At ninety, my grandma has Parkinson’s disease, and very serious memory loss. Sometimes, she cannot remember what has happened in the prior sentence, ending one definitive statement about something with a question about what has just happened. “It was so great to see them,” she says. “Is it just us here today?” She will often remark on the darkness of the night. Again and again. The darkest night she has ever seen. What day is it? Isn’t it dark tonight? What day is it? Isn’t it dark tonight? This is the darkest night I have ever seen.

I modify and streamline my answers until my response is honed and perfected. Yes, the darkest night on the longest day in December. She nods. Isn’t it dark tonight?

Some number of years ago, and before it came back into fashion, my grandma suggested I purchase a white shag rug for my living room. That was a year or so before everyone started doing it. Her apartment still looks modern, although now some of the paint near the top of the 13 foot ceilings show their age. The rugs are slightly worn, but still lively with color. But the chocolate brown wall in the dining room is still perfect.

My grandma has never really worked, she but was the daughter of an immigrant who did. My great grandma was a single mom, before the term had been coined. She owned and ran a successful business when women were thought incapable of it, and later, she bought and managed real estate properties, and her son joined her in the business. Not her daughter.

She raised her daughter very carefully. My grandma was excellent pianist, careful not to to play tennis so as not to damage her hands. She was charming. She elevated conversation to an art; you were lucky to be seated next to her at dinner. She knew just how to go to lunch, buy the best presents for friends. She gave dinner lovely parties, dressed beautifully, shopped creatively, wore her hair just right. She was current on art, music, theater, ballet, opera. I still have and love Japanese flower scissors she bought for me from Takashyimaya on 5th Avenue. They are beautiful.

She always knew what color to paint the walls. You would still choose the same wallpaper she has in her den (if you could find it) even 42 years later. All this is not to say she was perfect, that she did every thing right, that she didn’t struggle with not having a career, or never becoming a concert pianist, or raising her three children. She was human. I know many people feel that, especially for women, pursuit of excellence in the aforementioned areas is considered worthless, or even demeaning, but for my grandma, it was a life well lived. She seems to be the last of certain kind of person. Her life was her art, and she, the maestro.

“It is not easy being a woman in Africa,” says Issac Denison in Out of Africa (played by Meryl Streep). Or any place else for that matter. And the rules of womanhood, femininity, equal rights, equal pay, stay- at-home-moms, right-to-life, when to get married, and many other issues will not be settled anytime soon. I am not convinced anyone knows, well enough, the answers to these questions.

When I was 13, she gave me just the right length pearl necklace for a girl that age, with an extra strand to add when I turned 16. You may not have known that there is an  appropriate length necklace for a girl that age, but there is. And it does not change with fashion or time. Before she lost too much of her memory, she gave me another set of pearls that had been hers, the grown-up version. She knew many secrets in that magical process of turning a girl into a woman. They have not been lost.

She is a kind, wonderful, lovely person, even now, even though she is not who she was. There are still the same moments of grace and kindness and charm in her. When I am in her apartment, there are many memories. Opening the medicine cabinet in the guest bathroom, I remember, many years ago, when I accidentally broke an expensive bottle of perfume. I was horrified, but she didn’t get angry, she didn’t even seem upset. She just wanted to make sure I wasn’t hurt. She got married at 22 and has been married for 68 years. My grandfather is with her still, taking care of her, making sure these final years are okay.

A friend of mine told me recently that if you go to a foreign country and teach a man English, the language will be lost in one generation. But, if you teach a woman, the language lives forever because she will teach her children, and so on, and so on…

Because, come on, how many times in life do you actually get to wear the ruby red shoes… twitter.com/zoefinkel/stat…

— zoe finkel (@zoefinkel) December4, 2011

Yes. The embed feature is super cool! Follow me from here.

I’m going back to work. But not just any back to work, not just any job. A really great job, at a really great company.

I’m honored, excited, and thrilled to be joining Twitter as a copywriter.

#tomorrow.

I type in my password countless times in a day, even though I’ve got it saved into various browsers. Still. I’ve got a good password too. My fingers skim over the keys with the lightest provocation, the briefest glace at an empty password box. Recently, gmail suggested that I change my old password, which I did.

As I was thinking about what to change it to, an incident from the night before came to mind which I remade into a concise reminder for myself. Then I proceeded to type it a million times as I changed all my passwords, and I felt it reverberate around my brain.

That reminded me of something Rabbi Mordecai Finley said once a long time ago when I attended Ohr HaTorah, a synagogue in Los Angeles. He told one of those little anecdotes: once his watch was broken and it beeped every five minutes and he couldn’t figure out how to turn it off and it was driving him crazy. Then he decided to think of God every time the watch beeped and use that previously annoying beep to think about God (I’m paraphrasing, but something like that).

It’s an obvious and good idea. So I remade my password into a little something I wanted to remind myself of, a lot, since it was going to be in my brain a lot.

Rabbi Finley, by the way, is one of my favorite living thinkers. His teachings/talks are an amazing cross between pysch/philosophy/religion/self-help/moral code/linguistics. They are filled with scientific and literary references… anyway I could go on, but you can listen for yourself

Interestingly, I happened to see Race at ACT a month or so ago with friends. David Mamet’s whole author’s notes in the playbill were about Rabbi Finley and some ideas that he turned Mamet onto. I can’t say I was in agreement about the politics, but I wasn’t surprised to see that Mamet had been influenced by Finley. He’s that good.

I always remembered the thing about the watch.

I like the sound of getting your story straight.

Aside from the criminal implications, telling a “straight” story is an interesting idea. Is that the truth? The facts in order? A narrative that makes sense historically or emotionally?

I’ve got a story that I want to tell. And I want to tell it straight, how it will have the most impact. I think a lot about where that story starts. What is the beginning of it? Here? No, here. No, here! And when I start to write it, I always ending up cutting back in time. And digressing. Knowing something about the past makes the present make sense, and sets up the outcome. Chekhov and the gun in act one that has to go off by act three and that.

Which should say something about the outcome of our lives. As, at least mine, has been sufficiently set up. Except that life isn’t a straight story. The story is just the thing we make out of it, tell about it, craft out of the non-linear trajectory. And yes, it’s my birthday today. But I digress…

There’s so many things I like about this, it’s hard to know where to start.

I could say a lot about it, but let me just mention a few things. The music. You can listen to this piece (without watching, although I don’t recommend it) and get the whole story. It’s amazing. I love the low point of the narrative (yodeling, trailer park, mud) and the emotional highs and lows that run throughout. It’s the longest and most engaging three minutes I’ve spent on digital media in a while (and I know it’s not new, but I keep going back to it). It articulates how each moment creates a different future, and is therefore everything. Just the current moment. It’s moving, it’s exciting, it’s life and death.

Also, it showcases the intersections of culture, media with celebrity and fan beautifully. And I think the placement of the product is brilliant. When you really get a long look at the shoe, you can feel it in your chest.

I can’t seem to get enough of this. I watch it repeatedly. Every time I do, I notice another tiny, careful, interesting detail that feeds the whole.

Plus, it starts in the middle and ends at the beginning.

A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see.

He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive toursim of infancy.”

Just try to fold this!

It’s true I have a thing for small, shiny pieces of Japanese paper. I love them. They’re balanced, neat, delicate and brightly colored. M has been known to take a whole stack and write a word or draw an image and staple them into a little story. Often they just sit in small stacks in drawers or on my desk, but sometimes I like to try to fold. I’ll sit with a thin, delicate, shiny square in my hands and crease, un-crease, fold and smooth, trying to follow the instructions as they skip down their little white path. The more I read this particular story, the more I realized how much was going on, with the little lines and arrows punctuating the drama. It was very exciting. Of course, I couldn’t figure out how to turn my paper into a swan but I started to love the narrative. I think my favorite part is the climax just before the bird unfolds (see below). There’s a little white cloud of excitement and then the swan emerges.

It starts with the chime, or the ding that lets you know something’s just come in. That’s exciting to begin with, then there’s the message itself, short, compact, urgent, in some stunted form. Long sentences, pauses and proper grammar would only slow things down and distort the meaning. Because pace is important; timing is everything.