Tiny Rituals

Dateline, 2015. We rise early in the morning, my feisty 8-year-old and I, and head out to a soccer field.  As the youngest of five, she is all in for this gig, having tagged along to her older siblings' games and tournaments since she was born. Now it's her turn and she is beyond enthusiastic. Rabid might be a better word.

Early mornings are her favorite time to head out to a field, and games at least an hour away are the best. She loves to get up while it's still dark, pile her soccer backpack, pillows, and blankets into the car, and doze on our way to a game, holding a warm cup of hot chocolate and watching the sky lighten through half-closed eyes. We trundle down I-80. As we come around the wide curve in Albany, Golden Gate Fields appears, floating on the edge of the bay off to the right.  She perks up, stretches her body as high as she can, and starts to look for horses.

Golden Gate Fields is the local race track and in the early morning, trainers and jockeys are busy. From the freeway, we catch glimpses of horses practicing on the track, walking amidst the stables, or circling around a hot walker. We count as many as we can and as we pass the fields mere minutes later, we announce our findings: A 4 horse morning! A 2 horse morning!  A 9 horse morning!

Zero horse mornings are always a disappointment.  

On mornings we aren't together for her drive to a game, she excitedly reports the total to me later.  Her siblings – older, cooler – roll their eyes. I gush with enthusiasm and tell her how many I saw on my travels that day too.

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Dateline, 2019.  It's way too early in the morning. I'm trying to get my 12-year-old out the door. Turns out, she did not, as she assured me last night, have her entire soccer uniform and she still needs to find one blue sock. Frustrated, I growl something about how it's her responsibility to be ready for her game and it's not me who will be late to warm-up. She growls something that may or may not be actual language. She doesn't eat the food I made. I don't have any encouraging words to share. We each glare and fume and think uncharitable thoughts.

The car is thick with silence, and neither of us so much as glances at Golden Gate Fields as we drive by. This is most definitely a zero horse morning of our own making. Forty minutes later, she slams the door without a word and disappears into the misty morning. I sit in the car grateful to be by myself and generally annoyed that she's such a bi–– ...bitter little pre-teen.  What happened to my sweet girl? When did we become adversaries? Why did we stop counting horses?

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Dateline, 2022. My fifteen-year-old leaves in the morning with her older sister, who is now her main chauffeur. That precious car time we used to have so much of vanished one day without warning, and it turns out that I miss it. Mommy Brain has blissfully erased the frustrating mornings from my memory bank. I have time for other things now, but I know that her high school years will break the sound barrier as they whoosh past me. So as the car pulls away, I am both grateful for a quiet house and also a little melancholy about the nearly grown girls speeding down the street and away from me. Being a mom is confusing that way: always two competing emotions at once.

I settle into a comfortable chair with a hot cup of coffee and my laptop. I'll get some work done this morning and then take the dog for a walk, or play my fiddle, or binge-watch All Creatures Great and Small. I am positively giddy at the options. All my kids are old enough to do their own thing now and they need me less. Or at least differently.

Thirty minutes later, I am absorbed in a good book, when my phone pings with a quick text from my youngest. 

Time stands still and then rewinds, back to those lovely early mornings, back to the simple fun of counting horses and sharing the numbers with each other. Who knew it would stick?  Just for a moment, there are no competing emotions, just gratitude: for horses, for her, and for the tiny little rituals that bind us together. Smiling, I turn back to the good book. All is right in my world. 

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Note: Shoutout to Hideout and Suede, the handsome boys in the photo at the top; photo cred to my friend Janelle who is busy every day with these two.

The Truth is True, Even When It's Not

I have been cleaning up my laptop lately and finding really old files of all kinds of things. Today, I am posting one of the things I found. I have absolutely zero recollection of writing this piece, but apparently, I wrote it in 2018, during Lent.  2018 was a shit show: not only did it follow the single worst year of my life (2017), but our entire country was dripping with Trump droppings. Maybe that's why I don't remember writing it – I may have tried to erase that year entirely from my brain. 

Anyway, this is what I wrote back then.  It is imperfect and sloppy and not entirely sensical.  And it was good to find it today.

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The truth is true, even when it’s not.

I have been praying the rosary every weekday morning during this Lent.  The first time I did it, I was flooded with relief.  Spending time so differently—without noise and clamor and news and the distress that comes through my radio and my smartphone—felt like a gift to myself.

The quiet, the repetition, the reverence for things eternal: all of those seemed to bring me back to myself in a way that actually made me cry.  It felt right and just to be spending my time in that way.

I know why I thought of doing this in the first place: because of Ann.  She loved the rosary, loved Mary.  She had what is called a “devotion” to Mary – a special connection to the Blessed Mother that buoyed her and sustained her.  When she was sick, she and her family visited Lourdes, looking I’m sure partly for a cure and also for peace.  She didn’t find the cure.

I started doing the Rosary to feel closer to Ann.  Or maybe to be Ann.  When I am feeling the weakest and the least confident, I try to channel the people I love who have qualities or characteristics that I aspire to, like my dad’s ability to charm people and make them feel special.  When I’m feeling socially awkward or overly self-conscious, I think: “Channel Larry.”  And sometimes, I find a way to turn it around and focus my attention on other people.  It’s not a nice thing to do for others: it’s a survival mechanism for myself, a self-care strategy that has the added benefit of making other people feel good.

When I’m feeling disconnected and lonely, I think: “Channel Ann.”  And sometimes, I find a way to imitate the way she radiated love and goodness and made other people feel just plain blessed in her presence.

So I started doing the Rosary, so that I could maybe start to understand why Ann loved it so much.  To find in the repetition something of the deep peace she radiated.  

As the days have gone by, I have struggled a bit with the practice.  It feels odd to be repeating words like “save us from the fires of hell” and “pray for us sinners,” even though I have no problem with the idea of sin.  It feels both out of touch and relevant at the same time—a dissonance that is sometimes OK with me and sometimes, for lack of a better word, really weird.

It makes me wonder what Ann would say if I could ask her: “Why do you love the Rosary so much?”  But of course, I cannot ask her that, and realizing that I can’t ask her that, or any other question, ever again, brings on waves and waves of regret and sorrow.  That I didn’t ask her more questions when she was here, that I took for granted our friendship, that I behaved as if she would always be there for me.

She isn’t here anymore.

Yesterday, as I was saying the Rosary, I kept thinking about something the priest said at Ann’s Rosary, the night before her funeral Mass. He was describing her, and he talked about how our gathering to pray the Rosary was so fitting, because of Ann’s special devotion to Mary and her own love of the Rosary prayer. An unwelcome thought crossed my mind: “Was Ann perfect?  No one is perfect, but the way this guy is talking, it sure sounds like she was perfect.” I’m don't know why I had that thought. I think it all felt unreal to me: Ann dying. Us being gathered there, participating in a death ritual.  And it felt like we were celebrating a saint, a mystic...a unicorn. But the truth is, Ann was better than anyone I've ever met at actively, purposefully loving the people in her life.

And then I thought about eulogies in general, and how when we talk about the people we lose, we talk about their perfections. It is true that Ann was perfect. She was perfectly Ann. 

Did she have annoying qualities? Was she ever impatient with her kids, or too tired to do one more thing for them? Did she and Eric fight, or did she ever feel like a failure, or did she ever give in to weakness? I’m sure some or all of those things are true.  And still, she was perfect.  The truth is true, even when it’s not.

Not sure if I'll keep the rosary thing in my life, but I'm grateful for all the things doing it each day has made me think about, and especially grateful for the ways it is keeping Ann present and close.

Daybook: 9 January, 2022

Outside my window, the sky is piercing blue, the air is sharply chill. The planting beds are heavy with recent rains and replete with weeds that I should be pulling.

I am thinking about many many things: Aren't we all? I'll share the first five I can think of. (1) the stupid pandemic and how radically it has altered all of our lives; (2) the pile of laundry I need to get through; (3) my goal (at work) to raise $375,000 this year from individual donors; (4) the three large manual typewriters on my dining room table that have been there for two weeks (rendering the table unusable) and how I want to sell them so I can get rid of them and so I can use my table again; (5) the fact that I can never seem to get up early anymore. I used to get up at 6 or 6:30, and now I can barely crawl out of bed on the weekends before 9 or 10. Is it the cold winter weather? Is it the pandemic? 

I am thankful for the beignets my husband brought home this morning for all of us to enjoy, from Devils Teeth Baking in San Francisco.

From the kitchen: Coffee and beignets.

I am wearing grey yoga pants and a long-sleeve black shirt. So, basically, my uniform.

I am creating space. Always, forever, trying like hell to create space.

I am going to play my fiddle today if it's the last thing I do before head hits pillow tonight.

I am reading About a Boy, by Nick Hornby, a light-hearted fun read after the much heavier book I just finished: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. I recommend them both!

I am hoping that my two adult sons get their own place soon. They moved back to the Bay Area and into my tiny house three weeks ago. They/we are actively looking for an apartment for them, and we all need it to happen soon.

I am hearing the beeper on my microwave going off every 60 seconds, indicating that someone heated something up for themselves and then forgot to retrieve it.  It's anyone's guess how long we all just let the beeper go before one of us deals with it.

Around the house, there are too many piles of my two adult sons' belongings.

One of my favorite things: My dog.  She's not a thing, but she's my favorite.  She is sitting on my feet right now as I type.

A few plans for the rest of the week: figure out how to practice my fiddle and get exercise while also working full time.  It's very challenging to do it all.

And a picture: My daughter sent me a photo of her desk at college; she goes to the University of California, Santa Cruz.  I absolutely love this photograph: it is so her.  :)

Ahhh, college life!

I invite you to join me by posting your own daybook; the text in italics are your categories (or you can make up your own).