The Third of Three Valentines...

Every mom needs...

a friend to take walks with

a friend to shop with

a friend to have lunch with

friends who have no kids, to keep her real

friends who have older children, so she'll remember not to sweat the small stuff

friends who have younger children, so she can re-experience those early days in all their messy glory

friends to talk shop with, whether that shop is of the motherhood variety, or of the career pursuasion

Happy Valentine's Day (better a day late than never) to all the women who make up my life.

The Second of Three Valentines

This morning, I threaded my way through traffic to the dentists' office, completely on my own, no offspring with me; sat myself down in the hygienist's chair only to discover that it had been over a year and a half since I last showed up there. Apparently taking your children to the dentist religiously, slavishly, punctually to the dentist every 5.9 months does not, through some interesting osmosis, translate into clean teeth for Mom.

Just in case you thought otherwise.

Hygienist Sarah remedied that state of affairs and was even quite nice about it, conceding that I was in pretty good shape, all things considered (or rather, my teeth were).

That taken care of, I heighed myself back into traffic, tuning into AM 1690 ("The Voice of the Arts") for the drive home.

AM 1690 used to be AirAmerica, and then it wasn't, and then I stopped listening to it while I was driving, and then recently I found it again in a Come-to-Jesus moment occasioned by the fact that as I was fiddling with the car radio, they played "I'm Working for the Man,"

(Oh, well, I'm picking em up and I'm laying em down
I believe he's gonna work me into the ground
I pull to the left, I heave to the right
I oughta kill him but it wouldn't be right
Roy Orbison, 1970)

and since then, whenever I end up at the 1690 end of the dial, the dj's playing a song by the Rondells or a rousing rendition of "Roumania, Roumania or something else that makes a perfect soundtrack for the movie-of-life.

Today being Friday, the song was "Roumania, Roumania, (they play it every Friday at a certain time) and the fact that the album it's from is called From Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs 1914-1950 tells you everything you need to know: klezmer music makes the six-lane stretch of Interstate 75/85 through downtown Atlanta downright cinemagraphic.

Previous posts long ago made it clear just how often I depend on the car radio for moments that transcend the mundane.

This morning, the sky was all wisps of blue and cotton batting. Laid out underneath it was the ornate strutwork of the city; the skyscrapers built the past few years already become such a stairstepping bar graph — charting what exactly?

Oh Atlanta, real honest-to-god cities laugh at your pretensions, wouldn't even bother to call you a city at all. But I love the way your commuter trains trundle and clank, over asphalt that comes together and parts and merges, a clotted molten river, particularly during morning and afternoon drive-time.

Here in this sprawling southern city, life is mostly flicker and ebb we prefer to remain sealed off from in our cars: slag-heap and shanty, weeds and tattered plastic bags, even the elegant Tilt-A-Whirl of the buildings downtown and their chill, translucent spires, the looping trajectory of headlights sinuous around them like some welder’s arc-light.

Years ago, before children, I worked for a while in a law office downtown and took MARTA to get there. Every morning, the doors of the train parted and I stepped forward, hobbled by high heels and skirt. On the train, I swayed, half-asleep, always facing forward, moving toward employment I had to have but didn’t much like.

But once, an elderly man slipped back through the train’s automatic doors to rescue the glove dropped by a crying child onto the platform. Once, the car I stepped into was so still and hushed that it felt almost holy, seemed as full of silence as the pause and pulse of breath, drawn in, before a choir starts singing.

Oh, how did it happen, that I could feel so much for a particular city? That it could become home?

The First of Three Valentines

Man o man, I wish I'd written this — Judith Warner's column for today from the NYTimes.

I might, in fact, have a bit of a crush on the woman who can write like this.

Not Women's Work, not Men's Work, just... Work

Last night I sat and watched President Obama's press conference — feeling such a moment of awe and pride during that measured second when he settled himself at the podium before he began:  we did that, America, we did, for a moment we transcended who we usually are and became something so much larger — and then I sat down at the computer and emailed my senators, Isakson and Chambliss, asking them in no uncertain terms to vote for the economic stimulus plan.  

Will it do any good?  

If by "good" we're asking if those two will vote for the plan,  probably not.

Does that mean I shouldn't have bothered?  

Asking that does as little good as wondering about trees that fall in forests and who hears them, and whether they might make a sound as they come crashing to the ground. 

Spring Fever

It shouldn't have arrived yet, but it has, though maybe it'll abandon us again before the month's done:  Spring.  It comes, bearing gifts, and crocus (croci?) to nestle in the still-wintery beds. The mockingbirds are, this morning, rejoicing:  the sap is running in the maple that graces the lefthand corner of our yard.  

It seems absurd to sit here in front of this screen in the face of this shy excess.  

I cut my teeth on spring, varietal Georgian.  In fact, if spring in this neck of the woods were, truly, a varietal (not that I know jack about wine), it would have to be a prosecco or that Portuguese sort known as Vinho Verde.  

Spring in the bit of earth I call home is a green wine, effervescent, astringent. It goes down easy. There are always things to be done, but me, I'm off to take a heady early-morning sip.     

Reading Lists, Redux

This time last year, I was more than happy to take up blog-space (and bore my friends and relations) by documenting what books sat on the nightstand, hungry to be read*  — and my good intentions regarding them.

Resolutions are made to be broken.  Lists are made to be lost. I would say about a third of those books actually got read. I But lately I've been squirreling away a whole new stack as if I'm expecting some late-winter blizzard to keep me house-bound for months.  

But I shall read them all this year, each and every one of them, I swear:

The Feast of Love  Charles Baxter

Lark and Termite Jayne Anne Phillipps

Last Night at the Lobster Stewart O'Nan

The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri David Bajo

Jarhead Anthony Swofford

Operation Homecoming:

Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home 

Front, in the Words of U.S. 

Troops and Their Families Andrew Carroll, editor

Chemistry and 

Other Stories Ron Rash

Madeleine is Sleeping Sarah Bynum

Netherland Joseph O'Neill

*I was also happy to set the goal of finishing the draft of a novel by the end of 2008, and see how far that got me (uhhh, 50 pages in?). 

In Our Times

This morning, during breakfast, during that brief eye of the hurricane between squabbles over who gets to hold which cereal box, the spillage of orange juice and shouts from the male half of the parenting duo of "come on!  come on!", Elder Girleen posed the following question to her younger sister:

Hey, P, what do you want to be when you grow up?

If the face of a three-and-a-half year old can exhibit complete and utter disdain, Younger Girleen's did at that moment.  

I DON'T WANT TO GROW UP, she replied and that settled the question. 

This may be the most sensible answer to this question that I've ever heard; in fact, as I multi-tasked between feeding myself, feeding others, drinking coffee, sneaking a look at yesterday's NY Times Book Review, making nutritious lunches to be schlepped to school and emptying the dishwasher, I doffed my hat to her.

I'm sure that if I sat down and devoted three hours to thinking about it, I probably could set some laudable goals a la Your Best Year Yet, mentioned last post, and I must admit that the  thought of doing so appeals to the adult section of my brain, the same side that couldn't stop itself from picking up a copy of The Mom's Day Planner! at a stationary store the other day.*  

I started making lists when I was a freshman in college, and the fact that the Husband can get through his life without doing so blows my tiny mind (practically the first thing out of my mouth when he received the employment boot was maybe you should make a list...)** 

I will teach myself to play the guitar; I will double the size of the garden; I will finish the novel; I will be a better mom/daughter/spouse/neighbor; I will resume my role as community gadfly until the City, distressed or not, breaks ground on the playground promised our neighborhood; I will make more money; I will sell myself better; I will paint the house; I will...

I've run out of breath.  

But there is something, also, to be said, for being completely at home in the skin you inhabit right this minute.  

Ours is a culture seduced by transformation (and by success, but that's another story),*** and I'm a sucker for the modern fairy tales (What Not to Wear, where Cinderella becomes a princess every single time; Super Nanny, where the dysfunctional family becomes a sane one in just four days...) as much as the next girl, but this year, I think I'd rather take a page from Younger Girleen's book. 

Here's to being no one other than the person you are, right this second.  

*Did she buy it; did she not?  Only the Shadow knows!

** Of course, those freshman in college lists were practically elegant haikus:

quit smoking

write

finish reading Moby Dick for AmLit

*** The fact that transformation often involves spending money bears thinking about:  how much of our lust for transformation has to do with keeping consumer spending levels up?