After the eyes open, then what?

and other morning thoughts

Ye who seek companionship with incompatible partners, here is your totem:

(discovered hanging out at the main college entrance of Columbia University, my alma mater)

I get it. Some of us wake up in the morning and dive right into a well-honed, super-cool, Dalai-Lama supported, instantly healthy, Instagram-ready routine.

The rest of us are happy that our eyes opened.

With my kids getting so much older (along with other, less pleasant personal life events), I have discovered that I don’t actually have a reliable morning routine anymore.

I used to - when I was a little kid in College Station, TX, I had a whole internal list of things I had to do before I caught the preposterously early bus to get to my preposterously distant public school. (And incidentally: a shoutout to my mother who managed to get four kids fed a full sit-down breakfast and out of the house by 6:15am every single day!) I remember knowing exactly how much time each thing too: hot-rollers or curling iron for my hair, brushing teeth, situps, reading a poem, singing the right song, telling myself in the mirror that I didn’t care what the stupid jerk in Biology said, it was fine to be smart and a girl—whatever mad self-improvement routine I had decided was vital to the survival of the day, I knew how long it would take and I arranged my schedule so that back-to-back I could sleep as long as humanly posisble before I woke to my alarm and got these thing going.

I don’t do that anymore. In the mornings before they went off to school, I used to read aloud to the kids (because 1) it made them not fight while eating their breakfast and was easier to monitor time than with a TV show and also 2) it let me have discussions with them about books their schools wouldn’t think to give them, like ALL of the Little House on the Prairie books and ALL of the Anne of Green Gables books and ALL of the Harry Potters and CS Lewis and Mysterious Benedict Society and eventually Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, lots and lots of Dickens, and nowadays, since I only have the one kid still getting up to eat breakfast with me, Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, and currently, Jose Saramago’s The Cave. (which I highly recommend to anyone who is or ever was an artist of any kind—though it’s a little hard to read given that the text is solid blocks of endless Proustian run on sentences with a fabulously omniscient and opinionated narrator and zero punctuation to set off the dialogue or distinguish the characters, that said, if you got through this particular paragraph of writing you’ll probably do fine.)

My point being that the kids have their own routines now, and soon my daughter will be off to college anyway, and this week is a winter break from NYC public high school so I have no reason to wake up early except to go to work and (as you may have guessed if you know me) I tend to work late into the night rather than early in the morning. But my body is waking up around 8 regardless so there is this interesting morning void that I feel strangely compelled to fill.

I’ve been thinking about that.

Why do we always want to do something with the emptiness in our days? Why can’t it just be peaceful space? We love looking into deep chasms - you’d never want to fill in the Grand Canyon! The negative space is what makes art beautiful. The silences set off the music. Waterfalls are most spectacular when surrounded by cliffs. Outer space is a mystery and a miracle. So why not the space in our own lives? What a different world it would be if that inactive space was noticed. Not as a place to rest, but as a thing to admire.

You guys go think about that while I pour myself a third cup of coffee and get back to work on these taxes.

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Writing News

I had a lovely and busy week - the day after I got back from the AWP conference instead of unpacking I went to see the incredible poet Sarah Kain Gutowski do a reading at KBG Bar. Her newest poetry collection is The Familiar and it portrays and extraordinary battle between the poet’s “ordinary self” and her “extraordinary self” and it is worth every second you spend with it.

(WEIRD coincidence, the collection is coming out of Texas A&M University Press… which is in my hometown)

I also went to an Agent-Writer mixer that I could write a whole post about. Maybe I will.

(Okay I did. It will be out on Monday on Medium.)

It was fascinating to watch the hungry young writers with their damp-from-the-printer MFAs circulating like ravens seeking out the black name tags marking the literary agents. I enjoyed being back on campus and it reminded me that I can go up there any time to get inspiration. I’m not sure why I don’t go more frequently.

Why would you NOT be a writer when this is the kind of event people throw for you?

In other inspirational news, I had a fantastic Valentine’s Day (as I hope you all did as well). I went to see Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers with a full orchestra and massive choir singing the soundtrack. It was spectacular and the conversation was revivifying.

Had some time to kill before the show so wandered around in the Rockefeller Center lobby. Got some amazing scoop about the art on the ceilings and walls of this glamorous space. Did you know that the main lobby has an outrageously cool optical illusion? The whole mural seems to move when you stand in a different place. Go see it next time you’re there. Look up!

From a different angle, the guy holding the hourglass puts it on the pedestal (like his partner in the upper right hand corner)

My daughter is away this week, I hope to have more time to write. We shall see!

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Random Final Thought

Not everyone was watching the game

I was at a huge writing conference in Kansas City all last week (I flew out just at the Superbowl kickoff and watched most of the game on the plane - it was crazy to have to deplane right after SF scored a surprise goal—I became some kind of throwback-to-Texas crazy person rushing with my carryon to the closest JFK gate TVs to gawp at the overtime plays—usually I mildly watch the game and focus mostly on the ads-as-commentary-on-the-state-of-the-Nation)… and so the shooting was such a shock having been there so recently that I sharply recognized each city background framing the survivors being interviewed. We really do have more connection to places we have been, to humans we have seen, to our tribe. This is the biggest tragedy of the way that the country is splitting into two camps - it is hard for anyone to care about the not-us people in the world. I wish we could spend more time creating the feeling of an “us” rather than just looking out for the “me.”

Just a last random thing: this local bar has different fake fires. Is that not interesting?

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