welcome, harlem

going home, 12.22.11

I got home from a lovely dinner last night with friends Courtney & Matt, flipped open my cell phone, and found this rather cryptic text message from an unknown number:  "Hey, this is your e."

Visions started dancing through my head of disappointed teenagers frantically looking for little bags of ecstasy, not knowing that a friend had it thanks to messaging gone awry.

Evan, being oh so pragmatic and recognizing the area code for a Seattle number, said it was probably Stepbrother Erik just wanting to make sure I had his number since he'll be picking us up at SeaTac tomorrow afternoon.

Hours later, and from the same number, a follow-up text message clarifying that indeed e was he, Erik, my brother, and that he will see us tomorrow.

It made me smile so, the simplicity of his first message, and it made me think of Pooh and Piglet and one of my favorite moments in literature ever.

And I suppose, in the reciprocal way these things go, that I must be his e, too. And am so very, very glad of it.

in which emma enters the modern age

I was rambling to Nick at a friend's party the other night about recently making a mix, and about how it involved compressing songs into a zipfile and then uploading said zipfile to Dropbox and then sending people the URL so they could listen to this mix I'd been so arduously putting together. I was very pleased with myself over my grasp of this alien vocabulary, but as I rambled on I noticed Nick beginning to look at me rather oddly.  Finally, after I'd run out of words, he just said, "Yes, that's how it's done these days. Why are you talking as if every word is underlined?"

I, abashed, went in search of another round of drinks.

bridge, 12.17.11

'observing her mother...'

"Observing her mother with her adopted daughter at the beach one day, the author muses: 'It made me think of girls -- little girls, teenage girls, even old girls like me -- who at one point or another discover, like all girls do, their sadness.'"
(Hilton Als, New Yorker, on Diane Keaton's new book Then Again)

going home, 12.9.11

(This did not bode well for 11:30pm on a Friday, though we lucked 
out and the A came within five minutes.)

'pokey the tortoise rings the bell on the transom...'

Some Cats I know

Pokey the tortoise

Rings the bell on the transom

Runs away laughing.

Nora the buzz

Nail in the coffin of love

Under cover in a ball.

Ernest the tub

Knocks over a jar of water

Steps daintily in broken glass.

Olive the small

Asleep, face in food dish

Wakes up for a homemade racecar.

Zora the elemental

Observes bubbles rising

As the dishwasher hums below.

Adelaide, minicat

Head cocked always,

Vietnamese or simply thoughtful?

Milo the stretch

Peeks out the window

But he wasn’t looking for me.

Zeke the kitten

Held up by a gauzy curtain

Gnawing at its threads.

Duncan the elder

Died at 21, was replaced

By a strapping tabby.

Llama causes trouble

Only when the knits come out,

Lying on the blocked yarn.

Ericat is me,

Cat with thumbs and

Restless sleepy spirit.

(Erica Sklar, 2011)

woolish things

Firstly, two new pieces finished and available in my Etsy shop:

beaded burgundy lace shawl

ruby red lace wrap

Lastly, and most excitingly, I was chosen as a featured artist today on Misanthropy Creations!

spotify, or, yet another stick in the craw of romance

Evan asked me over dinner last night what I was smiling about, and I had to confess that I'd been writing a blog post in my head. I had been thinking about what a lovely evening we were having, and what a treat it was to come home to the smell of bread baking in the oven, a glass of home-fermented hard cider, and Gillian Welch playing on the radio.

Except of course she wasn't playing on the radio, and somehow the thought of writing about the loveliness of her dulcet tones playing on Spotify just didn't have the same ring to it.

And this is what was making me smile as I munched on the most delicious grilled cheese sandwich ever.

"and the radio is counting down the top 20 country songs..."

"like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays..."

meeting molly, or, what's in a name (take II)

An old friend of mine recently relocated once again to New York City, this time hopefully for good (or at least for more than a month or two). He asked if we'd like to meet him and his friend Molly for dinner yesterday evening, and we said yes, we would like to very much.

After making these dinner arrangements it occurred to me that I have known two Mollies in my life, and that they have both been incredible women, and that I was ridiculously excited at the thought of meeting a brand new person at least in part because of her name.

Well, my excitement was well-founded, as it turns out, and clearly Mollies are just inherently interesting people. It didn't hurt that this particular Molly loves the Muppets, plays the fiddle, and practically crawled under the table to admire my new boots, about which I was rhapsodizing.

Also, she and Gary really seem to like each other, and that's enough to make anyone happy.

what's in a name

Years ago, late one night and most likely aided by a glass or two of wine, Nathan and I got into an odd and lilting conversation about baby names. We both wanted "William." I argued that as the firstborn child, I should get dibs on the name. Nathan, ever the logical one, argued that which ever of us had a son first should get the name.

Eventually, in our intoxicated and intoxicating sentimentality, we decided that maybe we could both lay claim to the name, and that it wouldn't be the end of the world for two cousins to answer to Bill.

I remember the conversation feeling very abstract, in that particular way that conversations about not entirely impossible but definitely far-off and hard-to-imagine things feel.

Nathan called me in early September to tell me that Shanna is pregnant, and that come next April they will be parents.

I was surprised at how sad I felt at first, upon getting this phone call.  I got off the phone that night and sobbed myself to sleep, which seemed such a shameful and horrible way to greet such lovely news that I've tried not to think about it too much.

Cousin Eric sent me a couple old pictures last week, from a sailing trip on his parents' boat that happened a quarter of a century ago. I wasn't expecting these pictures, and had to catch my breath after opening his email. And it struck me then, in that moment of not being able to breathe, where this initial sadness had come from.

I am so very happy for Nathan, adored baby-brother-mine, and his lovely Shanna and their impending parenthood, and I am so very happy at the thought of being aunt to their child. But also there is the realization that our father will never know this child, will never be known by this child, and will never watch his own child become a father -- something I know he would have watched with boundless joy.

And so I find myself crying for them: for these two wonderful and beautiful men and the loss of an experience that they should have shared, had things gone a little differently with the world.

I imagine, if Nathan and Shanna should have a son, that he will be impish and curly-haired and glowing, as his father and grandfather have been before him, and that perhaps he will carry with him his grandpa's exuberant grin if not his grandpa's name.

november music (fragments)

Jill and Evan and I went to Brooklyn Bowl last week to see Mike Doughty. They were surprised, I think, at how middle-aged he is, or how similar all of his songs are, or something. They are not wrong in this assessment (as Jill so concisely put it, after hearing some of his old stuff, "I guess weird dissipates with age?"). Weirdness also dissipates, sometimes, with being sober, and with being content, and maybe with being happy, and I still can't help but love him, even if half his songs sound like they might be the intro to Circles. (Here is some old Mike, and here is a some new(er) Mike, and here is an actual music video off his latest record!)

I recently discovered this little gem (and am apparently one of the last people on the planet to do so, given its YouTube views), and pretty much want to listen to it all the time:



Nathan recently sent me a mix (by which I mean, in this amazing modern age, that he sent me a URL and I went to said URL and downloaded a zipfile, then unzipped said zipfile and imported it into my itunes -- with Evan's tutelage because I am technologically phobic and sadly ill-informed). One particular song, this weird and gorgeous thing, is currently my commuting music of choice. I put my headphones on, turn up the volume, and stare aggressively out the train windows (preferably the front-most window, out of which one can stare at the oncoming tracks, and which is closest to the door most convenient for my subway stop).

I am slowly putting together a birthday mix for a recently reconnected old friend.  I find myself wanting to somehow capture in it the twelve years of our silence, but I've been working at narrowing things down.  Just because these new-fangled technologies don't have the built-in limitations of TDK cassette tapes doesn't necessarily mean anyone wants three hours of your favorite tunes, after all.  Some of the things that aren't making the cut: Singuila's Mektoubi, from my French/African hiphop phase; Tricky's take on the Cure (mostly because the studio version isn't nearly as creepy or as gorgeous as this); a nearly 20-minute long live recording of Built to Spill's Broken Chairs, because though it captures a certain early-20s angst, who wants to hear twenty minutes of someone else's rage, elegantly and heartbreakingly jagged as it might be?

bridge, 11.26.11

'someone i loved once...'

The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep, I dreamed this poem.)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

(Mary Oliver)