The last weekend of Boston, Kirsten invited the roommates to her family’s lighthouse near Chatham on Cape Cod. Such a perfect, summery weekend was not had before or since, I think. The sun was beautiful in seventeen different ways between dawn and starlight. It was warm but not heavy and humid and night required the coziness of hoodies and socks. There are so many individual things that made this trip blessed for me – discovering an unholy fear of crabs, playing taps at sunset from the lighthouse tower, wrestling in the sand, seeing the fireworks displays of all the South Shore towns at once, watching the sunrise, cracking ourselves up in the living room. Walking the shore at sunset with Erinn, I was so overtaken by the deepening liquid colors of the waves, the slow gorgeous curve of the beach, the lights of the shore and the lights of the stars, that the only appropriate response was to sing hymns. The beauty of these people who I have come to love, and the beauty of the natural world called out to me – to say, remember, when you are far away and lonely and frustrated, remember – this is WHY.
In wandering through development blogs, I ended up at this one, and scrolling through found a missive from the blogger’s last day in Goma, DRC. I felt like it captured perfectly the wierdly rooted rootlessness of those who make new homes periodically thousands of miles from their old ones . . .
I rode the three hours to the Kigali airport with B and V, and V bought me a croissant and a water.
But then they left. And I was alone.
Sitting all alone in the coffee shop at the Kigali airport, crying quietly to myself, I pulled out my computer and opened up Skype. An old friend’s name popped up, a wonderful woman I haven’t talked to in months. I double-clicked on her name. And I began typing to her. I asked for stories about her life in Spain to take my mind off of my loneliness. And she told me about love, love, love. We talked about friend love, lover love, and family love. We talked about how damn DIFFICULT love is. And how impossible it is. But how difficult and impossible it is for everyone in the world – every single person. And so I stopped crying. Because I wasn’t sitting all alone in a coffee shop anymore. I looked around. I was sitting next to an old man who kept having to get up out of his chair to chase down his little granddaughter, who kept running hither and thither. I was sitting next to the waitresses, one of whom rolled her eyes and whispered something to the other, just at that moment, and laughed. I was sitting next to a young biracial couple, two tables down, and next to another woman jiggling a screaming baby on her knee. I was sitting in Rwanda beside my friend in Spain.
I do not make life easy for myself. My heart gets broken all the time. Sometimes somethings that would not hurt someone else very much will hurt me a great deal. But I think that this is okay. It is okay to be sad sometimes. I get sad because I love, I love, I love.
Me, too
As a new owner of a kindle, I eagerly biked into Spencer* yesterday and downloaded my first four books:
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Tess of the D’urbervilles (Hardy);
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White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Easterly);
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The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy; and
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Dead in the Family – A Sookie Stackhouse Novel (Harris).
Oops. One guess as to which book I’ve already finished.
*Because one of the things my parents’ house has in common with where I’ll be working is lack of a 3G network.
Filed under: Things that make me smile
Belatedly, I will share with you the secret to winning my heart.
Irish soda bread, lightly toasted, with a good, salty butter melted over the top.
So, now you know.
You can find it here.
It’s a lot of replies to other folks, but some truly endearing posts, including this one:
Spent many hours madly gardening. Stuff coming up, & me w. the wet leaves lying ungathered… Planted some primroses or were they cowslips?
I don’t do twitter (::yet::), but I loved this glimpse of her brain. I would like to have coffee in her garden and talk about being a woman.
I threw an extra ‘t’ into possibilities today, because it’s Friday morning, and when my coworker called me on it, we had a momentary brain-link about writing a book or blog of pasta recipes and calling it “endless pastabilities”. We thought we were very clever for about a minute, and then I googled it and found that, like all good ideas, someone has already had it. Sigh.
Filed under: Things that make me smile
Workers at a Chinese Aquarium spent a year training Beluga whales to blow a heart shaped bubble in honor of the Chinese new year.
In descending order, here is how much I like the various parts of sushi:
1. Pickled Ginger
2. Wasabi
3. Seaweed
4. Vegetables, fruit and/or avacado
5. Rice
6. Soy sauce
7. Fish
Filed under: Things that make me smile
Stolen from my friend Joey.Fitting, no?
I’m such a sucker for sports movies, and now they’re putting Nelson Mandela in one? Niiiice.
The word is that Slumdog did so well last year because no one wanted depressing movies due to the recession (usually everyone puts out something soul-crushing as an end-of-year Oscar bid). I’m cool with this trend continuing, as December is soul crushing enough without the cinematic help.
