Category: stories worth repeating

stories worth repeating, thoughts, trouble

The thing about Liz

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I was 19 when we met. I’ll never forget the moment. She was a new waitress at a microbrewery that I was working at for the summer in Seattle. I think it’s fair to say she blasted into the place from the start—long blonde hair, sassy New York attitude, a confident smile—and made a life long impact. She was older than I was and I was in awe. We were instant friends.

I had never really thought about why I was so starstruck. She always stood out in mind as such a powerful and unique person. In thinking about her now, though, I see what was so unique about Liz.

She was truly authentic; fearlessly herself.

She was fearless in other ways too, but it was the ability to be and show herself (for better or for worse) that I admire most, what made her a real artist, and is such a huge accomplishment in life. She wasn’t afraid to fail, or take risks or work hard, or be the fool—or if she was, she didn’t let it stop her; courageous in the hardest way.

Liz was also a connector, a builder, a maker. She took action, she made things happen. She was incredibly warm and she made life exciting. She was always doing things that you had heard were off-limits. She said things no one else ever said and she laughed about them. She was honest and funny and bold and she possessed a certain kind of freedom. That summer, as we worked together serving beer, dancing, talking, staying up too late, I was drawn to how true she was, how real.

When I got a better job at Cafe Sport at Pike Place market through my friend Shannon, I got Liz a job there too, and the three of us worked together cementing our friendship into the kind of thing that doesn’t disappear just because distance and time separates you.

There’s a feeling that I’ve always had about Liz, the magic she brought into the room and the way she made life seem: everything is possible.

You will be missed.

music, stories worth repeating, trends, writing

When I’m twenty-two…

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I’m late to the Taylor Swift party. And I may not stay long.

At the 2012 Grammys, she sang her hit single, Mean, and needless-to-say, I connected. Me, and the millions of others who had already made her platinum selling album, Speak Now, a hit. Let’s face it, is there any person on the planet who can’t turn to someone and say, “Why you gotta be so mean?”

But a beautiful exclamation point on the universal story of wanting to get to the metaphorical “big city” came at Grammys. I had to reverse engineer the story, because I only listened to the original song after seeing her perform, but it was no less powerful in the remembering.

Taylor’s got two things in the story of being picked on, oppressed, and maligned that she’s aspiring to in the chorus. Living in, “a big old city” is my favorite. The quintessential get-out-of-your small-town-living-well-is-the-best-revenge-move-on dream. She’s also got, “big enough so you can’t hit me.” All you’re ever gonna be is mean, she sings.

It’s a nice when the heroine of the story looks and sounds like Taylor, and by age of twenty-two is a mega star. But that’s what makes us want to imagine that we’re her. That our little sad story ends so well; in a golden dress with a Grammy in each hand.

At one point in the song, the music stops and the beat is maintained by clapping. When that happened at the Grammys, Taylor swapped out the lyrics, “living in a big old city” for, “singing at the Grammys.”

That’s got to be a great moment to live through. Then she won a Grammy for the song, and one for best country performance.

And all you’re ever gonna be is mean.

mommies, stories worth repeating, thoughts, writing

In Africa…

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My grandma is blessed with the most excellent, innate, and timeless style of anyone I have ever known. As I tried on a red knit hat with an oversized flower that I got as a holiday gift this year she said, “It will look better with your hair down.” And it did, of course.

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 lovely dinner 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…

stories worth repeating, thoughts

Password as mantra or, a short tour of my brain

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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.

stories worth repeating, thoughts, Uncategorized

the thing that made all the difference…

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Reading Erica Goldson’s impressive valedictorian speech, which included a scathing and truthful critique of the state of this country’s education system, got me to thinking about how there’s not usually a lot of follow up with these people. We get to hear the, let’s go get ’em speech, but unless they hit the big time, we don’t get to hear what all those valedictorians think after they been around a while. That could be interesting … or not.

My father was the valedictorian of his high school. I never heard or read what he said in that speech, although he did say later that if he had it to do over again, he would have said something different. He was also the valedictorian of his University (okay, top 1%, they didn’t have only one valedictorian). That time he didn’t give a speech but I’d like to share what he wrote about his life for the alumni book 25 years later.

“The thing that made all the difference was doing what I knew was right even though I knew it meant losing my job, which it did. Everything fell into place after that.”

Dr. Donald Finkel

1965 Twenty-Fifth Reunion Class Book and Directory, Yale University

mommies, stories worth repeating, thoughts, Uncategorized

of perfume and forgiveness

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Once upon a time…

I was visiting my grandparents in New York City.  I spent quite a bit of time there, and it was with my grandparents that I was introduced to the joys of theater, music and art. When I was six, I saw Yule Brenner in The King and I.  With them, I saw a Chorus Line for the first time, went to the opera, and would circle up the ramp at the Guggenheim and eat lunch at the original MOMA.

One day, when I was visiting, I accidentally broke a large, brand new bottle of my grandmother’s perfume.  I remember that distinctive and horrible sinking and miserable sensation of awfulness.  It seemed, to a child, that impending and irreversible doom must follow a transgression so great and careless, and of such an expensive and precious item.  And then, I remember how my grandmother shrugged it off as absolutely no big deal.

She was glad I hadn’t hurt myself.  That was the last it was ever mentioned.

That memory is one of the more resonant of my childhood and I recently recalled it again when my daughter accidentally pulled the belt  and buttons off my raincoat.

At every accident, there is an occasion to practice my grandmother’s gift of nonchalant forgiveness.  It is powerful, and I am grateful be able to pass it on.

mommies, stories worth repeating, Uncategorized

the satisfactory ending

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Frog and Toad

You may or may not have had occasion to read Frog and Toad Are Friends recently.  However, if you are like me, and have a young child, you may have read it hundreds of times in the last few months.

And happily so.

The Frog and Toad series, by British author, Arnold Lobel, are among the children’s books that one can read repeatedly and still enjoy, or at least tolerate, or at least not totally loathe.

In fact, I love Frog and Toad and especially Frog and Toad Together.  The stories are good, the characters relatable, and the endings are brilliant.  Enviable.  Analysis-worthy.

But let’s start with two excellent characters, long time bffs. Frog is the elder statesman, the more responsible, more reliable, wiser character with Toad, his immature, ill-mannered, ill-temperated, often neurotic and, of course, good-hearted best friend.  Toad is usually suffering through some lesson, something which more often than not, he does not appreciate.  My daughter has often said, you’re Frog and I’m Toad, and tonight when I asked her who her best friend was, she said, “You.”  So, I guess, I’m still Frog, which is kind of funny, since I relate more to Toad, despite my being older and wiser.

Cookies, a story about Frog and Toad binging on delicious cookies that Toad has baked, ends with Frog giving all the cookies to the birds in order for them to gain willpower. Toad rejects this concept announcing that Frog can keep the willpower–he is going home to bake a cake.

Almost every story is a juicy little nugget; shaped perfectly, with just the appropriate amount of  plot and character development to make them full bodied and delicious.  And the endings…  I don’t want to use the word perfect, but, they really are.

They often end with “place,” like, “The hands of the clock moved to show the hours of a merry Christmas Eve.” Or, “Then they sat in the shade of a large tree and ate their chocolate ice-cream cones together.” “They ran around the corner of Frog’s house to make sure that spring had come again.” In one, Toad has the last word, “Winter may be beautiful, but bed is much better.”

I think my favorite is from The Letter (Frog and Toad are Friends): “Toad was very pleased to have it.” It really comes down to a mixture of closure and uplift.  It’s just so damn satisfying.  You feel as good as Toad getting his first and probably last letter (sent to him by Frog, of course).  Just two best friends feeling as content as can be, as right in their little world as conceivably possible.  The best part is, Frog has already told Toad the contents of the letter, because he has to convince him to wait for it, being, as it is, delivered with interminable slowness, by snail. But they actually end up enjoying the wait because they share the knowledge of the contents of the letter.  Togetherness is a big happy theme too.  But I digress.  I mean, what more can I really say?

Toad was very pleased to have it.

stories worth repeating, thoughts

the truth or something like that

zoefinkel

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Human beings seem to have some intuition for knowing when things are right, a certain feeling of truth and resonance.  It’s the same in fictional stories, when it all adds up and satisfies at the end, and conversely when you hear a story, you often know when something is missing.  Sometimes, you don’t even know that you know, but will guess as some obvious marker, and rewarded later by learning the truth.   These principles hold true in the stories of lives, equally, and the “ah moment” is equivalent in both.

I was thinking about the scientific principle Occam’s razor which, paraphrased somewhat incorrectly says, the simplest answer is usually the correct one, but it’s more accurately explained: “When multiple competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities.”

Thus, Occam’s razor doesn’t exactly speak to the stories of human’s life, which are not necessarily simple (or are they) and yet, when revealed accurately, make absolute sense to us (and perhaps this is only some sort of pattern recognition, but those patterns seem to be repeated and repeated so that a story like The Iliad, and the conflicts within, ring perfectly true to us today, thousands of years later.)

All this is to say, that late last night a friend called to tell me the truth about something he’d been keeping from me.  And not knowing wasn’t bothering me (because I wasn’t thinking I didn’t know something), but knowing still comes as a huge relief, like a coming up for air breath, like an ahhhh at the end of a compelling story.

This gets me thinking about mysteries, and how much we really like them.  A woman isn’t supposed to lose too much of her mystery, and granted they do keep us on the edge of our seats, but I wonder how much better (or worse) it is just to know.