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Sunday, July 22, 2018

happy places

You'll always feel the same, you'll just keep getting older.

-Nora Ephron

Trout Lake age 8





Atlantic City, age 6

backyard tree age 12



I didn't get to write yesterday because we went back to Asbury Park for the morning and the rest of the day was filled with the mundane follow-up to this simple pleasure: sweeping up sand, unloading wet towels and bathing suits, laundry, cooking, resting, and being with V apres-beach, although he remained relatively content for the rest of the day. For him, his bed and the dining room table are also happy places. 

The week had more downs than ups but since I'm working on reframing (a cognitive technique for viewing and experiencing events and emotions to find more positive alternatives) I'd call it a wash. There were two last minute very nice lunches out: one with an old work friend and one with cousins, I had a few nice swims and I did a lot of housework - not fun but satisfying.  I won't even go into the rough parts because I'll get over them and I find repeating narratives can get me stuck in the anxiety and stress they elicit. 

Looking up "happy place" I see it has an app version(what doesn't?) for depression and anxiety, and it leads me down a rabbit hole of all sorts of apps with names like calm and happify. I generally find all these algorithm-generated wellness tools, in their effort to be efficient and user-friendly, tend to downplay the nuance and messiness of life, but I download one called Pacifica to give it a try. A lot of it is annoying and unhelpful - I really don't want to listen to guided meditations with a robotic voice -  but there are a few good cognitive therapy/mindfulness type exercises that are useful, like.a tool to name your feeliings, which provides a good visual reminder that a range of emotions and experiences co-exist: that any moment, like any week, has a mix of happy places and miserable locales..  And it helps me remember that this is a universal, shared phenomenon: that the seemingly content comfortable people I see all around me have struggles, and those who are clearly struggling have moments of joy or peace, even if it's limited to french fries or a TV show...there's generally something that will have you saying yum or yes, that will make you happy to be alive, even if you can't name it or realize it at the time.   




Another good but grueling task this week has been going through bins of papers and photos in an effort to declutter.   Most of the papers are related to V and bring up a lot of grief, disappointment and anger. It's always jarring to physically witness that the the amount of paperwork V generates (and the time and money it represents) is at least 10 times that of his brother. Only in the boxes of photos do the boys equalize: love, beauty, growth - pictures that fill me with joy and laughter and wistfulness. 

There are as well a smattering from my own childhood, pictured above. Happy place #1 a picture of me and my dad from my favorite two weeks of the year: Trout Lake in the Poconos.  The cottage on the lake. the smell of the mountains. The rowboats. Entirely free days to swim and run around and play games with the other kids I'd see every year.  The weekly dinner at Besecker's Diner.  It was absolute perfection, and proof you don't need a lot of money to have a great vacation.  I wish so much I could have given something so wonderful to my own kids and I'm still struggling to accept that it didn't work out that way.
Happy place # 2: Atlantic City, where we'd take day trips to the beach and to visit my aunt and uncle who lived there, long days of sunshine followed by delicious home-cooked dinners. My mom and sister are in there but it mostly seems a photo of sand which I obviously found a lot of fun. Nothing changes - kids still can spend whole days at the beach where time disappears. The only difference is we now wear sunscreen, no one trudges through the sand with a huge container of ice cream over their shoulders yelling "Fudgy Wudgies!" and families cart a lot more stuff.  But the smell and sounds and sensations stay the same and whether you call it the beach or the shore for most of us it remains a happy place.

Last is the tree in the backyard where I grew up.  We have beautiful trees in our yard now, but none for climbing. I haven't scaled a tree in decades and don't know that I safely could anymore, but I remember the pride and joy I felt at my agility in clambering up that tree and how it would so kindly hold me in the crook of its branches where I could sit and read. 


The Nora Ephron quote is from an interview in today's NY Times Magazine with Parker Posey  (geez, the indie queen of my 30's is 49!)  and while it's a true and wonderful quote: what brings us joy, what makes us scared or sad, the core of who we are stays the same - it's also not.  The nature and texture of those feelings alter over time based on our experience and how much we can relax into the impermanence of it all. 

The happy places in my happy childhood were heightened pleasures but not dramatically removed from the tenor of daily life. They were joyous interludes, not respites or escapes from an arduous job or hostile environment. None of those words or experiences were in my vocabulary, thankfully.  I lost myself in enjoyment but never stopped to name it like now when I find myself sitting in the sand with a loving script: I am sooo grateful to be here at the ocean and what a relief to be somewhere no one stares at us and the sky is so beautiful and the water so warm and I am so very lucky.  Yes, I feel the same but I feel more, for better and worse.  And when I return to my messy demanding housebound life I try to find that happy place - however fleeting - on my plate or the page or a screen or under a tree or as I write this, staring out the window at a stream of rain..    



Saturday, July 14, 2018

Thai boys, French men and Everyone else


And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

- Song of Myself, Walt Whitman (1892)

Let's start with the Thai boys rescue because. Of course. Finally a feel-good story. The world comes together, superheroes rescue a young soccer team and their coach in a grueling, complex operation involving superbly trained divers from around the world in a feat of astonishing teamwork. The physical and geologic challenges enthralled the world, but the spiritual and emotional components are equally compelling. 

After his parents died in Myanmar when he was a young boy, the coach entered the Buddhist monkhood, where he lived for nearly a decade, a common option for destitute orphans. During their long ordeal in the cave, he taught the boys to meditate so they could pass the time without stress. Many believe that helped them to survive. The parents of the boys forgave the coach. (Can you imagine a group of American soccer moms doing the same?!)  Three of the trapped players are, like their coach, stateless ethnic minorities. One of them played a crucial role as interpreter to British divers since he was proficient in English, Thai, Burmese, Mandarin and Wa.  Wow all around.

There's so much to celebrate and embrace in this narrative, yet it also raises some serious questions: Why does a tale of 12 boys get more attention than the world's 12 million refugees under the age of 18?  As the bioethicist Peter Singer explains in a letter in the NY Times, "Juxtaposed with this personal and institutional generosity [of working to save the boys] is our collective failure to save the approximately 7,500 children under 5 who die every day [emphasis mine] of preventable or treatable diseases...Malaria alone kills 1,000 children a day and yet just $2 for insecticide-treated bednets can prevent two people from contracting the disease." So why don't we band together the same way to help them?

It's because the more people who are suffering in a crisis, the harder it is for people to become engaged in their stories. That's because of a phenomenon known as psychic numbing: As the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy,our willingness to help, reliably decreases.  Even writing this I feel like a spoilsport...can't we just celebrate this uplifting story and not think about the rest? The weight of bad news right now is absolutely soul crushing.

And so we rejoice that the boys are healing well. It is because they are futballers we are told, young athletes in excellent shape. But it is as much their background and experiences that make them resilient and strong - disaster preparedness is woven into their DNA. The heroic boys are invited to watch their own heroes at the World Cup finale, but their doctors say they will not be able to make it because of risk of infection.

They will watch from their hospital beds, with millions of other viewers around the globe who will view the unlikely showdown between Croatia, the country with a population less than 1/10th the size of Thailand, and the Black, Blanc, Beur [black, white, Arab]  members of Les Bleus (France), a brilliant young team composed of roughly 50% African immigrants, many of them Muslim, young men from Morroco,Senegal,Mali, Algeria, Mauritania and Guinea   My favorite Mbappe, the 19 year old phenom, has a father from Cameroon and a mother from Algeria. Their legions of fans cheer them on, even as the country they represent faces growing normalization of those who spew hatred and violence against the banliesards [the out of towners]. 


We share a political climate where the haters are emboldened, the result of our own psychic numbing. In LA,  a 92 year old Mexican man visiting his family is brutally beaten with a brick, and told to go home.  A Latina wearing a shirt with the Puerto Rican flag is told to go home by a belligerent drunk who, like many Americans, doesn't realize that people from PR are US citizens. Children are ripped from their parents in the most revoltingly inhumane way.  One awful story after the next...
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But on Sunday I will join the Thai boys and millions of men, women and children around the globe to watch the astonishing teamwork and fierce rivalry at the World Cup. A world both vividly generous and unfathomably cruel and indifferent.  The opposite of numb is engaged, interested, responsive. I hope we can make that a gooooaaaallll for the year ahead.
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Saturday, July 7, 2018

all together now/all by ourselves/all together



July 4th is my least favorite holiday, my friend says, and it's a relief that someone else feels the same way and isn't afraid to admit it. As is usually the case with holidays that veer far from their origins,  this has nothing to do with the day itself -  the celebration of our independence is truly wonderful, but like so many holidays it's become about something else. (Do we really memorialize those who died serving our country on Memorial Day or embrace the labor movement on Labor Day?)  In its modern incarnation it's about being with others: BBQs and fireworks or relaxing vacations away somewhere, the culmination of all the themes of seasonal commercials where throngs of young people drink beer on the beach while effusively singing and dancing together, or some airbrushed multicultural mix of families enjoy whatever the product is: Coke. hot dogs. Home Depot'ed decks. Old Navy shorts.
For many years it's been one of the loneliest of days. We can't participate in the public parts: the parades or fireworks, the town picnic; and harder still, we don't get invited to any of the private parties I see walking around the neighborhood or when out for a drive, or hear and smell while I work in the garden.  I find the first green beans in their fecund hiding place while smelling barbecues and hearing music from the family behind us and  the annual pool party of my neighbor up the street and I struggle to stay grounded in the momentary joy of discovery.

Social rejection and isolation never feel stronger than on this day, with independence's lonelier definition: dissociated from others. Eventually I head inside to shut off the world around me and binge on Killing Eve, a BBC series starring the beautiful yet relatable 46 year old Sandra Oh because shows about psychopathic assassins (is there any other kind?) are so engrossing and I can say, well, things could be worse, at least no one is trying to murder me.  It's not nearly as fun as fireworks but it's highly entertaining if you have nowhere to go.

July 3rd and 5th are another story altogether - bookends of city and beach, two places that embrace everyone, at least for the day, since both have become too prohibitively expensive to actually inhabit. Oh the irony that Asbury Park, the town I have visited for most of my life, from its depressed abandoned state to its astonishing renewal, has become too expensive for more than a day trip!   Who could have imagined the decrepit old Howard Johnson's being a hipster nightclub, the majestic yet long-abandoned Convention Hall (a term I just heard in reference to Detroit - ruin porn - seems apt) now housing cold brew coffee and overpriced artsy fare, and the boardwalk selling Korean tacos and fresh cut fries alongside all the ice cream and salt water taffy of my youth.  But for all the gentrification it's still a typical inclusive beach: for five dollars it welcomes anyone and everyone.



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Any vestige of the 4th's social rejection vanishes as we become one with the blocks-long spread of humanity converging in the sand on a perfect beach day. V is back to loving the ocean, to the point of having to be almost forcibly pulled out when it's time to go.  We arrive early and leave early, with no traffic, no worries, and I come home feeling a good kind of tired. 


And the day before the 4th we are in the city, V does great on the train and subway and walking around. While he still has a hard time with crowds he somehow has always tolerated the density and spectacle of city life, where he lived his first four years. 
He can sense that no one pays him any mind in the best sense - no staring at the teen in the noise reducing headphones on the platform, the overgrown kid on a playground of wood - age-appropriate for anyone who likes to climb, eating sweet potato fries on a park bench like any other sweaty hungry park visitor. 
We go in to see and let him hang out with a former babysitter who we've known since she was a college student of B's age, now in her 20's  and living in Harlem with her boyfriend while attending Columbia for her MSW.  doing well and doing good, successful and down to earth, a wining combo.  It's so nice to see her and to be on familiar turf:

The Harlem Meer and Conservatory Garden in Central Park, the Museum of the City of New York. Even with the enormous gentrification of one of my favorite neighborhoods, it's not entirely whitewashed. We eat West Indian food in East Harlem, and I try to remain hopeful that its longstanding cultures, color, spice and roots will remain intact.

An exhibit at the Museum on public art is a sort of ' unexpected 'this is your life': programs and people I've worked with, interviewed, written about, funded or supported in some way.  I really don't want to live in the past or emphasize the gaps between then and now but sometimes it just hits me like a wave.  For nearly two decades you were a part of something and now you are not. 
It's why the plants in the garden are so healing, a constant reminder that there is something bigger we are a part of,  no matter how sparse our social or professional life becomes. Things keep growing. We find a way to survive, and eventually, with a lot of work and forgiveness and acceptance and patience, to thrive.  I'm not there yet.  But I've lived through the week and this morning the birds are singing and the forecast says brilliant sunshine; beautiful.