Instead, I have thus far celebrated my birth by 1) finishing a freelance project. 2) eating a (homemade! with love! Thanks, Sonia and Emily!) red-velvet cupcake. 3) Listening to Wild Light while creating a new blog. So just another day on the H.T.M, it seems.
Mostly, this will not be a blog about life, the universe and everything. Unless, of course, you consider things like music, books, television, movies, writing and politics essential to life, the universe and everything. And if you don't, who are you and how do I know you anyway?
"The world is not enough with us," the poet Denise Levertov said, "Oh taste and see." In honor of a new year (for me, at least) and a new blog, a list of things that make the world worth living. I was going to do one for each year but, as my friend Erica might say, I'm old for trees, and we'd be here all night. Instead, in honor of the Patron Saint of Pop Culure, Nick Hornby, my Top Five, All-Time, Most Memorable:
Things That Make You Happy
1) The Right Music. The Right Moment.
You know it -- not just the perfect love song that comes over the tinny speakers when you're at the top of the Ferris Wheel on a cool summer evening, hoping for your first kiss, but that snatch of Ella Fitzgerald as you stand on a street corner in New York for the first time, breathing in the smell of car exhaust and hot chestnuts and possibilty, that burst of raucous guitar from Joe Strummer as you gun the engine after a long day at the unbearable office, that pure, sweet voice of Dolly Parton when you want to curl up under your covers and cry yourself to sleep. Sometimes, it's the song you didn't even know you know needed, until you're shimmying around your kitchen in your socks, remembering how to get into the groove, or trapped in a vanful of drunken women singing "Maaaaaybe it's the best thing for youuuuuuu, but it's the worstthatcould ha-ah-pen tooooo meeeee" and feeling oh so very loved.
2) The Feel of the Wet Sand Under Your Toes.
It's the first warm day of spring, really warm, and maybe it's a Friday, and you've talked your significant other into a spontanteous drive, or maybe it's a Tuesday and you've called out sick, or maybe you live on the West Coast now, and are always twenty minutes from the ocean, but whatever the circumstances, you find yourself in a car with the radio turned up loud so you can hear the tunes over the roar of the wind through windows left open to catch the first hint of marshy breeze.
You park the car and you walk over the dunes to the beach. It's still early in the season, so you have to take off your shoes and socks -- rookie mistake! -- and leave them in the soft, dry sand. Later in the summer, you won't be able to walk barefoot without burning the soles of your feet, but today, the top layer of sand is pleasantly warm, but when you dig your toes in experimentally, just testing, it's cool and clammy and a little bit mysterious.
You make it to the water line and stand there for a moment. If you live on the West Coast, this is an eternal debate -- too cold? freezing cold? cold enough to hurt? -- but if you're staring out at the gunmetal gray, gentle swells of the Jersey shore, it's the only time you'll wonder all season. You take a breath, and roll up your pants and edge in, closer and closer, until a wave comes up too far and washes over your toes. You gasp at the bite of it, the surprise, but when the wave recedes, your feet are half-buried in the cold sand, your footprints smoothed over in the smooth glass of the shoreline, and you feel something in your heart stutter and swell and you remember every memory, viscerally, of sun and sand and summer.
Two minutes later, you jump back to avoid getting splashed and, later, you complain to your companions about the sand they tracked in your car, but you never forget, not really, that one moment you were perfectly, uncomplicatedly filled with joy.
Or so I've heard.
3) Vista!
There should be some place every day, somewhere on your commute or in your daily ramble around the neighborhood, or on the way to or from your beloved's home, some place that makes your heart soar. If you are not lucky enough to live where "the Pacific Ocean never runs dry," and are thus not blessed with vistas around every corner, it may not be, say, the view from the top of the hill around the corner, with the Bay stretching out in all directions from the hulking cranes of Oakland, but we can't all be that lucky, can we? Still, everywhere I've ever lived -- and I lived in New Jersey, okay? -- there has always been a place that, when I passed it in my daily travels, made me remember for a moment that I was glad to be alive. You should find one.
4) The Perfect Sip.
Much like the elusive Right Song at the Right Moment, the Perfect Sip can vary widely, and of necessity. Sometimes, it's that first taste of coffee in the morning, when your brain hasn't quite glommed on to the fact that you're awake, and your toothpaste makes the cream curdle just a little on your tongue. Sometimes, it's that cold sip of beer hitting the back of your throat on a hot summer day, when you've been outside and your skin is crackling with dried salt and you can't decide whether to summon up the gumption to make a salad for dinner or just say to hell with eat and feed the family a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish (cheddar flavor, natch). Once in a while, it's something bigger -- that sip of cheap, flat champagne the day you get your degree, or your first job, or the big promotion; that familiar taste of too-sweet Coca-cola when you're half-a-world away from home, and determined not to be homesick or be an Ugly American or for one second not be an Amazing, Sophisticated World Traveler. It's always just what you need, when you need it the most.
5) The Go-To Grab Bag
The Philadelphia Story. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted. The ending of Babylon Revisted. "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"
Perhaps for you, the list would look a little bit different -- a little more Waylon Jennings, a little less Katherine Hepburn. The point is that, by the time you hit a certain birthday, you ought to have amassed a number of go-to cures for What Ails You. For me, nothing will cure a funk faster than the lightning-quick banter of Hepburn, Grant and Stewart in The Philadelphia Story; Jimmy Ruffin's voice soaring over the bridge of Motown's finest "Whoa-ooo-oahs;" the heartbreakingly perfect ending of my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald story (actually, that one just makes me cry, but sometimes, you need a cathartic pop-culture cry. Don't judge me.) or the funniest episode of WKRP in Cinncinnati in history.
So maybe it's not a new year for you, but one week after Tax Day, Passover and Easter have all passed us by, what's making you happy?
