I am feeling a bit weepy today. A musician-friend e-mailed me a recording a few weeks ago (which I only just found in my inbox!) of her duo's newest song for me to check out (theme being the fear as well as the forgiveness of 2020), and it is absolutely lovely (the harmonies, the lyrics, the jangly guitars).
Then, not five minutes later, I discovered (again, belatedly) this clip that another friend sent me a while ago, which had me bawling all over again. I do not watch those talent shows (nor will I), but the gentleness and beauty of the artist's rendition overwhelmed me... 💖
As we approach the one-year anniversary of The Day the Earth Stood Still, I am allowing myself a few moments of fragility and vulnerability. The father of my son E's best friend/college roommate passed away a few weeks ago of prostate cancer (the service is this weekend). He was diagnosed at the same time as my husband (who is fortunately now cancer-free), but the disease was already in the later stages, and eventually metastasized. Our whole family has been in "there but for the grace of god" mode; it is a cautionary tale about the necessity for following up, as well as never taking for granted those you hold dear. My heart hurts, but it reminds me that "Love is touching souls" indeed... 💞
It's Feel Good Friday. As is tradition, five items below of beauty, interest, and humor to brighten your day/weekend/week. Enjoy!
~ A Virtual Evening With Anne Lamott & Hoda Kotb (TONIGHT!!!): In Dusk Night Dawn: On Revival and Courage, Anne Lamott explores the tough questions that many of us grapple with. How can we recapture the confidence we once had as we stumble through the dark times that seem increasingly bleak? As bad news piles up—from climate crises to daily assaults on civility—how can we cope? Where, she asks, “do we start to our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back…with our sore feet, hearing loss, stiff fingers, poor digestion, stunned minds, broken hearts?”
~ City Guesser: a geography based browser game that strives to provide an exceptional travel and guessing experience. City Guesser launched on August 13th, 2020, and welcomes thousands of geography-enthusiasts each day.
~ Sheet-Pan Everything: 20 often surprising, always delicious recipes for the most versatile pan in your kitchen
~ Live @ the Freight by Cry Cry Cry (Lucy Kaplansky/Richard Shindell/Dar Williams): All proceeds from this album will be donated to Live Music Society to help sustain and rebuild venues for live music. Please consider a generous donation so that Lucy, Richard, Dar and thousands of other artists can perform for you in the future. “Live @ the Freight,” was recorded at the last show of Cry Cry Cry's sold out 20-year reunion tour in 2018.
~ Forking hell! Is The Good Place the ultimate TV show for our times?: Michael Schur’s series about heaven and hell was not meant to be topical, but it’s become the ideal antidote to the news cycle [Warning: this article contains spoilers]
BOOK: Rise Up: Confronting a Country at the Crossroads by Al Sharpton, Michael Eric Dyson (Foreword)
POEM(S): Haiku by Melissa Kirsch
POEM(S): Haiku by Melissa Kirsch
I don't want this year
to turn into a blur of
Zoom chats and Netflix
I Am Tired of the Movie About Sentimentalized Male Failure by Sophia Stid
QUOTE: "When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." ~ Edward Teller
You know the one—it stars Clint Eastwood, or Beau Bridges.
Whoever it is, he’s got a face lined as the map he crumples
and stuffs in his back pocket in the first minute of the movie
I don’t want to see. I don’t have to see it to know he’ll get lost.
He’ll spit a wad of tobacco out the window of his truck,
dig out the map and unfurl it against the steering wheel.
He looks at the map quizzically. At some point in the movie,
he’ll miss his daughter’s wedding. He’ll disappoint his wife.
His daughter will marry a man so not like him that he’s exactly
like him. In this movie, everything is about him. Look at him
looking at the map. In this movie, there will be long shots
of the horizon, strip club scenes, whiskey, fists, and pills.
They don’t make movies like this about women. The plot
is watching this man bleed out and calling it interesting—
calling it a reckoning. “You know the reckoning’s gonna come
for you,” my cowboy friend Jack told me once in a bar, smiling
in that lazy cowboy way I loved. I laughed. I had no idea
what he meant. I was twenty-two. I thought love took care
of everything, like the concierge in a fancy hotel we couldn’t afford—
I thought all I had to do was show up. So when a reckoning came,
I didn’t expect the desire to run, that lurch like wild horses
in my chest. How, when her call came—Come home—I thought,
I can’t. My reckoning came when I went home anyway.
My reckoning came with pills, prescribed, morning and night.
I counted them out into her Day-Glo Days-of-the-Week pill-minder.
Her pain was not about me, but secretly, I wanted it to be.
I wanted someone to say, Oh, you’re doing such a good job.
The shame of that. How sometimes I watched myself in a movie
as I watched her strain to breathe, watched my hands move
around her doing everything they could, which was not
enough. It was hard to watch but it was easier to watch it
than to be there. Oh, my endless lack, hard as the prairie
scarred beneath the churning herd of wild horses I called
my sense of self. That self, that sense, scattering, and scattering
again. When I paused the movie in my head, all I had
were those horses and the chalked taste of the dust they kicked up—
and even that is metaphor, a kind of watching. Past the horses,
past their fear and sweat and trembling, what was left?
A pain that was not like anything else but was only itself.
The gap between who I wanted to be and who I was.
Nothing I did could save her, and I had to do it anyway.
I hated that. Counting the pills, I kept losing track.
The relentlessness of starting again—one, two, three …
their pastel shells clicking against the plastic. I listened
to my lack. I wanted to leave every day. I didn’t leave. I stayed.
That was the only miracle, and it wasn’t a miracle at all,
but it was a kind of healing, the kind I didn’t even know
enough to ask for. I want to tell the man in the Clint Eastwood movie
what that healing feels like. I want him to look back on a life
he rose to meet, to know how it is that we’re changed in the rising.
I’ve known men like that man in the movie—men who hide
in their bourbon, men who hide in their fiction, men who hide
in being men who can’t love, and all of it is the same hiding.
Fear disguised as grappling disguised as American manhood.
Men who drawl, Baby, I don’t want to hurt you, a hoarse chorus,
hurting and handsome in their pearl snaps, studying the map
Clint Eastwood stuffed in his pocket like that’s a map that could ever
bring them anywhere new. Baby, I want to say, burn that sad map.
Spit out the fucking chew that will kill you. If you want interesting,
forget the drugs, the blood, the road. Forget your own lack,
every idea about how you can’t love or what you deserve.
If you want a reckoning, love someone for a long time.
There’s never been a map. At the end of the metaphor
is a gap that hurts to look at. Look anyway. Our reckoning
is here, and you know the only kind of reckoning I trust
ends in more love. The kind you can only see in the looking back—
but look. Look. There. How we changed. How we rose.
[Sophia Stid: “Lately, I’ve been leaning into a kind of poetics of friendship—writing poems for my friends, because of my friends, writing with their words taped over my desk. This poem started in a dark movie theater in Nashville with my friend Joanna. (We were about to watch a terrible movie, although we didn’t know that yet.) Joanna is able to sit with paradox better than anyone else I know, and later that night she’d give me a back rub as we sat tangled up on the stairs in a cabin out in backwoods Tennessee, watching our friend Bea play a house show. This poem is for Joanna, and for Bea, for my friend Jack, and for everyone who finds themselves giving or needing care, or in a reckoning, in the gap—which, right now, seems to be all of us.”]
QUOTE: "When you get to the end of all the light you know and it's time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." ~ Edward Teller
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