Tag Archives: Daily Life

To Play in the Rain

26 Jul

This gift will last forever, This gift will never let you down… 

  –-Glen Hansard

Last night, at bedtime, I could feel the pull of the night air.  I stepped out onto the porch and looked out across the sky. Pale blue with hints of pink, and thin gentle clouds that rose into small,  fairy-tale mountains as I turned to the north.  A breeze on the warm side of cool brushed past the leaves as Hallie followed me out. “Wow,” she said, looking up at the sky, her hair dancing across her face.

Crawling out of the water that morning, rivulets coursing down my body, I rolled onto the catch basin, too tired to lift myself completely out of the pool.  Slowly standing,  breathing hard as drops of water hit the cement, I slowly made my way across the pavement and up the stairs to my t-shirt and towel, every movement intensely felt in my tired muscles, happy now only to walk, after swimming so far.  Is this, perhaps, why we left the oceans behind us? The sheer pleasure of moving in a different way?

The summer’s been lean.  After a couple years of abundant money and too little time, I’ve had to learn again how to live with the opposite.  And for the first time in ages I feel as if I’m having a summer.  My life is made of wind and water, heat and rain.  The sun rises and sets before my eyes, and as the days grow shorter, I am happy to sit on the porch with my little girl and say wow to the sky.

Swimming, biking, and eating ice cream; childhood pleasures that have always cheered me.  But this summer I long to add another.

I want to play in the rain.

I want to dance in puddles with my daughter, chase kayaking leaves with my son, and laugh with my wife as we both get soaked to the skin.  It’s been a while, and I’m sure I’ll look crazy.  But that’s okay.  Embarrassment holds little sway in my life these days, it’s just another enemy of joy.  And joy is what I’m after.  It is, of course, all around me:  in the motion of my body and in the air that I breathe,  in the clouds in the sky and the laugh of a friend, in the attention of my son, the touch of my wife,  and always, always, always in the eyes of my daughter, where the world never fails to inspire, befriend and renew; and where love abides for all she beholds.

 

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Best Cup of Coffee

4 Aug

It was beautiful this morning.  Early sunrise, cool breeze and the sound of leaves dancing.  Not quite enough to get me out of bed for a run, but enough to make me thoroughly enjoy Hallie cuddling against my chest after her 6 am feeding and the both of us crawling back into bed with Amy for a little more sleep.  Heath stumbled in a few minutes later and as all four of us lay in the early morning light things seemed just about perfect.

The city has moods.  I notice this most on days when the mood is dark.  But today the city was serene, it’s people calm and polite, as if all New York had enjoyed a good night’s sleep.  And it probably had, the heat and humidity having broke with Saturday’s storms, leaving the days comfortable and the nights cool.  My dreams, lately a jumbled mass of high school reunions and old girlfriends, grew quiet, and last night I simply slept.  But, having a newborn in the house, I did not sleep enough.

And so I needed coffee, which I picked up from my favorite cart at the corner of Lexington & 52nd.  I don’t know her name, but I love the woman who runs this cart.  She has taken wonderful care of me these past few weeks as I stumble sleep deprived into the city for another day of temping. 

I discovered her one morning when the nearest Starbucks locked it’s outside door.  You see, I know it’s crazy, but I had actually made peace with popping the five dollars for a Venti Decaf Mocha with skim milk and no whipped cream.  In my defense, I had a rule.  No more than once a week, with exceptions for days when it’s raining (as it was on this particular morning).  But the street door I always used was locked.  I could see customers inside, but the door wouldn’t budge.  Then I saw the little sign.  For security reasons I was required to enter from inside the building.  Which meant going through security.  Metal detector, bag check, the whole nine yards.  Ten minutes before I’m supposed to be at work.  For the privilege of paying FIVE DOLLARS FOR A CUP OF COFFEE!  No. Absolutely not!  I stood out in the rain as people hurried past and I scanned the horizon for a coffee cart until BAM!  I saw one directly across Lexington.  I ran across the street and bought a cup of coffee for one dollar!  And it was goooooooood!  And the woman was nice!  We chatted, we laughed, we became, in a small way, friends.  For whatever reason, she was wearing a head scarf, and somehow that made it even better.  Completely restored my faith in humanity.

This morning the prices had gone up.  That medium coffee is now $1.25.  But despite its having been a couple weeks, my newfound coffee friend remembered that I like skim milk and two sugars.  I gave her two singles and she pushed one back. 

“Just give me a quarter next time.” 

“Are you sure?”, I asked.

“Yes, it’s so much easier.” 

And so it is. 

I walked up toward Park Avenue, smiling in the morning sun, breathing in the air of a happy, well rested city.

 

 

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Kind Words

15 Jul

I have never really trusted kind words. Fearing false emotion and cheap platitudes, I shrugged them off as politely as possible and moved on, never giving them their due.

I was wrong.

Not to avoid cheap emotion, please… God save us from Oprah’s couch. But I was wrong not to listen. Not to hear. Not to recognize the truth that is almost always there.

The responses to my first post, Gifts from My Daughter, have been an amazing lesson in the power of a kind word at a difficult time. Such words, I have learned, do not lose, but rather gain with repetition the power to comfort, attaining a warm glow, the softness of a favorite blanket, the smell of woodsmoke. I cannot hear them enough.

Surprisingly many of these words have come from old friends, people I really didn’t expect to hear much from again. And yet here they are, sharing their own lives and stories as if the time and distance that separates us does not exist.

Why did I ever let such amazing friends drift away?.

The answer, I know, is mostly geography. When you pick up and move every decade or so, you cut a lot of ties. Hell, in my youth I thought this was healthy, something everyone should do. As if uprooting all the trees in a forest every ten years and moving them all around could somehow be good land management.

Idiocy.

I should never have let it happen. These people are too valuable. I should have brought them with me. Forcibly if necessary. And we should all now live within blocks of each other, having coffee in the morning, beers at night, and barbecues on the weekend. Our children and grandchildren should all be the best of friends and have the run of each others houses. We should be there for each other all the time, sharing the seasons of our lives.

Idiocy as well, I suppose. But, understandable idiocy, which is usually the best I can plead.

So, I throw myself upon the mercy of my friends. And be they in Perrysburg, Chicago, New York, or Steamboat Springs, I have no doubt they will catch me. Most likely with a kind word at a difficult time. Which I will value above gold.

 

 

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