girls & their glasses

standing in the rain

sistering & daughtering

I was talking with my mother on the phone this afternoon, mostly just making sure she and Paul had made it home (or mostly home, being still nearly 100 miles from Anacortes) after their stay in Pennsylvania this past week. Mostly this, but also there was this: "Well, Emily, we got our boy married."

Indeed we walked our boy down the aisle three days ago, our six awkward elbows linked inextricably at least for those few moments, him looking adorable and anxious and ecstatic, us in our fancy red get-ups looking anxious and happy and, I imagine, ever so slightly bereft.

It's a funny thing to be an older sister walking a baby brother down the aisle. And it's an even funnier thing when that relationship, this sibling bond of ours, seems in some ways so much closer, so much more intimate, than the relationships shared between most siblings I know.

I drove down to Philadelphia Friday afternoon with three friends and our conversation (between naps by at least some of us in the back seat) ranged far. But the moment that jumped out at me, the moment I have been carrying with me, was a particular exchange between Jill, driving, and Dave, in the shotgun seat, half heard through my sleepy hazy daze, curled up in the back.

They were talking about kids, specifically about how many they might, in an abstractly futuristic way, have. Jill said she wanted two, that she would never have only one child. Dave retorted, with a surprising edge to his voice (this is Dave after all, one of the kindest, gentlest creatures known to man), that she should watch what she said next. She explained that both of her parents are only children and both are neurotic, and she doesn't want her kids to be like that. (I know I am paraphrasing here, and was not entirely awake, but this is how I read, how I remember reading, the conversation.) He countered with the fact that both he and his husband are only children and quite well adjusted, thank you very much.

I wouldn't disagree with either of them, knowing them and their families as I do. But what I would add, what I found lacking in their discussion, wasn't so much how the kid(s) it(them)self(ves) would turn out, but any acknowledgment of the joy that a sibling relationship can provide.

Friends and lovers come and go, parents die before their kids, and the world moves on. But I know on some indisputable level that no matter where I am in the world, no matter where Nathan is in the world, we are not alone in that world.

It's a pleasing thing, having a brother one adores, and the three of us, my mother, my brother, and me, we make an odd little trio sometimes but a formidable one, I think, in our love for each other.

And it was such a happy, a thrilling, a satisfying thing, accompanying our boy down the aisle on his way to his new bride, all of us lucky enough to be surrounded by people we love -- friends and family from Washington State, Washington D.C., France, Pennsylvania, New York, Kansas, Norway, and more.

calling in the hit

all grown up

'I met my class, although I could pretend to no teaching...'

"I met my class, although I could pretend to no teaching. It was not like a wake; it was one. We shared the shortfalls of our thoughts. 'It's like a dream,' my students said. And more frightening, 'Like waking from a dream.' The America they woke to on Tuesday morning was, like the skyline of New York, changed forever. The always-thereness of here was gone.

The final lesson of my writing class came too soon. There are no words. But there are only words. To say what the inconceivable resembles is all that we have by way of learning how it might be outlived. No comparison can say what happened to us. But we can start with the ruins of our similes, and let 'like' move us towards something larger, some understanding of what 'is.'"
(Richard Powers, The Simile, NYT Magazine, 9/23/01)

red pipe

anatomy of a picture

I love this picture.

I love that some of my favorite people in the world are in this picture, enjoying a beautiful Friday evening at a rooftop bar on 32nd Street.

I love that it catches Nick in such animated conversation with Emre and, just barely, with Dave. I love Nick's hand gesture, shaping in front of him, in the space between them, the story that he's telling. I love Emre's amused little smile, and I love that hand looming in from the right, Dave's hand, the hand that seems about to touch us.

I love how these three draw us deeper into the picture, framing Dan and Nathan who are also caught in conversation (a quieter conversation, less animated and more still). There is a comfortableness between these two that comes out of years of friendship and affection, Dan listening intently to what ever it is Nathan is saying, their heads tilted in toward each other.

I love the pink of Emre's drink (campari & seltzer?), and the salty remnants of Nick's margarita.

I love that Dan actually likes this picture of himself, when he hates most pictures of himself.

I love the multiple layers of this picture, the hand drawing us in to Emre, whose glance leads us back to Nick, whose gesture pulls us further in to Nathan, who is engaging with Dan, who sits at rest, and all of this caught up against what looks like a white picket fence, but fourteen stories up from the street, Empire State Building looming to the north, in the middle of midtown, Manhattan.

books

I went book shopping last weekend. This is not something I need to do, ever. I have a fair number of books as it is, and when one's mother has a veritable library in her house and a generosity that knows no bounds, there is even less of a justification for such extravagances.

But I've lost a fair number of books over the years, too. Books dear to me, books that come creeping back in to my mind in odd moments, standing on subway platforms waiting for trains, walking all alone-like down Fort Washington Avenue early in the morning.

Back in college, in between dorm rooms, I had a habit of storing boxes and suitcases and bags of stuff in various people's homes. Most of it I got back. One particular suitcase, though, got left behind in the basement of an old boyfriend's parents' apartment building. Mostly it was school books that were lost when the basement got remodeled and the parents didn't know the suitcase was mine and it went out with the trash, but not all.

My new boyfriend at the time, seeing my heartbreak at this loss, replaced some of the non-school related books for me. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Chaim Potok's The Chosen. Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. Douglas Coupland's Life After God. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and July, July. (Of the last two only the first had been previously adored, but both are autographed especially for me, "To Emily, Peace, Tim O'Brien.")

When that boyfriend moved out a couple years ago our five years of cohabiting inevitably led to both of us losing things we probably considered too much our own. I somehow ended up with the 8" Global chef's knife, and he took with him various books I'd fallen a little bit in love with over the years.

This past April I had to fly out to Seattle for my grandmother's memorial service. I stayed, most of the time I was there, with my Uncle Jim and Aunt Sharon. Sharon took me to a yarn store and though I did the most damage, she fell in love with a hank of Mongolian cashmere that was just about the softest thing in the world. And the colors were straight off the cover of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (Yes, I see the world sometimes as it relates to the covers of books I especially love.)

I got back to New York a few days later hellbent on rereading this Murakami novel, only to discover it had gone the way of so many books when the boy left. Heartbroken all over again, I was ready to call the boy and demand my book back but my mother, visiting for a couple weeks and ever the practical woman, insisted on giving me a new copy rather than letting me embarrass myself yet again.

I decided last weekend, while killing an hour before meeting friends for dinner, that it wasn't an entirely bad idea, this notion of replacing some of those lost books I held so dear. I went to the 83rd Street Barnes & Noble, traipsed around the fiction section, and gathered up Potok's The Promise, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Keri Hulme's The Bone People.

I have not yet actually reread any of these more recent acquisitions but there is a surprisingly wonderful comfort in knowing that they really are mine; that I can carry them with me, and hold them close, and never have to lose them again.

slap

(Erik Mongrain, Airtap)

More Mongrain: Lisbon, Muse, Confusion #8

Kaki King: Goby, Playing With Pink Noise, Bone Chaos in the Castle, Bari Improv. Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers

Michael Hedges: Ritual Dance

rooftop in brooklyn

looking for salvation

underneath

marks

There was a girl I loved back in my adolescent years, though at times it seemed more an act of mutually assured destruction.

Late one night at the diner she pulled up a pant leg to show me the woman's symbol she'd carved into the pale meat of her left calf. I couldn't tell then if she wanted me to oooh and ahhh over the angry red flesh or pull her back from the brink of something I couldn't even see.

I have worn this same mark on my left shoulder these past thirteen years, carved somewhat more professionally into pale freckled skin, ink-tipped needle etching out once crisp black lines & smooth curves, now fuzzy edged and fading to a softer grayish-green.