The World Is Not Enough With Us, Oh Taste and See

It's Valentine's Day.

It’s warm and sunny and fresh in Oakland, and spring is beginning. There are riots of colored flowers, and that creeping gardenia/magnolia/seasalt/summersand scent of California is back on the wind. It’s starting to overtake the wet dog/wet cedar/wet eucalyptus smell of the winter.

Of all the things that have changed in my life, the seasons are the ones that still have the ability to throw me off-kilter. It’s like earthquakes: the ground should not move beneath your feet. The seasons should happen the same way they always have, spring follow winter follows autumn follows summer. The seasons are immutable, unchanging. Like the sea.

Except the sea I once stared at was the gentle grey swell of the Atlantic. Now it is the thundering boom of the Pacific, blue and austere. The seasons here are not the same. They are wet and dry, cool and cooler, sweater-in-the-morning weather or sweater-at-night weather. The world is so vastly different across the continent, across the ocean, around the corner.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop right now, drinking too-sweet coffee and watching flocks of seagulls – minus the funky haircuts – wheel over the lake. I’m surrounded by friends, people I love, engaged in that pastime of the chattering classes – writing retreat/blogging workshop/typing with purpose. We are together and alone.

I have things I want to say. I have work I need to do. I have deadlines. I have this moment, and all moments.

I’m thinking about Valentine’s Day.

I always joke that I grew up in an agnostic household. My parents, married for 40 years now, never celebrated. They thought it was a waste of time. Love is the every day. It’s flowers on a Wednesday afternoon, it’s doing the dishes when your spouse is bone-tired, it’s watching football when you’d rather be watching anything else. Love is life. Big gestures aren’t the same as small miracles.

So Valentine’s Day never seems like a big deal to me, even when I’m alone. It’s a Hallmark holiday, a calendar day of Mandatory Fun, like New Year’s Eve, or the Superbowl. It’s love as fascist state, where the currency is tight red roses and ashy drugstore chocolate and crushed expectations.

Eros, or romantic love, is the kind Valentine’s Day is meant to celebrate. Fiery passion, head-over-heels infatuation, the love that’s celebrated in story and song, the kind that’s made Julia Roberts and her rom-com sweethearts a truckload of money, that’s the only love the Valentine’s Day fascists will suffer.

But the Greeks, the immoderate, intemperate Greeks, had four words for love.

Storge, or filial love, is the love of obligation. Parents are obligated to feel affection for their children. Children are obligated to respect their elders. It’s the love of basic human decency. It’s a love that’s so basic that it sometimes get dismissed as unimportant, or feels like a burden more than a gift.

But a child’s first Valentine is often her father or his mother, the person who loved them first, and best, the person who said, as God once said of Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” It’s the love that gives you roots, and wings. It’s the love that lets you send your own love out into the universe, in your time.

Philia is the love of friendship and affection. In a world where we move across the country, across the world, around the corner, in a world where our seasons change and our oceans change, our friends are often where we get our support, our everyday love.

If you’re single, those friendships can make the world a better place. They can mean the difference between living a life and suffering through it. If you’re married, they can be vital reminders of the person you once were outside of a union, a thread that lets you hold on to the tiny core of a person you keep deep inside. People say “my friends are my family,” but too often they forget that with philia comes storge: that you have to nurture and honor your friendships in the same way you celebrate and crave romantic love.

The final Greek word for love is agape. I grew up in the Catholic Church, where this kind of love is sometimes called “pure” love and sometimes called sacrificial love. It’s the love that Jesus supposedly felt that allowed him to give up his life on the cross. It’s love as self-abnegation. The gift is in subsuming oneself completely for another’s benefit.

That seems a bit much for most people. I can’t imagine that – outside of those idle moments in childhood Catechism classes when Catholic kids all over the world dream up scenarios in which they staunchly defend their faith and die bloody, but noble, deaths – most people spend a lot of time hoping they can give up their whole lives, their whole selves, for someone else.

If this is pure love, then most modern people are with Mae West, hoping to be as pure as the driven slush. It’s a harsh and demanding kind of love, at least on paper.

In actuality, people practice it every day. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter – they get a lot of press. But we forget that selfless love can be small and personal, too. Let that car merge on the freeway. Do the dishes when your spouse is tired. Watch football when you’d rather watch anything else. Small gestures are big miracles.

I claim Valentine’s Day for my own. I celebrate all kinds of everyday love. I love the warm sun and the too-sweet coffee and the women who surround me. I love my family and friends, near and far, virtual and “IRL.” I love the world, and my little corner of it. I love my life, and the chance to make it better every day.

The world is vast. It contains universes. It is tiny. It contains 40 inches of snow. It contains the scent of California.

It is enough.

Love, and in the words of the wisest philosophers of our times, be excellent to one another.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Either Way There Is A Light On

Heh. Go big or . . . go to sleep for half a year. That's our motto here at The Real Broads.

Blogspot reminded me -- forcefully -- today, that it was time to make an update, so I thought I'd take the first day of the last month of the year to do so, and to promise that updates will be more regular and varied in the coming year.

This is second day of Advent, the favorite season of my (lapsed) Catholic heart. I love the idea that it's an entire month devoted not just to anticipation, but to preparation, to getting ready. So many times, what matters most in our lives changes in a matter of moments. I like the idea that one time a year we try to slow down, even as the world around us is hurling towards the holidays -- towards the year's end -- and think about what is to come.

Earlier today, my friend E was talking about Christmas music, and the search for a song during this time of year that speaks to all the parts of that feeling -- a longing for what you remember about your childhood Christmases, a desire for new music that isn't cheesy, and doesn't make you want to stab yourself in the eye, a way to speak to the parts of you that are lost and lonely and aching for meaning. It made me think about what kind of music speaks to me during this time of the year that's all about longing.

For the last few holiday seasons, my favorite Christmas song by far has been Katryna and Nerissa Nields' Christmas Carol.

The song builds off the titles of several well-known Christmas hymns to tell the tale of a woman who's at a crossroads in her life, waiting for her partner "across town in [the] hotel room" to decide the fate of their relationship. Despite the grim subject matter, the song is upbeat, and the lyrics are hopeful.

What strikes me most about it, though, is the last verse:

I'm driving home and it starts snowing
I hum a carol to the night
You fall apart because you're growing
Unfolding slowly towards the light
And there's a light on in my window
Did I leave it on, or have you come home?
Either way there is a light on
Either way we're turning towards the sun

That's the feeling that Advent always captures for me. The year is coming to a close, the world is falling apart around our ears, but at the same time, the world is moving away from darkness, back towards the sun, towards a new year. In the same way, we can move from where we are to where we want to be.

Advent celebrates possibility; it's the Schrodinger's cat of holiday seasons. All things are possible.

It's also the season of bravery. We reach out because we are afraid to be alone. We make a change because it hurts too much to remain the same. We open ourselves to others, unfolding slowly towards the light, because we have things we want to say, we have gifts within ourselves we want to give. But however much we want them, those are hard things to do, to offer, and so we prepare ourselves for that moment when we can stand on the precipice and leap.

I've spent much of the last few years reinventing myself, preparing myself to make that leap into a great unknown. All that I knew or thought I wanted was taken away, and what was left was possibility.

The journey matters. The waiting matters. But the important thing, to me, is that at the end, however you get there, there is light.

Either way there is a light on
Either way we're turning towards the sun

Welcome! Come and Knock on Our Door!

Some people celebrate the day of their birth with trips to Hawaii and days at the spa. Those people do not live here. Nor do they quote the immortal lyrics of the theme from Three's Company in their introductary posts.

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?