mother's day

A Mother's Day card came in the mail today from my son. I spoke with him on Sunday, but this was unexpected.

I studied the envelope for a few minutes before opening it; that distinctive handwriting ... my left-handed art-boy. I don't think i have gotten anything in the mail from him since he was in college, and he'll be 37 in July.

He did send me a Mother's Day card when he was in college, at Oberlin. I opened it, and there was a
handmade card saying Happy Mother's Day, and a photograph stuck inside showing a curly-haired person with lipstick on, a ruffled frock, and a lovely string of pearls. Oberlin has a campus-wide, everybody-in-the-pool Drag Day every year, and this was his memento to me. I thought it was very funny and endearing, and showed it to people I worked with. I had left NYC after Benjamin graduated from high school, and was back in Massachusetts, in a decidedly more suburban environment. The other women -- I was temping at a proofreading agency -- looked at me like I had...well, a disease.

His handwriting is mostly all caps, as befits an architect, I guess-- but there's that tell-tale wayward swoop on the 'Y' that gives his left-handedness away.

When I was around 5 or 6 I desperately wanted to be left handed, and practiced eating with my fork in my left hand at the dining table, which drove my mother batshit. She was of the opinion that there was something 'wrong' with left-handed people. In the household I grew up in, there was her way, the correct way, and the other way, the wrong way... for most everything. Too bad she was no longer around to see her grandson in drag.

This year, as he noted in the card,
he sent me love, and zebras for the garden--
wonderful seeds from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
What a good son. And how
lucky I am to have somehow,
somewhere learned to show him
my love when he was growing up.


 

change

I consider myself fortunate in that I am not afraid of change. I am terrified, traumatized by loss, but in most other areas of flux and revolution--not in-the-streets revolution, but the unstoppable progression-around-the-sun revolution--well, I am pretty good with it. I am a risk taker; a pull yourself up by the boot straps New Englander. I do not ease into the icy Maine ocean waters toe by toe. I run from 20 yards away and dive in head-first. This trait gets me into a lot of trouble but also has enriched my life beyond measure; the trouble is a pittance next to the pile of treasure.

I am musing about the slow entry into what I guess will be thought of as retirement. I will continue to take all jobs that I am offered if the request comes from people I respect or the work interests me, but I am turning down jobs for people who make unreasonable demands or if the work itself is more of a burden than a challenge. I see the approach to retirement as tremendously exciting, not because I do not like to work. I am possibly incapable of not working. But, because for the first time since I was about 13 years old, I do not have to do something other than what I want to do in order to please the person/company/institution who is paying for my service. Henceforth, anything I produce as a result of work--my energy, my time, my creative thinking--will only be subject to my own standards. Do you have any idea how amazing this is?

I am moving away from computer time to outdoor time; kitchen time; exploring time; sewing time; cleaning out; play time; reading time, listening to music time, game time (James and I play old-fashioned sit-down at the dining room table games; cribbage; Risk; our new fave: Bananagrams).

Here are some things that light up my world right now:

Tomato seedlings started from seeds my friend Cynthia gave me. Slow going with these delicate creatures, but today I see the second layer of leaves! ("The best time to transplant seedlings is when they begin to develop true leaves. The first set of true leaves are usually the second set that a seedling will produce. The first set are cotyledon leaves and won't support the plant.")

My beautiful new hiking shoes, getting broken in for the big coastal walk in Wales, coming up in June.

Possibly a million sunflower seeds that I toasted this morning. I am making a delicious-sounding salad with barley, asparagus, leeks, scallions, raisins, parsley, and pesto for the wedding celebration to honor the marriage of my dear friend Tori and her husband Will. Will is allergic to nuts, so I am substituting sunflower seeds in the pesto.

This is Tori and Will, last Thursday afternoon, after they got married at Town Hall. James and I were their witnesses. So happy. May they always be this happy!

And this is my beautiful altar piece, on the old mantle in the living room, just behind me as I work. A  rack of moose antlers James found in the woods; shells and rocks that I have kept over the years; a dear Buddha-like porcelain piece that Melissa Shook made and gave to me. 

New issue of Run, Nellie--and a CONTEST!

Busy as a bee these days, and little time for blogging -- although I do make a point of checking in and staying in touch with my favorite bloggers. I can't complain about the busy-ness; although I will -- I'd still prefer to be spending a lot less time in front of the computer. But, these days, I am at least being fairly productive. I've had a prolonged spurt in freelance work that has been welcome, actually, because I want to take some time off this summer. And, dear Nellie keeps me on my toes. We just posted the most recent issue, which as usual sent me into a minor tailspin when I encountered a technological problem, but I've gotten better at riding these panics out, and only had to call my son once. Hey, baby steps -- but I'll take it. And, he's been incredibly patient with me.

I love working with the authors and get so excited when I send out a feeler to see if a specific writer will do an interview with me. It was especially fun for me in this issue, to interview Tony Mendoza. He's a lovely, generous man, and we spent several leisurely e-mails indulging in that wonderful brand of remember-when-we-were-young-and-confused-in-the-'70s and '80s-in-NYC nostalgia. His book is Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir.

Melissa interviewed Oksana Marafioti, author of American Gypsy: A Memoir. (She's pictured below, as a child.) I have not read the book yet, but the interview sent me straight to Amazon to place my order.

James Wright is our guest essayist this month, in the Writing a Memoir section, with his thoughts about a memoir that perhaps should not have been written, that of Robert Jay Lifton. We have two new self-portrait artists in our gallery, and some contributors of short-memoir pieces in The Roundhouse, responding to the topic fog.

Finally: thinking caps tied tightly beneath the chin, everyone: we are running a contest, as suggested by my clever fellow blogger, Charlotte Hildebrand. (If you have not visited her at The Rat's Nest, do drop by: http://charlottehildebrand.blogspot.com/2013/04/faded-pictures.html).
Here it is -- as posted on Facebook this morning...so do not dilly-dally; don't let one of those FB slackers win!

Run, Nellie Contest:
To win a free copy of Tony Mendoza's book, Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir,
please submit a short-form memoir 250 words or fewer on the topic of PETS. 
(if you think a link to a poignant/hilarious cat video will help your submission, please reconsider). address: editors@run-to-the-roundhouse-nellie.
Deadline: May 10. The winning entry will be published mid-May, in the next issue. http://run-to-the-roundhouse-nellie.com/2013/04/12/ernie-a-photographers-memoir

new cousins

I grew up in a tiny family.
My mother had one sister, Helen.
My father was an only child.
The man my aunt married, Cal, was an only child.
Aunt Helen and Uncle Cal had two children, Nancy and Jimmy; my mother had me and Mark.
That's it.
To make the whole situation even more insular, I had very little contact with anyone in my father's family. My understanding was that this was my mother's doing. I remember a few occasions when I saw my father's mother; and exactly two occasions when I saw my grandfather, my father's father.
My father's parents were divorced when he was 13 years old.
I remembered a few names of my father's extended family members, and one woman in particular among them -- an aunt? a great-aunt? -- who sent me a crisp two-dollar bill every Christmas.
I loved the two-dollar bill.

Last week, I googled one of the names I remembered from the Landry family, in Worcester, Massachusetts. I found the recent death notice of a man that I calculated was my father's first cousin: two daughters of that man were mentioned. I googled them, and I now have two cousins (second cousins) who are very close in age to me. We spoke on the phone--a conference call--on Monday.
We are to speak again next Monday.

Here is a photograph of my father's father, my grandfather, who I remember seeing once, at my father's funeral, which stunned me. I remember that my legs felt as insubstantial as water because this man looked so much like my father. And, I saw him one more time, a few years later, at a family gathering my mother orchestrated, after I got married. I had the same almost fainting reaction. I don't know why my mother invited him; I suspected at the time it was to somehow shame him into giving me money. I don't know/don't remember if that "worked."

I used to be a little girl who went to church

"I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

In this snapshot, blurry and worn, you see the man, who did, in fact, grasp me by the shoulder while there was still time. 
When he died, I was seventeen and very angry and spoke to God as I entered the small and rather beautiful Episcopalian  church for the memorial service that I remember nothing of: I will never set foot in your House again.

I have not kept this vow; there have been other funerals and memorial services and even a wedding or two, the baptism of my godson, and  other rituals that I have attended as a social gesture. 
But I have no affiliation with any god. I will spend today raking my yard, tending the tiny shoots that are pushing their way at last through the thawed crust of winter. This is the rebirth, the only one I know.

bus ride

When I was a kid, the bus station in Boston was such a seedy place. They finally tore the old brick building down, and built a fancy, easy-to-hose-down warehouse-like terminal for bus travel, and stuck it behind the train tracks at South Station. The waiting room for the buses used to be adjacent to a bar, the door flopped in and out, back and forth between the two rooms, releasing competing smells of piss and beer, sooty cigarette smoke, and shadows of people who, let's face it, were going nowhere – not even on a bus. It was no place for a young teenaged girl, but that's where the bus dropped me and my friends off when we went into Boston on a Saturday, and where we had to go to catch the return trip. I found it fascinating, and once had a forbidden boyfriend that I would meet there, to sit across a peeling formica table from, drink coffee with, and be serene in the knowledge that no one I knew would ever see me.

The photo above, taken with my iPad this morning, is of the bus station, in Portland, Maine. I am sure most people consider this a vast improvement from the old one in Park Square, in Boston. But not me; in fact, I actively dislike its hygienic seating; its shiny vending machines that may not sell Lucky Strikes and Camels but packaged foodstuffs that are surely not much better for you. I hate that the wooden benches that I remember from the bus station and from the pre-renovated Penn Station in New York are long gone, replaced by seating arrangements that guarantee – are expressly designed to make such a thing impossible – that no man or woman can stretch out his or her legs, catch a little nap. God forbid: a homeless person might want to rest somewhere minimally safe, marginally comfortable. Can't have that.

I went to Boston today to meet a younger friend for lunch. She's pregnant with her first child, and was just in town for a few days. It was lovely to see her, and it is not so horrible to take the bus down even for such a short visit and I am glad that I did it. But I am sort of grumpy about changes I see whenever I go to Boston, and I am like lots of older folks, begrudging of the new buildings, the demolition of so many places that marked passages in my life.

I am begrudging mightily of the procession of time itself.

deep thoughts

i dont have any deep thoughts.

just a lovely birthday with my family, doing exactly what i wanted.  lunch at a small cafe on a salt-water farm on a narrow peninsula; a long walk through the woods that opens into a beautiful little cove; home for a few rounds of Bananagrams; dinner (i cooked: bacalao; asparagus; salad; coffee ice cream with home-made hot fudge sauce); and one of my favorite good-for-giggling films: Best in Show.

benjamin and alexis left very early this morning to try and get out ahead of the storm; they were back in NYC safe and sound by 1:30 pm. 

james stayed home today, because of the snow. 

what could be nicer?