Boomerang

There’s a memory we all have and it’s of my dad and how he would come up right behind you and wrap one of his arms around you. Arms that built our home. Arms that chopped the wood to keep our two sweet fireplaces glowing all winter. Arms that plowed the driveway and made the best steel cut oatmeal every morning that mostly no one ate. Arms that made pancakes from scratch on the regular and whisked milk for cappuccinos and drummed on the tables and hung upside down on yoga ropes and dug out sled runs on the hillside and fixed all the cars and gave you presents and wrapped a scarf so cozy around your neck before you left the house. Arms that pulled on your toes to wake you up in the morning and waved to all of the locals when we would go downtown to get the paper and you could see in their eyes that they felt lucky to know him while you felt so lucky to be able to have him come up and wrap one of those arms around you and hold you close. And in that place, with his strong arm around you, everything was good and safe, and you were loved more than any single thing on the whole planet. 

Christmas and Paris

There are some things that get you thinking.  Like when Z and I went over to visit our friends Phil and Amanda the other night, to see their new place and mostly because we’ve magnetized toward each other as people do who love similar things and for whom life is a similar battle but a similar landscape of meaning nonetheless.  They made the sweetest little home down the street from us and brought us in to this warm, this intelligent, this thoughtful evening with them.  And I thought about how I felt like I was finally in Paris with my Hemingway crew that I’ve always dreamed of.  Because they’re interested in things, like art and writing and poems served with martinis and cheese and jazz.  And it just made me think about how do I want to live and who do I want to be and I hope I’m doing this all right and other things like that.  Big questions, but small. The day to day of making sure you actually live the life you get while you’ve got it.

And today it’s Christmas, and Christmas is always a little bit sad. Z and I were just talking about this, how we always get a little bit sad around the holidays. And I suppose it’s because, well, when we were young, it was such pure unabashed joy and it was before all of the worries and when everything was all right all of the time. Jumping off the roof giggling into the deep fluffy snow and hot chocolate and the warm kitchen and records playing and mom and dad and mittens and knowing that everything was ok. And I guess there’s just something a little bit sad about that. And yet, still, everything’s ok. 

Now, every day on my way to work, I pass the muddy green hills of the cemetery, expansive and rolling, and lately the graves are bedecked with Christmas trees and poinsettias and sometimes I see people just sitting out there on the hillside together. And I think of Christmas and love and how we last somehow, anyway, even when we don’t, I guess. And it feels important to live with a certain beauty and delicate concern for the things that you love and the things that are special to you. And to make moments here and there with your friends, pretending you’re in Paris.

Everything That Makes Us Love

There was something so wonderful about this past week, mostly because of friends and how life moves along and all of these beautiful moments. 

Z and I met up the other night at Umami with our friends Chris and Phil and, later, Amanda, and we just ate delicious food, like truffle fries and too tall of burgers, and sat at that round table on the patio laughing and talking and it was so good, just really good to be with these wonderful new friends in this little life here, so far along, link connecting to link, bringing me, bringing me along. 

Then I was nostalgic because that particular Umami used to be a Cobras and Matadors that sprouted up after the first one got so popular and then it got too popular and then it all imploded and now there are no more Cobras and Matadors. But I walked through that restaurant looking around, remembering how many days I’ve lived and how much love there is. 

I made a toast that night, to friends, and also to the fact that Cat Stevens has a new album out. Because I’m so happy about both of those things, especially about the Cat Stevens album. Because he’s my favorite pretty much and reminds me of growing up and experience and loss and bravery and everything about having to go on this long big journey all by yourself and more beautiful things even than that, like the light in the windows and the wind and staying up all night in Chamonix singing along to the Best Of Cat Stevens tape because it was the only tape in that wooden house in the Alps that one summer so long ago with my family.

And then it was Thanksgiving and I went hiking early in the morning and I passed one of the old Polish guys that I’ve always seen walking up the trail with his six friends every morning.  All of these years hiking up there, the Polish group in the mornings. Just yack yack yacking away. And then the two Polish women would always break off and play tennis together on the rickety, broken court in the hills. So happy and active running around on that court with the tree branches poking through the concrete. I love that group of people. And I used to always try and say good morning to them, a long time ago, and they were so wrapped up in each other, they never said hi back, so I finally stopped trying to say hi to them, but they became a real part of the scenery for me.

I hadn’t been up there in a while and then, on Thanksgiving morning, I was walking down the path and just saw that one Polish guy sitting by himself on a bench down near the end of the trail. And I thought about friends and Umami dinners and the old Cobras and Matadors and Cat Stevens and everything that makes us love.  Maybe the rest of the Polish group had just gone home already. Maybe. But, I just thought, in any case, one day, there will just be one Polish guy sitting on a bench. And all of that love trailing behind him. 

Quiet Slow World

Sometimes, here in this big city, I’ll stop and think about home in Aspen. About growing up and the mountains. About the windows and the moonlight on the ground.  When I would just sit by the fire circling things I liked in catalogues, like gourmet gift baskets, apple baskets with chocolate covered popcorn, from Harry & David. Or maybe sweaters from Eddie Bauer that I didn’t really want but were the best thing in the catalogue so I circled them anyway, while the quiet snow fell outside.  

Now it’s so fast all the time. And loud. Traffic and subway stations where there’s a guy behind my shoulder asking me to help him because he just got out of jail, while I’m the only human being in the whole subway station just trying to buy my fare at the machine and that’s just not the right way to ask me to help you, by saying you just got out of jail and hovering over my shoulder too close. And then I take the slightly wrong train in my panic so I have to get off and wait for the next one and I’m mostly alone again at a stop I don’t know and somewhat worried but keeping myself together because you sort of have to all the time and it’s just the subway even though no one seems to ride it here at night except me and the two people waiting with me.  

I just miss it sometimes. I miss the quiet snow and the fireplace and not having the world beating down on you and your job grading your performance and too many horns honking for no understandable reason and politics and waking up to go make money and being grown up and everything you have to think about. 

Except that it was pretty funny the other morning when the toilet wouldn’t stop flushing and I tried to fix it and it started spraying on me out of the pipes and I woke up Z, not because he would know how to fix it or anything but just to join me in the hullaballoo because it was funny and maybe he would know how to fix it anyway. He didn’t. He just got sprayed too.

I know there’s a lot of beauty in this. And humor. And I do love it, this whole thing. But still, I miss the quiet slow world sometimes. Curled up with catalogues, circling things.

Gathering a Picnic

Z and I went on a trip to Colorado recently. Leaving LA on that early morning looking out of the airplane windows, I told Z that I always get a little bit sad whenever I take off in a plane. It just always makes me think of my whole life. And then I get some distant perspective on where I am, like here, watching LA sink away far below, stretching out. And I think about all that led me there, to that place below, to that one place, and where I came from, everything. 

And then Denver that first night! We wandered out of our wonderful strange decrepit hotel that was pretending to be fancy but wasn’t anymore to go explore the evening streets. It was so beautiful on our walk around the city that Z and I just kept stopping to feel it and take it all in and look at the sky and the buildings. It was the longest walk, getting lost, enamored.  The wind started to blow as we were walking around gathering a picnic to bring back to the hotel. Sweeping leaves up in circles. And then it lightly rained on us out there, in the middle of that city, and half of the clouds were dark and half were in the clutch of a rainbow and then it all turned pink and soft hazy yellow and orange and purple in different spaces between the illuminated buildings. 

My god, world. 

I don’t think I will forget that.

It was a real spectacle out there that night, and we were just so happy, I guess, which is just not something you can say all the time because there’s always something no matter how happy you are. But we were just there, on vacation, delighting in some sort of unencumbered wonder, stopping at intersections and popping into restaurants and little fancy markets and take-out shish kabob in that light, that weather, just us, gathering a picnic to bring back to that funny hotel room.

And So It Is

The other day I found myself driving along, accidentally thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong with anything (oops), my new job, the future, parking garages, the freeways, merging, crashing (etc. ad nauseam), and after a while I just had to laugh a little and say to myself out loud, “God, you can’t be afraid of everything.” 

And for me, after the laughter dies down over how ridiculous I am because I’m always afraid and panicking all the time, I have to remember something. I don’t want to miss out on any of this. Because everything feels like it has some sacred value for being just what it’s been. And somehow, I feel like I need to welcome and protect even the most painful pieces and hold them tight somewhere because they are some integral part of the total beauty. 

So I hold on to it all by finding ways to keep going forward into this world and moving, moving. 

Like last week, Z and I went downtown and got egg sandwiches at Grand Central Market and walked around and took pictures of the buildings and dreamed of buying one of the defunct ones with broken windows that was so beautiful and had lion parapets or some thing or another and we sat out on the sidewalk drinking iced coffees in the sweltering heat.  And I was not afraid of anything.

And the other day we went up to the Getty for a long time letting the art flood into us like it does when it just speaks to you and feeling all of the things there are to feel about the world and life and existence and just being here. And I was not afraid.

And one night it started to rain on our way back from a comedy show and we got home and ran upstairs. And we stood on the rooftop barefoot in the warm summer rain, quiet and happy, just looking around at the city and breathing it all in, and I just thought, here we are, and so it is. And I was not afraid.

Here’s what I think sometimes: I want to remember everything. Palpably. Especially the ache of experience. Because every time, in the moments when I feel so much peace and beauty and happiness, it’s only because I know more than that, it’s because I know the ache of life. In some strange way I don’t want to forget about that the most. And in some way, I’m lucky, because I can’t.  

And here we are, and so it is.