A Picture...

Photographs have been popping up in the oddest places. While slowly unpacking boxes from my 150th move in the past 5 years, old and/or forgotten snaps are unearthed. From the desk box, emerged a tattered envelope containing pictures from my 'surprise' party 11 or 12 years ago. My German Grandma let it slip the surprise by asking me to confirm the time it was to start. Too funny. I look so...I want to say young, but (thanks to my mother's fabulous genes, I haven't changed all that much) a more appropriate word is uncertain, hopeful; and a girl lacking any notion of the woman she'd become.

In the same box is a picture of one of my dearest girls, at ages 2. In the photo, Lorelei, a blonde angel in a puffy pink jacket and her friend Rosie are absorbed in a school project. The frame is handmade, cut from yellow and orange construction paper, decorated with the squiggles and dots of a marker. I can still see Laur running over to present it to me.

Six or seven years ago, the golden shoebox, which holds a couple of decks of cards and other odds and ends, produced a pic of the girls who warrant Most Favored Nation status. It's of a later vintage. I had already left them when Lisa sent me this pic of Laur and Allie. By then, I'd crossed the Atlantic for the first time. I had eaten brussel sprouts in Brussels, gotten lost in Rome, Marseilles, Paris and Florence; and played the balcony scene with a Napolitano Romeo in Umbria.

When the photo of my favorite girls arrived, a couple of years later; my grand adventure was over and everyday life was kicking my butt. Worse, the thought that I might not realize my dearest hopes and dreams, had reared it's ugly head. For the first time in my life I'd jettisoned a friendship, taken a full-time job, and acknowledged (if only to myself) that the kink in my health was not something I could 'power through'. In that moment, the picture of these smiling girls at the ocean was hard to take. I missed them, I missed what used to be known as my life.

When I find the picture again a few weeks ago while going through the gold shoebox for the umpteenth time (I'm sure there's something important in there that I missed last time), the girl's peek out at me. This time, I know joy with maybe a hint of nostalgia. Okay, and perhaps...perhaps, the teeniest bit of regret, sympathy for the girl I was then. The girl who had not yet learned how to reconcile the life she dreamed with the life she owned.

  

Tags: pictures, travel, italy, nostalgia, memories, love

Alas and Alack' My Dear Friends....

I've been the victim of a confluence of events that can only happen to *me*. There are those who might suggest my bed was made by me and now I should lie in it. Whether or not those people are right, it's extremely tactless of them to say so now.

So I have two handsets for my phone. For the longest time only one had a decent battery. And yes, I know that's stupid because every once in a while the thought does occur, 'this is dumb, what if something happens to the good phone battery, you will have no access to your outside world'.

However  when push comes to shove, I always find reasons for not buying a fresh battery for the juice-less phone. Generally variations on...I'm too cheap. Besides, what are the chances the good phone battery dies without days, yea, weeks of notice?

'Hello, Ancient Master  Dropper of Phones (me<---)!' I say to myself 'ehm, clumsy much?' But I make it a point not to listen to advice from myself, particularly when it's given in that specific *tone*. Of course, last Monday, after dropping the phone and managing (somehow) to break the battery but not the phone. I wished I had listened...regardless of Tone.

After eBaying myself a couple of phone batteries (I'm educable, if slow); the batteries seem slow to arrive. A couple of days past their due date, I discover that I' have neglected to update the eBay shipping address after my last move. Hah, yes....genius.

Have I mentioned the juiceless battery is being a complete and utter jerk? Juice-less is a teensy understatement; as the battery seems to have just enough power to light the little caller id screen. Now I get to watch helplessly as unanswerable calls come in.  Let me just say this, I now understand why dogs hate cats. Have you ever watched a cat sit just out of reach of a dog barking itself into a myocardial infarction? Phone = cat. Me = dog.

Looking forward to talking to you (at last!) very soon,

REPOST: The Library Book

I love libraries. They are, quite literally, the places on earth I feel most comfortable. Reading is a solitary experience, but the communal nature of library reading infuses it with a sense of...family, in a way. We belong to physical families as a result of genetic similarity, library familiality is a result of like-mindedness.

My favorite thing, which is what has happened with my current book, Readingsby Sven Birkerts, is finding the receipt of a previous patron stuck between the pages of the book. Indulging myself in Birkerts' musings about reading and time and the human condition has opened a doorway to a place I barely remember but for which my longing has never died. That pure...simple place where exists the exquisite and innocent joy wrought by everything related to reading.

Books...the way they smell, the weight of a volume in hand, the texture of the page...are approached with the pitcher's intent ritual treading of the mound, with the sommelier's expert palate. Reading...that moment when when letters and punctuation vanish from the page and the mind leaves this world and enters another...is a meditation, a cleansing of thought and an unfettering of spirit. It's a way of taking a vacation from one's self. To view the world through new eyes, to experience our hearts desires expressed in words we cannot find ourselves; "we read to know we are not alone", as someone said.

So a year ago, this guy in Napa checked Birkerts' book out of the library. Readings, which is basically a book about books and the way in which they can help us make sense of our swiftly tilting, sharply spinning world; or if not make sense, at least give us a vocabulary with which to express our confusion. I love Birkerts' clear, spare, unsentimentalized sentiment, he expresses his thoughts in a way that gives me plenty of room for my own and I find the experience of reading Readings rather like enjoying a sherbet after dinner; a delightful preparation for the dessert of deep thought.

I wonder what Napa Guy thought? Does he feel as I do about Birkerts's writing? Does he find it difficult, as I do and Birkerts does, to reconcile our present with our recent past and near future? Does he relish the gifts of libraries and of books as much as I?