Better To Say Nothing At All

I have nothing nice to say, so it's truly best to say nothing at all today.

Today's blog brought to you by a shitty night of sleep, the only asshole dude at the yoga studio WHO LEAVES THE SEAT UP in a studio full of women, and the rude woman at the farmer's market who cut in front of a line of five people because she needed cheese and her time is obviously more important than everyone else's.

Have a great fucking weekend.

Common Courtesy

I started this post earlier in the week, but it got ranty and you-kids-get-off-my-lawn pretty fast, so I stepped back and am trying again.

The simple fact is this: the title of this post is an oxymoron. Common courtesy is uncommon, largely because we exist in our own little bubble and don't bother to look up from our screens long enough to recognize how we are impacting those around us.

From the person who lets the door slam in your face when you are coming in right behind them to the guy who leans his seat all the way back for seven hours on a transatlantic flight (during the day, including dinner service) to the person who takes up two parking spaces in a crowded lot. From the weird practice of walking around in a grocery store listening to (bad) music...without head phones...to the neighbor who decides to hang some pictures at 7:30 on a Sunday morning.

To everyone reading this or picking up the common vibrations of these words I say this: practice a little courtesy today. Before you get ready to do something, think for a moment about how it might impact the people around you. Not in a cosmic, climate-changing, evolutionary way. In a very simple, right-here-right-now way. Put down your cell phone and engage with the world around you. Say please and thank you. Hold the door for someone. Let old people go first. Let mothers with children go first. Pick up something someone dropped. Put your dishes away after you eat.

It is ridiculously easy to do something nice. You don't even have to go out of your way or be inconvenienced. Let's take approximately zero seconds out of our day today (or this weekend if you can't spare zero seconds) to offer up a little courtesy to someone.

As Garrison Keillor says as he closes his show The Writer's Almanac: "Be well, do good work, and stay in touch."

As a common courtesy and to spread the love, please share this post on your various social networks. Maybe we can get something started today.

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Making Lists

(sky's the limit...get it?)

I am a list maker. There is something very satisfying about organizing your day/life in one column, checking off tasks and goals as they are completed. There are all kinds of rules about making to-do lists, like the one about not putting more than four items on a list per day and the requirement that you prioritize items, just in case you go back to bed instead of working on the list. Which never happens here. Or hardly ever.

This morning when I was coming home from yoga, I felt an overwhelming urge to create a list. Rare these, days, to get an overwhelming urge to do anything, so I have indulged myself. Ten things I want to do in 2015. Not prioritized because that's dumb and not helpful to me and how can I say which one of these will feel most important two months from now?

Also, this might be cheating a little because some of this stuff I already know is happening. But it's my list, so I can do what I want. There are big things and little things on this list, but if I can control it, they will all happen.

Here it is. Good luck to me.

1. Publish a book. I have two that I am working on, and it's time to stop putting them off. If they are published electronically, then the deadline is December 31, 2015. If I actually manage to get a publisher, then a contract by the end of the year is the goal. So I guess I better start writing.

2. Dip a toe in the Pacific. Down in Cali. Comin' at you, Left Coast.

3. See my friend Michael in Chicago and eat his food (he's a sous at The Brass Monkey). He has lived there for many years, and I have threatened to visit a couple different times but have dropped the ball. That's dumb. Combining this with a cross-country jaunt to fulfill goal #2 and stopping in Denver to see my friend Mandy, too.

4. Go riding. I miss horses, so much that it is hard to even look at pictures of my horse, Sadie. I have had a few opportunities to go in the past year, but I have a feeling it is going to be difficult for me and have been avoiding it. Just a little trail ride, nothing major. Get back on the horse, literally and metaphorically.

5. See my grandmother once a month. We were doing that when we first moved here, now three months have gone by and we haven't seen her. She is 97 years old, and it is such a small thing, to go see her and to help The Teenager develop a relationship with her. I have one memory of my great-grandmother, and it is filled with dusty cobwebs and dark wood. I want Sicily to know her great grandmother. Plus, it makes my grandmother happy to see us.

6. Plant a garden. Our new house has limited sunshine and a tiny backyard. This doesn't mean I can't grow my own food. Much to my neighbors' chagrin, I am also researching ways to cram a couple chickens in the backyard, too.

7. Work on my French. I speak passable French but understand more than I speak. I would like to change that, and it's not hard. Since this is a really vague goal, I will make it more specific: ten minutes of French daily. I have an app on my phone, and in the time it takes to whiz through all of my social media, I can surely squeeze that in.

8. Tattoo #2. This is going to happen as soon as I donate blood. So sooner rather than later. And while I'm at it, here's my call for you all to go donate blood. You can save up to 11 lives with a single donation. Find a donor center here.

9. Play the ponies at Pimlico. The best part of having non-traditional employment is that I can go day drinking on a Tuesday and take my chances at the track. I have hazy memories of a Preakness infield experience, but I'd like to go as a grown up.

10. Crab feast at the new house, and institute Sunday Dinner. Sunday Dinner is unrelated to the crab feast (more on that as it unfolds), but both are important, and both are happening this year.

Bonus: Dating a boy or two would be nice. Unless it's not. Then this item can be scratched off the list.

Double bonus: There is the possibility of Opening Day tickets for Friday. Cross your fingers!!!!

Are you a list maker? What's on your list for 2015?

 

You Are Here: How Small Is The Universe

So the universe is vast and expansive and wee at the same time. How do I know this?

Dane's 7th grade girlfriend is married to a childhood friend's brother and living in Myersville, Maryland, about 10 minutes from where I grew up.

To clarify, Dane was living in Seattle in his middle school years, in a neighborhood called Magnolia, the same neighborhood we moved when The Teenager was born. All the way across the country in a little backwater of a city (at the time; this was the early 80's) tucked between two mountain ranges.

This morning, I got a message in my Facebook "other" folder from Dane's middle school girlfriend who happens to have married into the family of one of my own middle school friends.

So if the universe isn't small in some ways, at least it has a good sense of humor.

 

 

Springtime Pickling

So what do you do when on Monday it's 75 degrees and sunny, a perfect spring day, light breeze included, and then on Tuesday it's 54 degrees, blustery and rainy?

You pickle some radishes, of course.



You like your radishes in a quick pickle because you are impatient, but you want a pickle that will only get better with time. So you throw together the following in a saucepan and bring it to a boil, stirring very now and then: 3/4 c. water, 3/4 c. white vinegar (cider vinegar works, too, or white wine if you drink tea with your pinky extended), 2 tablespoons maple syrup (honey works also), 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon of red pepper flakes (or chop a jalapeno - even better), and 1/2 teaspoon whole mustard seeds. Sometimes you get crazy and sprinkle in some black peppercorns, or some whole garlic cloves. Maybe even fennel, if have lots of people who like that sort of thing, or some thinly sliced sweet Vidalia onion. #Trust

Then you haul out your mandolin, the one you have had for years, the one you bought with a  gift card that your friend Mandy gave to you but have never used until two days ago, and now you use it like it's going out of style.

You take your excess of radishes that you bought in a fit of thinking The Teenager might actually like radishes, and you slice them into beautiful, mildly speckled rounds that you then pack into a wide-mouthed Mason jar.



Maybe you slice off a little bit of your thumb, but that doesn't make it into the jar.

You are a pro, and you know that if you want radishes that keep their crunch, you will slice them a little thicker.

Your brine is ready, and you pour it, hot and steamy, over the radishes.



Whatever you do, you don't inhale the steam because these are SPICY pickled radishes, and if steam does get into your lungs you will feel it all the way down to the bottom of your spine.

Then you wait for an hour or two. If you can.

Which you can't.

You eat one just after they cool and find that this brine goes from a tart pinch in the cheeks to a spreading warmth and a final touch of mild sweetness. The radishes are still crunchy, and you get  a hint of the mustard seed at the end.

You start planning for fish tacos, or maybe a burger, or maybe you check the weather and hope it rains for the next couple days so you can waste time on the couch with radishes and a beer.

What do you do when it rains in the spring?

 

Sorrow Prepares You For Joy

What would the world be without Rumi? A dark and terrible place, I think. A place I wouldn't want to be.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

~ Rumi ~

I confess I have not deeply read his writings; rather, it seems like the universe sends them to me at times that are most appropriate. Which is very considerate of the universe, seeing as how I have not always been its most enthusiastic or reverent member.

If I had read this two years ago, it would have washed over me like rain on a newly-waxed car. Today, this quote speaks to a place in me that is so deep I cannot see the bottom. With a child newly returned from Paris, spring on the horizon (even as clouds and chilly rain move in), and a plethora of professional and personal opportunities offering themselves up, this quote gives me, dare I say it, hope. Curiosity.

The tagline of this blog is "Seeking joy." How nice would that be? Joy.

Do I dare hope?

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And So It Begins: Welcome Home

The Teenager came home yesterday.

I waited for two hours, tracking her plane as it landed, sat on the tarmac for a bit, and then pulled into the gate. She cleared customs quickly and only requested a ginger ale be waiting when she came out for a turbulence-induced queasy belly.

I didn't recognize her immediately as she strode through the crowd at International Arrivals. Her hair was in a messy bun, and she was all in black; tall, confident. Then I saw her, a moment before she saw me. Her face lit up when our eyes met, and I had the pleasure of my teenaged daughter running to greet me in public.

I imagine this is just the beginning of the times I will be picking her up at airports.

I thought I would miss her more in the longing, lonely sense of missing someone, but mostly I just felt elated that she was out in the world and proud that I was able to send her there. There were definitely moments this week when I missed her chatter, and the hugs I got when I picked her up and before she went to bed were sorely missed, but mostly I was glad to have sent her off.

Parenting seems to always be a balance between two things. When they are little, you are balancing keeping them safe (i.e., poking their eye out on the corner of the coffee table) with letting them learn new things (like how to walk). In adolescence, right now it seems to be letting go and enfolding.

I have to let her leave me so that I can feel the pleasure of her return.

I have to let her make mistakes but then be there to figure out where to go from there.

She has to know that as much as I want her to come home I  want her to experience the world in equal measure.

These truths seem self-evident, but try it once. I am so proud of the woman she is becoming, but I still remember the fat wrists and the chubby cheeks. The tiny voice. The sweet smile and delicious kisses. I want her to take her time, to savor each part of life as it comes. Even grief, in its own way, is something that must be felt and experienced. I want her to slow down as life comes rushing towards her and carries her away from me like a leaf dancing on the surface of a stream.

So instead of moaning the loss of The Teenager to the world, this morning I am vowing that I will be her home, the one person she knows will always meet her at the gate, take her in, make sure her sheets are clean and that there is a juicy, mid-rare barbecue bacon burger with fries waiting.

I think that's our job as parents, really, to teach them to be independent and make good choices, then to send them out in the world to see how we did. I am just glad she is home and that I have her until the next time. Which may be sooner rather than later, as my evil plan seems to have worked and the travel bug has bitten.

Who are you home to?