hither + thither

I don’t today have so much a cohesive narrative for a letter of recommendation as I do a smattering of joys that have punctuated my moments of sanity during the pandy.
 
Without further ado:
 
Italian soundtracks: Usually I’m hardcore into podcasts when I’m out in the world. And if I’m not listening to Brené Brown or The Read or Tarot for the Wild Soul, I’m choreographing obscene dances in my head to Bunxx Up, etc. But these days my brain cannot absorb another syllable. Lyrics and interviews just feel like more ambient chatter. If you are feeling similarly, might I invite you to Italia with me?

The soundtracks to the Talented Mr. Ripley (I’m a psycho on a yacht!), The Great Beauty (I’m an aged aesthete!), and My Brilliant Friend (I so want to claim Lila, but, like most of us, I am firmly and unfortunately an Elena) have been painting the mood of my walks—jazzy, operatic, sprightly. Upon realizing that the achingly gorgeous theme for My Brilliant Friend is a recomposed version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, I wanted to sink to my knees and weep. I mean, it’s too perfect: the familiar rearranged, the girls throughout the seasons of their lives, the dissonant competing violins…Instead I shut my eyes and ate a piece of a brownie as the sun did its dappling thing through the leaves and I imagined I was anywhere else.
 
Curated solitude and irrelevance: Very recently, I went out with a bag for the first time since late March. This means I was going somewhere without a stroller and/or dog poop bags stuffed into my bra, which meant I was out for the first time simultaneously outside and unburdened neither by raccoonish toddler nor neurotic dog. It meant I had a destination, and the destination was to buy a $15 salad from Sweetgreen in the manner of the before times and to eat it on a park bench (getting up and moving benches any time anyone came near my person) and reading a Vanity Fair profile of Princess Ann. Reading about a lesser royal felt completely decadent in its irrelevance. Did I consider picking up my bag and walking, and just keep walking on into the great unknown? You betcha. Which brings me to….
 
Run: In my first book I wrote about how people who fake their deaths (or at least those who get caught) are almost always men, because women just don’t abandon their responsibilities. So to see the incredible Merritt Weaver act out that particular desire, right now, at this moment in history, in that tired button-down shirt, is transcendent. Scott, you have nothing to worry about! I’m not going anywhere! (Where the hell would I go, even? It’d be like the time I “ran away from home” when I was seven ((my sister had just been born, thanks a lot, Susannah)) and I hid behind a tree and waited for someone to miss me. I slunk home after an hour, having grown hungry and listless and seeing a wooly worm that quite disturbed me.)
 
Connell’s chain: I don’t have a ton to say about Normal People the tv show beyond hubba hubba, and if you enjoyed the book, or care a wit about the mercurial throbbings of youth, you’ll like the series. But I bow down to the brilliant costuming choice of giving Connell a chain. That thin piece of silver around his neck unlocked a Proustian swirl of adolescent yearning, particularly for the Worcester boys who wore some version of that damn chain!!! I feel like an utter perv watching the show because they are supposed to be like 16 or something when it starts (do you want to hear something really rude? The actress who plays Connell’s mom is…wait for it…ELEVEN YEARS HIS SENIOR! ELEVEN! I mean Anne Bancroft was only six years older than Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, but she was not his mama!) and they are in various states of undress all the time, the chain front and center. As a class signifier, it does a lot of work.

I watched an episode on my laptop in the bath the other morning (you don’t know my life (it was Sunday, ok?!)) and it was an ecstatic experience. Particularly a quick shot of the girls in college drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in someone’s back garden in the waning afternoon light. That sensation of feeling oneself sharp, in the creative communion of conversation, of time suspended and laughing….it just about brought tears to my eyes.
 
How to Be an Artist by Jerry Saltz: A slim illustrated volume with life-affirming advice for anyone. Saltz is one of the biggest-hearted writers of our time, and this piece in NY Mag made me pretty proud of my own eating habits by comparison.
 
Buying new sweatpants at Target. Nuf ced.
 
This Jack Kornfield meditation.
 
National Geographic sticker books: They have kept Theo in such a state of rapture I wonder if there is some kind of hallucinogenic in the adhesive.
 
The Zoom play What Do We Need to Talk About? Feels almost TOO real, though not to be outdone by the other piece of great art of our time, the artifact for the time capsule of this bullshit spring.
 
Juilliard performance of Bolero: I’ve watched this and cried about a hundred times.
 
Can I pet that dog?: I’ve watched this and laughed about a hundred times.
 
Are you finding smatterings of joy here and there, hither and thither? If so, do share.
 
I wrote a little piece for the New York Times’ Mother’s Day package, about the ways in which becoming a parent has changed you. I narced out my own mother and our family motto, which is unpublishable by the Times’ obscenity standards. I said I’m working on my temper, but I’m glad they don’t fact check with spouses.
 
Sending you covid-free hugs and all the little joys.