Boston, You're My Home

I tend to wake up early; sometimes at 3, sometimes at 4.

Always while it's still dark.

This morning I was sitting at my computer, drinking a cup of coffee.  My computer sits in a small room off of my living room. It has 7 windows, 3 of which face east. I opened the curtains to watch the sun rise.

My 7 year old came downstairs. I pulled him onto my lap.

"Look at the sunrise," I told him. "Isn't it beautiful?"

He sat quietly. He rested his head under my chin. I breathed him in, even as my leg grew tired from his heavy body.

Our day went on.

And then, the world went mad here in Boston.

My hands shook. My voice shook. The tears came. I kept my sons away from the television

As night time crept closer, I began to feel the vulnerability seep in. The house made a weird noise. The light cast a scary shadow. I know I won't sleep tonight.

As I was putting my 9 year old to bed, I looked out his westward facing window.

There was the slightest glow remaining as the sun dipped below the horizon. The sky was a deep, midnight blue, not quite black. The moon stood out, a bright sliver. Venus was out.

There was beauty, even on a day as ugly as this.

The sun rose and then set, bookmarks to the madness.





Love and prayers to the victims, their families, the witnesses, and the first responders.

And to this city that I love.

This city that is home.  

10 Tips For Running The Boston Marathon (by a non-runner)

Tip #1: The marathon route is going to be jam-packed with other runners. Avoid the crowds; bring your GPS and take back roads.

Tip #2: Say "excuse me" when you'd like a runner in front of you to move out of your way so that you may pass him/her. Good manners are important and your mom will be proud.
   

Excuse me, people. You are in my way.

Tip #3: To avoid having to use the bathroom during the race, it's best to avoid all fluid intake before and during the race.

Tip #4: If you absolutely MUST have something to drink, make it whiskey, and a lot of it, as running down the street after peeing yourself is one of its widely-known side effects. Plus, you'll be drunk, so what do you care?

No to water. Yes to whiskey.

 

Tip #5: Run to win. Forget that nonsense about finishing being an accomplishment in itself because, honestly, winning makes for a way better story and is far more likely to get you laid. 

Tip #6:  If you're going to beat those Kenyans, you've got to run really, really fast. Not just regular fast, I mean like 'OMFG, a very hungry lion is chasing me' kind of fast.

"Get in mah belleh!"

Tip #7: Chafing sounds bad. Don't do that. 

Tip #8: It's not every day that you get to wear a tin-foil shawl, so you should consider wearing it through the entire race to maximize your shininess. 

Shine bright like a diamond. A wrinkly, crinkly diamond.

Tip #9:  Tie your shoes. I recommend a double, if not triple or quadruple knot. You don't want to trip.

Tip #10: Don't over-think your form. Aim for this method:



 Good luck, runners!

On Divorce

This is how you get divorced.

First, you get married.

Then, you grow apart.

One of you starts zigging while the other is busy zagging, each of you drifting off in ways that are so small, so imperceptible that when you look back, stunned and wondering Where The Hell It All Went Wrong, you will barely be able to recognize those first minuscule schisms and cracks.

You get busy with the house and the jobs and the babies and the life.

Then one day, in a matter that is not completely out of the blue, you have a thought. It is the sort of thought that, once conceived, cannot easily be unthought.

You think, "This doesn't feel right."

This thought sits with you for a very long time. You eventually share it with him, you talk about it, you even make plans to split. But then you hurl yourselves back at each other in a relieved moment of, "Thank God we didn't go through with it!" You go back to the way things were because there is comfort and safety there and you're fairly certain it's all going to be okay, that the part of you that sometimes still says, "HEY! This isn't working!" can be made to shut up long enough for you to figure out a way to smother her once and for all.

That works for a few years.

But then, it doesn't.

So you talk. You decide to separate. He finds an apartment. You tell the kids. 

Everyone cries. Everyone survives.

You get used to sleeping alone in the bed, used to a quiet house on the weekend, used to bracing against storms on your own. Everyone survives.

You fight over the house. You have cake together on your sons' birthdays. You fight over money. You sit and have a burger and a beer with him one night in his yard and hope that this is what the future holds, this friendly sort of way to be. You have big conversations that come in fits and starts, where one minute you're talking about a retainer for your nine year old and the next you're saying things like, "I'm sorry" or "We loved each other the very best we could" or "No, you're doing just fine, be good to yourself."

One night you both stand outside, beneath the light that hangs at the door of his place. It's snowing. He says, shakily, "I met someone, and I see now what you meant about this not being right because I found something that does feel right. I know it now." You're relieved over this, yet you both cry, him looking up at the light and you down at your feet.  Shame and guilt run down your cheeks, splashing and mixing with the snowflakes in your hair.  You give him an awkward hug.  This is a little bit of healing.

But it doesn't last. The accumulated hurts rise and fall over the next few weeks as you trudge toward the finish line. You take turns having at each other. Attack. Defend. Counterattack. Apologize. Attack. Repeat.

And then, suddenly, it is the last day of your marriage.

You put on some nice clothes and go to court.

You sit, composed and eager to hurry through the whole thing, even as you lose a motion to keep your house. You have just lost what you've been fighting a year and a half for and you don't even care because you know you are about to lose something so much bigger. You know it was lost a long time ago.  

They call your name. You're already crying as you take your place before the judge. You stand together one last time, your final act as a married couple.

The judge asks if your marriage began on April 21, 2001.

You're wearing a white dress and stiff shoes.  You are standing before the priest, with everyone you love sitting behind you.  He's nervous as he takes a breath to say his vows; you squeeze his hand, trying to say, "Forget all of them; just talk to me. Right now, there is only you and me."  

The judge asks if this marriage did produce two children, born in February of 2004 and September of 2005.

You're running out of the bathroom with a pregnancy test, the sweet June air lilting in through the open bedroom windows. You're jumping onto the bed, bubbling and laughing, "Do you see it?  Do you SEE IT?"  

You're laying in the hospital bed 24 hours after giving birth, hormonal and exhausted. You haven't slept in 48 hours and the baby won't nurse. He climbs into your hospital bed to lie next to you. You finally sleep.

You're driving your youngest to preschool. You see him in the rear view mirror, small in his car seat, and ask him what he wants to be when he grows up. He says, "I think I'll go to work with Daddy. I'll ride the train with him and go to work with him and then we'll ride the train home." You nod and agree that this is a good plan.

You shut your eyes, not caring who sees the hot tears washing over your face. Your entire body is shaking. You sob silently. The bailiff brings you tissues and gives you a compassionate pat on the back.

The judge says, "Is this marriage irretrievably broken?"

"Fuck you," you're screaming at him, crying, his voice yelling back as loud as your own.

You're flying down the stairs in bare feet, grasping for your keys. He's booming at you not to run away.

He's standing on the porch, turning away with contempt and saying he can't even look at you. You cringe as you see yourself through his eyes.

Yes.  It is broken.

The judge says, "Is there any hope for reconcilliation?"

He made you a mother.  You made him a father. 

You were happy together for a long time.

You loved each other the best that you could.



You loved each other the best that you could.



The answer is no.

I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry. 




And then

you are divorced.

Season Finale of 'Girls': Boys to the Rescue!

For a show titled 'Girls', the boys sure did come to the rescue in a big way on the HBO hit show's season finale Sunday night.

I had mixed emotions as I watched Adam (Adam Driver) run shirtless through the streets to get to Lena Dunham's anxiety-stricken Hannah. Strange, troubled Adam is suddenly Our Hero, literally breaking down the door to get to Hannah.  As he bursts into her apartment, leaps over the couch, and enters her bedroom, she looks up at him with big, scared eyes from under her self-inflicted monstrosity of a haircut, and says, "You're here."

"I was always here," Adam replies.

He then scoops her up (she's wearing the same brown t-shirt she's had on for days - including her trip to the hospital after her OCD led her to puncture her own eardrum with a Q-tip), she puts her arms around his neck, and they kiss. 

Fade to black.

WAIT.

What?

WHAT THE HELL SHOW IS THIS?  

For a show that focuses so much on our ugly truths, with the biggest summed up by the former junkie Laird (Jon Glaser) as he tells Hannah that she's the most self-involved person he's ever known, this ending reads like the final chapter of a romance novel.  The damsel in distress is saved by the big, strong man!  She was all sad and broken, but he has come to rescue her!  The day is saved!

Marnie (Allison Williams) has a similar savior moment.  After telling Charlie (Christopher Abbott) that this has been the worst year of her life, her newly wealthy ex softens and takes back the woman who has broken up with him twice before (the last time being in the midst of make-up sex).  Charlie is security, from a financial perspective as well as an emotional one.  Marnie has been with him for so long that she no longer knows how to define herself if not through his eyes. The last of their scenes in the episode is one in which Marnie is gazing lovingly up at her man.  Charlie took her back; all is right in her world again. The boys have fixed everything. 

Barf, right?

Except...

Except that my emotional response to watching Adam run to Hannah, telling her to stay right where she was, that he was coming to her, was to cry.

(like, a lot)

Wait.

What?

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

Maybe it's because we've been raised on fairy tales and romantic comedies, but Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow show in this episode that, sometimes, as un-pc as it may sound, every now and then we want someone to Come Along and Save The Day.

Perhaps it's less about being rescued and more about wanting to feel connected. Hannah tells Laird that now that she is a grown up, no one cares if she drops a glass and has to clean it up; there's no one who says, "Be careful."  No one cares if she cuts herself. She reaches out to the unreachable Jessa, she hides from Marnie, but when she refuses to open the door for Adam, he won't take no for an answer. He's coming in, he's scooping her up. He cares if she cuts herself on the glass. Her wrapping her arms around his neck is not a surrender as much as a sense of relief:

She's got a connection.

We see the same in Charlie, as it's not until Marnie tells him that she wants to have children with him and watch him die (in a brilliantly awkward line perfectly suited for a girl who sang an uncomfortable, stripped-down version of Kanye West's 'Stronger' in episode 9) that Charlie softens to her. We know better than to believe this will last, but Charlie responds that this is all he ever wanted to hear.  Charlie wants what we all want: a connection.

The 'Girls' season finale may have been dark, it may have left the main characters in the same state of detachment from one another that we've seen all season, but in the end, the episode did what any show hopes to do:

Connect.

Don't Touch the Hair

This morning, as I was cruising around the internets, I stumbled upon this:

This, for those of you not in the know, is the boy band One Direction, responsible for the earworm known as "What Makes You Beautiful", a song about a boy who finds a girl's shitty self-image to be really hot.

What gets me about this picture is not the fact that they look like a unicultural United Colors of Benetton ad that I would have found in Seventeen magazine as a teenager.

It's the hair.

I just...I can't...I'm not...

WHAT is up with the douchebag hair? 

And I was all ready to make fun of them and their douchebag hair when suddenly...

I remembered the 90's:

 

Hi, I'm Brandon and I'm a know-it-all gambling addict, but chicks dig my hair.

Hi, I'm Dylan and I'm a moody alcoholic/drug addict, but chicks dig my hair.

While Brandon and Dylan certainly owned stock in a far less scandalous mile-high club, they had nothing on these guys:

We are totally hangin' tough. 

Apparently there's something about a young teenage girl that makes her oblivious to just how ridiculous the object of her 14 year old desire actually looks.

Exhibit A (or, "My Favorite New Kid"):

This is Joe.  He's a Capricorn. He regularly pleaded with me, "Please don't go, girl," but he was competing with algebra homework, appointments for spiral perms, and getting my braces tightened. Pretty sure I ruined his whole world.

However, at some point, this guy started to catch my eye (I don't know, it might have had something to do with hormones.  Just a guess.):

This is Jordan.  He promised that he'd be lovin' me forever, and boys don't ever lie about that stuff. Also, he started singing with his shirt unbuttoned while a ginormous fan tried to blow him off stage. It was very hot.  

So I suppose there's not much I can say about One Direction and their birds-could-nest-in-this-shit-and-you'd-never-even-know hair.

Except:

Style it while you've got it, boys. 

'Cause it ain't yours to keep.

 

Well, yes. This again.

I'm lying on my bed.  My 7 year old sits next to me, flipping through a photo album.  It's almost bedtime.  My body is achy, my head pounding, my ear blocked, my nose running, my chest tight.  I'm sick and even the energy of being responsible, having conversation, being the mother, is wearing me out.  I need bedtime to hurry.

"Who's that?" he asks.

I sit up.  It's a picture of him, fat and smiling, sitting on a blanket.  My dad lies next to him, making a funny face.

"That's you," I say.

"No, who's THAT?" he asks, pointing at my father.  This hurts, but he's only 7.  He was 5 when he last saw my dad, and he looked like a different man then, thin and sick.  In the picture, he's lively and overweight; I remember being concerned about his weight, his heart, thinking that Someday it was going to catch up with him, unaware that Someday was already flying at us, coming so much faster than I ever would have dreamed.

I lie back on my pillow.  "That's Grandpa Lane," I say and leave it at that.  I don't have it in me tonight to do this, to have one of these important conversations.

"Is there a telescope that can see to Heaven?" he asks and I roll over, away from him.

"Nope," I say.

And then, "It's time to brush your teeth."


*     *     *     *     *

I've been writing a novel for years now.

Maybe I should stop saying that.  Maybe I should say that I've been conceptualizing a novel for years now.

One of the earliest scenes I wrote, years ago and before I really knew much about grief and loss, was one of a young mother at a cemetery.  Her stillborn daughter is buried there, but the woman hates the place.  She doesn't feel her daughter there.  She doesn't know where to go to find her, to feel her, but she's knows that's not it.

I think often about not having a place to go to find my father.  There's no grave, no marker, and if there was, it would still be too far away.  Maybe it wouldn't help anyway.

But it's hard to find him.  It's hard to feel him.

I'm not one for one-way conversations.  If I were, I imagine it would go something like this:

"Why am I such a fuck-up?"

Except I don't think I would really say that to him because it would make him sad, so maybe, instead, I would say something like, "I don't know what I'm doing."

And he would say, "You have a fire in you and you have to always be true to it because it's who you are."

And that would make me feel good.

And then he would say, "You're going to be okay" and I would believe it, coming from him.

*     *     *     *     *

I get the sense that there's a statute of limitations when it comes to grief.  Like you get to a point where people will think, "Oh, this again."  And you want to say, "Well, yes.  This again."

But then there are the people who take your hands in theirs and say, "It's been 5 years and I can't speak of my father without crying."  Or, "I think of my mother every day and I cry."

And while you know that you don't believe in ever apologizing for how you feel, you know you've been making apologies because sometimes people don't want to hear it or talk about it or think about it because, you know, people die.  It's part of life.

People die.

But when they do, the people who did not die, the ones who loved those People (who) Die, we feel things.  And so we cry and we talk about it, or we blog about it or we go to Facebook and we post about it and fuck you if you happen to think, "Oh, this again."

Because...

Well, yes.

This again.

January

It's 6 a.m.  I open the cabinet, reach for the coffee, and find nothing.

Shit.  

In my mind I can see the box of K-cups sitting in the front seat of my car, where I left it yesterday afternoon, fully intending to bring it in after going to the grocery store.  But I didn't get to the grocery store yesterday because that wound up being bigger than I am.  And so the box containing all of the delicious coffee is sitting outside in my frozen car.  It's Sunday morning.  Mad Men is starting.  I slip on shoes and pull on my coat.

The sun is not up yet but the sky is no longer black.  It has bled into a deep, dark blue, my favorite color. There is the slight hint of a glow sitting suggestively to the east.  Everything is still; there are no cars on the road, no people about.

This moment is mine.  It's mine alone.

I search for the moon, but it's nowhere to be found.  I watched it rise last night, full and bright, but it's gone now, having scurried across the sky while I slept.  It exists out there, somewhere, of course, but what good is a moon that you cannot see, cannot admire, cannot bask in the light of?  

The stars are well defined but distant.  I can remember being a girl, around 10, lying in the itchy grass in the midst of a lazy summer and staring at the sky.  How high is that?  What kind of ladder would it take to get all the way up there?  The thought made me dizzy and afraid, the height and enormity of the space between where I was on the ground and this indeterminate endpoint too much to take in.  I shut my eyes and pressed my hands into the sharp, dry grass, trying to hold on.

It's bitingly cold, but the air feels good as I breathe it in slowly, feeling the punch of it in my nose, in my lungs.  There's a coating of snow in the driveway and I like the crunching sound it makes under my feet as I go to the car.  I have my coffee now.  I should go back inside.

But I don't.  Instead, I linger in the walkway for another minute, gazing skyward.  I see this sky every day.  I've slept beneath it 13,886 times.  Yet, even after all that time, it's enough to stop me in my tracks, draw me in.  I'm in love with it, I realize.  I stare.  I wonder.  I feel small.  I feel ablaze.  I'm moved.  I'm humbled. 

I'm reminded.

There is beauty everywhere.  You only have to be open to it.

I send up a thought to something...to these stars, to this sky, to the universe, to something I might call God, to...to whatever this is that I feel as I stand in my walkway, unseen to the rest of the world, beneath such vastness.

Please...let me always be open to it.