At the end of Nia class this morning, I checked my phone for texts and saw this one from Mia: “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d sub an 11 o’clock yoga class for us, LOL.” She has a summer internship at the YWCA of Cambridge, as part of a fellowship in not-for-profit leadership she received from the Forest Foundation. She works there to support their programs providing housing, food, and programming for local women and girls. Their yoga teacher cancelled last minute.
”Sure,” I texted back. I love that she thought to ask me. I’ve been meaning to visit her work site, having heard much from her this summer about their great work meeting a huge range of women’s needs. Plus, I’m already anticipating her departure back to college in California; too fast, too fast these summer days have flown by with her at home! So I don’t squander opportunities to be around her, or to show her I love her.
She met me at the reception desk, and we walked over to the women’s residence together. At first I thought they wanted me to teach Nia, but I saw the space and met a student, an older lady who told me she has difficulty feeling her feet and moving her hands. Mia clarified: this was to have been a chair yoga class. Aaaah. No problem: this was a job for Ageless Grace Brain Fitness, which is taught seated. “Party in a chair,” I like to say. It’s really fun.
We sat in a circle and played to music, shaking our limbs to Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line,” clapping to different beat counts as Michael Franti sang “Say Hey!,” having a seated dance party to Abba’s “Mamma Mia,” which I added at the last minute when someone asked “Are you Mia’s mama?” — launching us into a discission of the cheesy but wonderful new movie. The students—MaryBeth in her bathrobe and Barbara with her broken heart and achy feet, plus Mia and two game colleagues from the administration,—were lively and playful, tossing out comments and ideas, joining in with a freedom and joy that I’ve come to expect whenever I teach Ageless Grace. Still, it’s always such a delight to midwife it into being.
At the end of class, Barbara, who is vulnerable and bright such that I wondered what life challenges brought her to live at the residence, told me she could feel her feet for the first time in a long time. “My heart is full of love,” she said.
I gave her a hug and she looked surprised. Maybe I shouldn’t have touched her—one can no longer assume hugs are welcome. But she smiled shyly.
”Mine, too,” I told her.
gratitude 29
We took a jaunt up Route 128 this afternoon to visit Wingaersheek Beach, followed by dinner at a tiny restaurant on the water in Annisquam, a quirky oceanfront village just around the coast from Gloucester. Being on a vacation, John had it in his head that the beach would have emptied out by five o’clock, but of course, on a beautiful summer Sunday in July, there were still hundreds of people enjoying the afternoon when we arrived.
I’ve always had a basic trust in authorities and in the fundamental goodness of most people. I don’t spend a lot of time arguing with police officers about whether I was going the speed limit when pulled over. I have yet to challenge a medical professional on their diagnosis, or blow off their treatment plan. I even do the PT recommended by my massage therapist. I never once, in my eighteen years of schooling, undergraduate and graduate, mixed it up with a professor about a grade I didn’t like—I just thought I’d have to work harder next time. To be honest, such compliance has served me really well. I don’t create dramas, not that you do, but we all know those types, amiright? My temperament: sensitive, creative, emotionally reactive, is drama enough for me. My orientation is to try and learn from setbacks and to respect the experience of others. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blindly trusting. If the financial planner proposes investing in hog futures, or a friend suggests it’s quicker to New York by ferry, I’m not going to just jump to it without doing my homework. But my bias is to assume others are like me: basically well-intended, or at the very least, not out to screw anyone. My life circumstances have allowed me to continue with this orientation, it’s true.
Feeling grateful today for the concept that we can make up the difference later when we come up short, that good intentions and good faith promises have some capital. I haven’t let you down for these past twenty-five days; I’ve faithfully produced a blog a day, as promised. But this one got away from me. So I’m giving you a rain check, taking a mulligan, putting you on hold. I promise two-ish posts tomorrow.
John is in Connecticut today. He drove down this morning to visit his parents, who live in a congenial, attractive assisted living community in the town of Cheshire, where John grew up. His dad will turn 92 in early September; his mom just celebrated her 87th birthday on the fourth of July, in defiance of a late-stage cancer diagnosis she received close to two years ago. She opted not to pursue treatment; it made her feel too awful. She’s been in hospice care ever since. Although she spends most of her time in bed, and much of that sleeping, she sparks right up for visits and meals, her mind keen as ever, which is saying something. She presides over her bed kingdom with regal command, her minions a succession of cheerful health aides and hospice personnel, along with her loyal, royal consort, my father-in-law. They appear to be squeezing every possible drop of affection and connection out of their marriage of sixty plus years, despite the pain of her disease and the shadow of inevitable loss.
When Lucy was at Tufts, some students started an organization called “Tufts Free Compliments.” The members went around campus scattering compliments like dandelion seeds: “you look great!,” “I really like your hair,” “What you said in class was so smart,” the idea being that we all can benefit from some unsolicited positivity. Fox News would likely decry such sweetness as another example of snowflake-y delicacy on the part of today’s pampered elite youth. Mia and her friends had a similar impulse in middle school. They would sit in a circle, and each person would say something they liked about Rachel, then Caleb, then Emmy, and so forth. They’d work their way around the circle until each one of them had collected a bouquet of compliments from their friends. I always thought it was such a healthy and wise practice, to build each other up this way.
We would not be conversing at all today, dear readers, were it not for the humble wireless mouse. The trackpad on my Mac laptop suffered an inexplicable and sudden nervous breakdown yesterday afternoon, whether through a software conflict (I had just cried “Uncle!” in the face of OS High Sierra’s incessant reminders that I install updates) or hardware exhaustion (my MacBook pro is six years old and well-loved), I cannot say. But the curser decided either to skitter around my desktop willy-nilly, like kids playing tag, or to disappear from the desktop entirely. Either way, the trackpad flatly refused to respond.
Ok, so I don’t actually believe that my life will change just because yesterday John and I KonMaried all the books in the house, packing 14 boxes of tomes that once captivated us, but through the years have lost their luster in our hearts. Using the Japanese de-cluttering principles set forth in Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” we went room by room through all the bookshelves (and stacks, piles, bins, and baskets–also a few boxes of books we had previously packed to give away, but forgot to drop off at the library book sale.) We held each book in our hands and tried to observe whether it brought us a sensation of joy. The results surprised me, in some cases: all the Irish poetry collections from my year at Trinity College in Dublin, Patrick Kavanaugh and Seamus Heaney, those loamy, boozy, sainted laureates: gone, without a backward glance. Yeats’ poetry stayed, but his dramas, which were the subject of my senior thesis? Slán leat, which is gaelic for goodbye. Billy Collins, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver and Rilke got to stay, but poor Wallace Stevens got thrown in the give-away box in duplicate, once by me from the poetry section in the bookcase next to the bed, and once by John, who had a different edition on his bedside table. I may never again read To Kill A Mockingbird, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Beloved, but they made the cut without a second thought. Among my books about writing, I kept Annie Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Robert McKee’s Story, Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones — I stole some of Goldberg’s prompts when I taught high school essay writing; I still use Berg’s thought-starters when I’m stuck. I couldn’t do without Elizabeth Gilbert’s wonderful Big Magic, about the divinity that feeds all creative endeavors, but easily parted ways with her novels and the memoir Eat, Pray, Love, even though I loved it when I read it. I’ll admit that I gave away Anna Karenina, but kept every single volume of Harry Potter.
It’s a rainy morning, affording the luxury of a guilt-free deep dive into the pages of the Sunday New York Times, something I eschew in favor of the word puzzles when I have limited time —“Spelling Bee” has become a particular obsession since Nate and Annie introduced me to it two years ago. This morning, an article caught my eye: 
I am literally a tree-hugger. My childhood home on the Gold Coast of Long Island was landscaped with beautiful old maples, birch trees and an apple orchard. Our property abutted an undeveloped tract of land that was wooded and cool, with a small grove of white pines that as a very little girl I would skip off to visit, back in the days when a mom would simply open the screen door and gesture outside: Be home in time for lunch. Early one spring morning, one of those late-May days when the buds uncoil and the air buzzes with energy—bugs and birds awakening, plant life percolating– I went out to the grove to visit my favorite pine tree, one with a thick trunk and low hanging branches drooping down to touch the earth. The air was cool and piney in my tree-tent, and the tall tree stood silent and calm. I was so bursting with love for it, I took off all my clothes and hugged the trunk, loving the feel of the soft pine needles under my feet, the spring breeze on my skin, the touch of the scratchy bark in my arms. I must have been four or five. I never told a soul (not from shame, but reverence), although the experience showed up in the draft of young adult novel languishing in my drawer of unfinished projects, so it’s stuck with me.
A Body Story 