. 

In the garage. 

I'm meeting PRS at the end of the week, and I want to give her some of mom's things, so I will have to open that suitcase this week.

I've forgotten what it is that I deemed so precious that I felt I absolutely had to bring with me.

I suspect I'll open it to reveal just things (my mom was very fond of things).

It'll remind me again that my mom wasn't done with life. I've met lots of people, even people my age, who would be content to leave the world. But although mom was in her 80th year, she was so enthusiastic about everything. She wanted to travel to so many more places, kept making new friends, kept buying and wearing all the expensive stuff and looking fabulous...

When I open that suitcase it will remind me that all this is is just unworn clothes and jewelry from her closets. 

What if it's all paltry rather than precious. 

unexpected glimmers

"I can't find you... ARE YOU UPSTAIRS SLEEPING IN MY BED?" L texted halfway through the evening, making me giggle. 

Actually, I'd left her holiday party early, and Big had brought me back home because I'd started some story and was going to cry. But before that I had a really great time. 

J's very timely post on how to survive the holiday season and the one Nicole directed me to on Cup of Jo came in useful!

And look, the hyacinths I randomly stuck into various planters are beginning to show... This one by my reading chair announced itself through its fragrance and then I saw its precious pink candy stripes.

Also, Max, Maxie, Max-a-Million, my late-in-life, baby is underfoot, curious, and with me everywhere.

lines by heart

everyone comes in crying
and they slap you into it if not
everyone should fade away 
held soft in love and memories

so time comes forward

like the very next verse in a song 

a wormhole to eternity

narrating the next up tempo jump 

you're a child carried to bed:

dim room, steady hands, hushed love

safe now to dream of eternity

as we're all right here in the next room

_______________

Note: Three months today. I'm struggling a lot--with grief--but also trying to understand the finality of it all, the seemingly meaningless trick--where did they go? 

Nance described something similar reading obituaries in the wake of her father's death, "I'd read them, look at the photos, and feel a sense of real awe and loss that This Was A Person Who Was No Longer Here." 

I think I'm trying to figure it out... Like what is this cosmology and can I speak it into being? 

______________

Pic: An icy Red Cedar and lots of intrepid ducks with Big A.

stopping by the woods on a snowy... afternoon

I graded most of the day and then sat on my butt trying to motivate myself to get off it when L emailed to see if I was up for a walk.

I was.

Except I couldn't find my phone when she came to pick me up. She tried calling, but my ringer is usually off when I'm teaching, so that didn't work. We finally found it using "Find My Phone" under a pile of kitchen laundry I'd been folding and then abandoned some time this morning.

All of which to say, when we got to Baker Woods, it was the much needed rest and reset I needed.

And now back to my regularly scheduled promises to keep and all the miles to go before I sleep.

Pic: Baker Woods with L.

Intersecting at Stoppard

Tom Stoppard died this week. I've been in awe of his work since I was an undergraduate, maybe even before I actually ever read his work, simply from the sheer audacity of the premise of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The more I knew, the more there was to love. Later, he fed my theory that writers who come to a language late as foreigners (like Conrad, Rushdie, Nabokov, Brodsky, Stoppard) write so precisely, because they have some additional intuitive insight into language. Much later, I learned of his deep connections to India as it played out in Arcadia and Indian Ink.  (In the linked article here, I was charmed to see a reference to Hermione Lee a much beloved English professor and the president of my college at Oxford.)

And it turns out that theater is life. 

In a literal sense. 

In a letter to the Times of London, in response to Stoppard's obituary, Michael Baum, a Professor emeritus of surgery, wrote: "In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of adjuvant systemic chemotherapy and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia."

[As it turns out, I wrote a letter to the editor myself this week trying to reach David Shulman. I actually met David in the late 1990s at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I was with a group of people at IAS and heard someone say "Tamil Pessalama?" (Shall we speak Tamil?). I turned around expecting to see a Tamil person (the intonation and accent were so perfect), but here was this genial white guy. David is a genius (a MacArthur Genius even!) and works on poets I revere. But more recently and importantly, he's been a lifeline for me with his tireless work and compassionate voice for Palestine. I wrote a note thanking him and sent it to him at his university email address, but it was deemed undeliverable. So I then sent it to the letters editor at NYRB where he has written most recently with an earnest request to forward it... and they must have! Because this morning, I received a lovely email from David that brought tears to my eyes. (I wonder how much of my letter writing is due to reading The Correspondent!)]

Pic: Michael Baum's Letter in The Times. All the deaths since mom's seem extra poignant--Andrea Gibson, Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Alice Wong, Dharmendra, Jimmy Cliff--I'm seeing them all through her connections to them too.