Intentionality of Friendship

It’s spring.  Just barely according to the weather, but in the cadence of life, I feel it.  The predictable schedule of fall and winter was like a dormant volcano: lots of activity but under control.  With spring, active lava flies out at will and spews new opportunities.  I’ve given up thinking I’m inside controlling the trajectory; I’m outside chasing the hot ash.  

I know where I am without confirming the date on the calendar: Mere weeks before the end of the school year.  Will has added track practice and track meets to his schedule, not in place of anything but on top of everything.  The end of Liam’s chess club is overlapping with the beginning of his cooking class and golf league, on top of guitar lessons.  Somewhere in the mix are Will’s spring concert and spring recital, and Liam’s trips to the YMCA to burn some energy off in the pool.

To Bill’s delight, perfectly manicured green grass has an open sign on it.  He can once again chase a little white dimpled ball over grass, through woods, onto sand, and into water.  Plus there’s soccer, Formula 1 racing, and golf Friday through Sunday on the tube. He’s in heaven.  

As activities flux in the Malcolms' lives, I’m working like heck to keep me on the schedule.  Over the winter months, I carved out a pretty good exercise routine throughout the weeks, and I’m looking forward to holding onto it through June 13th; Liam’s last day of school when all semblance of the current schedule disappears. I’m confident I can manage this: it’s an existing machine.  The where and when already pre-determined by habit.  

What’s more challenging lays in the land of community.  I’m the social coordinator for the family, and there is danger in this: booking for everyone else, but me.  On Thursday mornings every week, a friend and I are committed to walking 5k around a local lake.  Two other mornings I do Pilates to keep this post-cancer body limber and strong.  Those are the only weekly social interactions on my calendar.  I feel grateful that they are routinely scheduled to happen.  No, not even scheduled, they just are.  

Occasionally, I have a lonely week.  Bleak even.  This is a bit confusing because I’m rarely alone and always out and about.  Looking at a week’s view of my calendar, I could see that while it was jam-packed, I had no intentional, personal social interactions of my own, outside of these three hours of exercise.  Mind you, a hello, a wave, and a five-minute conversation on the fly do not count.  Nor do texts, emails, or social posts.  Call me old-fashioned, but for me to feel socially connected requires more intentionality.  To sit across from a friend and talk for an hour.  To have an equally long phone conversation with long-distance friends.  To spend a weekend together with out-of-state friends.  

A 47-year-old friendship... Vicki, my friend since kindergarten.

And the funny thing is, the more intentional time I spend with friends, the more I want to see them.  The intensity and quality of time in one another’s company doesn’t quench the need but only intensifies the want for more.  

So, as hard as it is to mesh Saturday morning schedules for a breakfast, pull off a mid-week dinner, or connect at the right time of day by phone, I’m going to keep plugging away at my social calendar, for the payoff is indescribable and immeasurable.  

Enjoying the journey…

Heat on the Annisquam

It's spring break week in Massachusetts.  We aren't traveling this year, rather choosing to stay close to home this week.  We have a couple day trips planned to Boston, and I'm taking Will and Liam on a two-night trip to New Hampshire late in the week.  It will be mostly unplugged.  A stressful proposition for me to plan, but I'm hoping once in the remote, non-WiFi locale, we'll assimilate rather quickly.  

Today we have plans to go bowling with friends then head to the Institute of Contemporary Art this afternoon, so my normal Tuesday morning writing in the library is now compressed into forty minutes or so.  And that's OK, first and foremost I'm Mom... the writer can have her day back next week.  

Given that we are still experiencing winter weather, I dug through my journal entries looking for a nugget from a warm summer day.  I think I've found just the thing.  When we renovated our house in 2012, we had to move out for a good portion of the summer.  We found a big, old house to rent in Annisquam, MA, overlooking the tidal river of the same name.  The river connected the Annisquam Harbor to the north and the Gloucester Harbor to the south.  Both ends of the river lead to open waters of the Atlantic.  I hope this warms up those of you still entrapped by winter on this mid-April day.

August 2012
The house on the Annisquam had the shore’s pulse.  A lifetime of that pulse.  The vinyled kitchen and dining room floors reflected the hardiness needed to live by the sea.  Sand from the river’s beach.  Water from a lobster pot.  Dirt from the paved street.  All of the residue from summer days digging for clams, dining with friends, and walking uphill back from the dock.  

That aura sunk into us. Through and through.

We kept the old windows open wide, upstairs and down.  The near-ocean breeze was the only coolant in the house.  A fact that nearly broke the deal for me.  I’m an AC worshipper on hot summer days.  Light woolen blankets were on each of the 10 beds.  I immediately removed all of those.  This was summer in the Northeast!  

We ventilated sun-soaked rooms by leaving ceiling fans on every day and throughout every night.  I like ceiling fans about as much as I like the heat.  But this was the only choice for any comfort.  I describe the air in these rooms as if it were always heavy and heated.  And that was the norm in that dreaded noon to four portion of the days.  But after that, the evenings were capable of great variety.  

At the going-to-bed hours when the house held the heat, I surrendered to it.  Sheets off.  Fan on.  Windows open.  Our bedroom at the corner of the house faced the river and benefitted from a set of windows on both exterior walls.  We kept the bedroom door across the hall from us open, so we had a third source of airflow through that room’s open windows on a third exterior well.  
All doors had heavy door weights: seashells.  Big and heavy.  At first, we kicked them aside; it made opening and closing the doors quicker.  Within the first couple days, we had experienced enough gunshots ricocheting through our flesh – created by slamming doors – that we fell into the habit of using the weights.  

From my bed, I could see Annisquam Lighthouse.  The lighthouse was on a little belly that jutted out into the river, so I was seeing the light from about two miles away from my bedroom window, as the crow flies.  On hot, humid nights, I lay still on my right side and watched the light.  Lying motionless was more effective than continually tossing to find a cool spot of cotton sheet.  The light held my gaze, and I found myself counting seconds between the flash of light.  Beacon.  Two, three, four, five, six, seven.  Beacon on eight.  I didn’t lose myself counting innumerable sheep.  My eyes drifted shut watching and counting to eight, time after time.  I shared my system with Bill.  At the end of summer, we were going to miss having that light lull us to sleep. 

By morning, the air cooled and was pleasant.  The sun woke us and soft breezes blew away the sleep.  The house was chipper in the morning.  I felt like a cotton sheet that had been aired out overnight on a clothesline.  That kind of freshness.

One night, Bill and I flew out of bed with bangs and cracks of a storm that had blown up in the middle of the night.  Blowing rain into the windows, the wind was whipping through the bedrooms making the curtains flap with the intensity of a midwestern tornado.  With six bedrooms, twenty bedroom windows needed to be dropped to keep the inside dry.  The old wooden sash windows fought with us a bit.  Original to the house, most raged with character but some had simply given up the fight, forgetting how the weight system worked.  This resulted in an occasional slam as accosting as the doors slamming.

One early morning while it was still dark, we woke up to a horrible stench.  Something dead outside our window.  Despite the heat, we made our way around to the windows and lowered them down.  It didn’t help the indoor air much as the odor was thoroughly inside and had the strength of a skunk spraying under an open window: the times you think the skunk MUST have gotten into the house because the scent is so strong.  I envisioned a whale – or, most likely, a very large dead fish -- washing up on the shore, but in fact, there were no waves on our little piece of water.  It was a river.  So it wouldn’t have washed up.  More aptly, it would have been left behind with the outgoing tide.  By morning, the smell was gone and the tide was high.  We would never know what decaying creature, or group of creatures, created that smell of rot.

Another night, we were tucked into our hot, humid beds when a cooling breeze came through.  It was gradual at first and felt comfortable, then it was downright cold!  The need for those thin woolen blankets suddenly become very apparent.

End of entry.

I'm ready for the heat of the summer sun.
 

Book Places

A couple weeks ago, the four of us went to a bookstore for the first time together in a very long time.  It was a box store, not a small independent.  I’m partial to the latter but we’re content in either.  Very, very content.  

Bill and I were shopping at a store next door, and the boys went ahead to the bookstore on their own.  When we arrived at the bookstore, I walked toward the children’s section at the back to make sure they were both there. 

At the entrance of that section, I heard a dad call out, “Max, where are you?”

Max replied, “My normal spot!!”  

So, we aren’t the only ones.  I think Will and Liam have had these spots since they were preschoolers.

To get my boys back into reading, I only need to take them to the library or to the bookstore.  I’m finally realizing that, like it is for me, there are many distractions in our house for them.  But if you walk into a building of books, the options are limited – even though there are thousands.  

And if your sensory system is on high alert after a day in school, or around people, or amidst noise, I feel a building full of books strips away the crazy, over-excitables and mellows out the soul. 

In all the times I purchase a book on these trips, the little two-hundred-page memento that goes home with me does not calm the soul the way physically being in the building does.  Once home that book becomes another book to read.  It moves from opportunity at the store to “to-do list” on the book stack. That purchase feels like the right thing to do at the store.  But it’s a little like shopping at Pottery Barn: just because you buy a giant sage green pillar candle doesn’t mean your dining room table will look like a designer’s masterpiece the way the candle did on the table in the store. 

A few years ago, when we were waiting for friends at a train station in Boston, we took the boys to the bookstore in the middle of the station.  They found little pieces of real estate to crouch down and read books they had pulled off the shelves.  The store manager caught them and said they couldn’t read in the store.  They were appalled to know that there were book places where reading on site was prohibited!

A couple years ago, I went north to Maine for a writing weekend on my own, and Bill took the boys on a Boy Scout trip to southern Massachusetts.  On Saturday afternoon, Bill and I texted one another photos: we were both in independent bookstores at the exact same time – wishing the other could see what we had individually discovered.

I’ve been going through photos the last few days.  I’m struck again and again by the Zen oozing from the pores of my kids when they are in bookstores.  When they were much younger and in small bookstores, I would find the two of them, side by side, squatting in identical positions, heads down, reading books.  

In this world of screens, my heart bulges at the sight of them sinking into words on bound paper. 

 

English Daffodils

Yesterday was Bill’s mum’s funeral in England. So bittersweet. Saying “good-bye” brings so many people together for the service to honor a loved one.  Funerals are one of those rare  life events, like weddings, that pull family, friends, and acquaintances together. I met so many of my mother-in-laws friends who I’d heard stories about but had never met. I felt like I was being introduced to characters from a book. People approached me saying, “You don’t know me but....”. And I smiled, for I felt I actually did know them through Bill’s mum’s vivid memories that she shared with us. 

And, like the conversations at my grandparents’ funerals, many of us said, “Why do we wait for occasions like this to get together?” Life. It’s movement pulls us into our own grooves. Then that tug of a life event pulls us together in times of great happiness or great sorrow. 

We do not usually visit England this time of year. While the days have been wet and dreary, I’ve been surprised by hosts of daffodils that are absolutely everywhere!  Rather than continuing to peck away on my iPhone, I want to share this with you from 2011:

Norton Anthology of Poetry. Spring. Daffodils. Wordsworth poem. Memorized. Not. It's an annual tradition. Unsure if I found the poem first or the daffs first. But this year, I know exactly where to find the 26-year-old anthology, so I can try yet again to memorize it. The chemo shelves in the basement.

Armed with an empty laundry basket, I head to the basement for a double-errand: dry towels & swim trunks and the big book. At the bottom of the stairs, I'm delighted. I remember both the bag and the book. I open the anthology and briefly glance at the poem. It was still there. I would fold laundry upstairs, then sit for five minutes and read the poem.

Two hours, or two days later, I got the basket to the second floor. And with a few minutes at hand went to pick up the book I had laid on top of the towels. Gone. And so much time had passed since pulling it off the shelf, I have no recollection of where it went.

Call it what you like: multi-tasking; distraction; motherhood; age; chemo brain -- my short-term memory has blown a fuse.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats o'er hills and vales, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils. I gazed and gazed but little thought what wealth to me this sight had brought. For oft when in pensive mood... inner peace and solitude... sprightly dance." And there is my jumbled favorite poem. I extract its meaning even though I've lost the exact wording.

No appearance of the anthology. But thanks to modern technology, I found the poem. The character of the poem is very different on a clean computer screen. No smell of paper and dust. No notes in the sides. No dog-eared page marking the spot. Wordsworth wrote this in 1804; I think he meant for it to be read from paper. Eternally read from paper.