Believe it or not, I have seven posts sitting idle in my draft folder, with a few for each month that this site has been silent. It’s a fitting metaphor for how I’ve been feeling—many thoughts but few words to express them. Those who know me in person understand that I’m not a big talker. I enjoy people and conversations, but I often hit a wall when the words suddenly stop. I think them, but they don’t come out.
Sid returned home in May after eleven months away. The growth has been astounding—a mix of intensive work and natural maturity—and we’ve spent the past two months adjusting to being a family of four again. We left off with a ten- and thirteen-year-old. Now we have a tween and an almost fifteen-year-old, in sixth and tenth grades. That shift feels pivotal, as there’s no going back to early childhood. Young adulthood looms, which is both beautiful and frightening, leading to midnight musings about what comes next.
Once upon a time, I stood at the full-wall kitchen window in my West Village office building and watched two planes crash into towers a mile downtown. I watched debris fall and gradually realized that it was not all pieces of plane and glass. I watched those towers pancake to the ground, the vision painfully surreal to process.
I walked the eighty blocks back to my apartment, tuned the radio to NPR, and slumped down onto the kitchen floor. An hour later, unable to sit with my grief, I threw on my sneakers and ran. Uptown and downtown, I would have looped the bridges had they not been closed. I couldn’t stop running; I needed to feel my heart beat. And with every beat, I wondered how many other hearts had stopped.
Raise your hand if you have a brain that is busier than your body. Hello, friend!
I recently had a psychiatrist appointment during which I expressed distress over my level of anxiety. I know I am anxious when I stop sleeping at night—a frustrating no-win situation where I don’t want to go to bed because I know sleep won’t come. However, I’m also nearly paralyzed by the idea that I won’t sleep and will be too tired in the morning.
Cue the tiny violins, but honestly, when you work with four and five-year-olds all day, you need to be awake. They know when you are bluffing. Plus, you are used as a human tissue for eight hours a day, five days a week, and if that immune system is depressed, well, you wind up with RSV like an adult four-year-old. Hello. That’s been me for the last three weeks.
Ginkgo trees can live 1,000 years or more. They are living fossils. They’ve mingled with dinosaurs. They’ve survived some of the harshest conditions, including the atomic bomb and, most notably, New York City streets. They are strong. Survivors. And they start as tiny seedlings.
I found one this summer. I was petting a stray cat in Prospect Heights and saw one making its way up and out of very dry soil in a sidewalk crack. The cat was disinterested, but the baby ginkgo couldn’t say no, so I scooped it up in my hands and carried it with me to dinner with a friend in Park Slope. It was a beautiful night, and the waitress placed three glasses on our outdoor table. “Here’s one for your baby tree,” she said nonchalantly, and I plunked the parched roots into the ice water, drank some nice wine, and had a great evening.
No one in Penn Station bats an eyelash at a sweaty middle-aged lady clutching a ginkgo seedling wrapped in a damp paper towel at 10 pm while waiting for New Jersey Transit. My husband didn’t, either, as he’s known me for twenty years, and it is not unusual for me to return home from an outing with some living thing in tow, and I am sure he was relieved that it was a tree and not a cat.
Ginkgo saplings grow slowly. They are the antithesis of bamboo, which you can witness – even hear – growing if you are still and patient enough. Ginkgoes are giants that take their time. They are saving their energy for survival. I think that is why I’ve always loved them.
I tend to pick things up from the ground to save when I want to remember moments. I have stones that hold all sorts of memories – saying goodbye to my best friend when she left for college, hag stones from a beach walk in San Francisco days before Sid was admitted to the hospital. I have water chestnuts Emmett slipped into my hand while visiting Valentino Pier and horse chestnuts I’ve pocketed on walks through my town alone, savoring the fall air and leaves.
A few months ago, on a walk with our dog, I scooped up a few burr oak acorns. It was a pretty unhappy time, and the act of picking up the seeds was partially one of desperation. Maybe, I thought, I can make these grow. Maybe, I wondered, if they sprout, I will make it through. When I got home, I wrapped them in a damp towel, shoved them into a plastic bag, and left it on my office windowsill. Then I forgot they were there until December.
When I opened the bag, I anticipated mold and foul smells, but instead, it was an earthy musk of life. Pushing out of three of the four nuts were strong, thick roots. I held them in my hand, marveling at nature’s ability to do its thing in the dark of a wadded-up wet paper towel, then placed each in water and watched them grow. Unlike ginkgoes, oak trees are speedy. Within a week, two seeds had leaves. I moved one to an old bourbon bottle last weekend as its roots had become too complicated to reside in a salsa jar.
I probably should plant the oak and the ginkgo outside in the spring or fall, but I’m selfish and want to keep them close. When I watch their roots and leaves spread, their stems move incrementally toward sturdy trunks; it reminds me of how instinctual survival is. I want to grow with them. I want to survive with them.
It’s been a while. I’ve had a lot to say but not a lot of words, if that makes any sense. Summer began and passed and here we are almost at the cusp of school starting. I’m not sure if I have much to show for it other than work hours logged, a few good books read, and some intensive therapy – and I’m transparent about that one because these things need to be more at the forefront of conversation. Humans can be fragile and strong at the same time. I used to think that it was a balance but these days I feel that it is a composite, for there is strength in fragility and, conversely, strength can be fragile.
I am sitting with a beer at SEA-TAC, waiting for my red eye flight home. Four hours ago I was in California hugging Sid for the first time in almost two months and then navigating a flimsy rental car through a canyon of giant flood puddles and mudslides and rocks and pretending that I could see the road on the 405. Apparently there was an earthquake in Ojai around the time that my first flight took off. Seattle is sunny and warm and full of forest fire smoke. I don’t think it’s dramatic to say that the world is upside down.
This has been the summer of hard feelings – encountering them, acknowledging them, facing them, feeling them. I’ve never been good at any of that. I have always felt things deeply but received a D- in the processing department. If anything, I will complete this summer with a degree in feelings. Take that, Harvard.
I’m not even sure what highway I was on this morning – maybe 14 – en route to the 405, hustling to try and get ahead of the flooding and feeling guilty for not spending the full allotted four hours with my kiddo, but also cognizant of the fact that if I missed my flight, I wouldn’t be home until at least Tuesday. I’d spent the night in a random hotel, blackout drapes drawn, diving into and surfacing from intense dreams that left me covered in sweat, shaking so hard that I thought I would be sick. The rain barreled down onto the road, so much so that the car sensor registered that I had crashed the front. It kept dinging and flashing for a good half hour, the camera obstructed by sheets of water. Every so often, the car would lift with a surge, and I’d grasp the steering wheel tighter, training every thought on the lyrics of Bright Eyes songs that I’d set up to play, album by album, from my phone.
The rain reminded me of a trip my husband and I took to Turkey shortly after we were married. We drove from Izmir to Cappadocia, stopping in various towns and cities along the way, and at one point we were driving up a mountain behind an oil truck that was moving exceedingly slow. When it finally let us pass, our car was pelted with hail, and we realized quickly that the slowness and largess of the truck had been shielding us from the harsh reality of our future. When this memory hit, tears ran freely down my cheeks. I wasn’t making a sound, but the physicality of the emotions surfaced.
Much of this summer has been acknowledging the fact that I have been using life like that oil tanker, the feelings like hail just out of view. At some point that truck is going to pull over and the natural elements will reach you. So, here I am with a lot of dents and scratches. I think the hail has gotten smaller, though sometimes the smallest balls of ice sting the most.
In other news, Sid has been connecting with farm animals, and one of the chickens is named Patricia.
object of memory 