Happiness New Year

The seconds are ticking off until it's 2009. Without question, this year has been one of the most difficult of my life...and I thought 2007 was bad. The truth is, this was undoubtedly a terrible year in so many ways. But in other ways - friends made, acquaintances renewed, steps taken forward in this new life - it was a successful year.

And while it's impossible for me to forget Ronnie's death and how it changed everything about our family, my life, and my perspective, I must also remember that life goes on. The days continue to pass, and though I will continue to keep his memory, it would be an insult for me to let that keep me from living.

So...here's to a review of 2008, a year of losses and gains, of grief and gratitude, of seriousness and snark. I will be ringing in the new year with faith, hope and love...those things that I've learned are essential under any circumstances. Happy New Year, my dears.


January: Measuring Up: In Praise of Junk in the Trunk


February: Devastate, In All Its Forms


March: Just the Five of Us: The Shape of a Family and The New Theory of Relativity




April: This is a List


May: Weeds


June: Father's Day






July: Ghosts of Trees


August: Gratitude: A Letter to the Universe





September: Meet the Parents (or My Not-So-Great Evil Plan)





October: Tumbled Thoughts from the Shoreline


November: Gratitude: Part V - Love (and more gratitude)


December: Let It Snow

Tumbled Thoughts from the Shoreline

Right now, I'm sitting on the, well, we'll call it a balcony of my hotel room and listening to the Atlantic fall on the sand again and again. There's enough of a breeze that it's sort of chilly in a way that simultaneously makes me want to go inside and want to sit here shivering just to feel alive. It could be that I'm tired - I was up til 2 a.m. working on our project and then up at 6:45 to get back to it - but I find myself staring into the inky darkness and thinking harder than I want to...

* About working too much. There was the trip to Orlando. And then another to Atlanta after that. I left yesterday morning to be on J.I. now. I'm headed back tomorrow, and then early Wednesday, I'll get up and head to Atlanta. And it's good...I'm proud of myself. But I wonder, what about everything else?

* I'm on this trip with two guys who have kids, and they're always talking about their kids. And I have nothing. I mean, I tell my Dillon stories like a good auntie and laughingly interject something about Kudzu, but sometimes, it just feels empty.

* I feel sad about The Professor and his ex. I feel sorry for her. And I feel sorry for me. It's just a weird place to be in for both of us - me and this girl I don't even know. I feel like she's having to go through the place I just was, and I'm looking at the situation, and thinking, "I'm glad that's not me."

* There's a quiet right now - besides the constancy of the ocean - that makes me feel so solitary. I can't hear anyone else talking, no signs of life. The quiet is almost eerie, and far more lonely than soothing.

* Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how we all think that happily ever after will happen to us. But the truth is, there are so many people who don't have it. For every happily-ever-after is an also-ran. I'm not condemning myself as an also ran yet - and this really isn't the part where I want everyone to tell me that my day will come. This is the part where I face the reality that you don't get everything. And I have stellar friends and a fabulous family life and a good career...and lots of wonderful things. I spend entirely too much time thinking about the missing pieces...especially in light of the fact that maybe - just maybe - they were never meant to be part of the whole.

Done & Undone

Done:
* Stoned kitty sleeping by cat-nipped scratcher near the kitchen
* Filmed various important Wilmywood locations: first office, first apartment, Morton Hall, beach
* Sushi
* Long bath
* Palm Sunday service
* Watching She's the Man (twice)
* Identifying Amanda Bynes ' next teen movie project and duly notifying Penelope
* Almost entire bag of Skittles
* Afternoon nap
* Marathon procrastination
* Agreeing to tap dance at Kim Shable's wedding

Undone:
* Dishes
* Taking the trash out
* Sending out resumes
* Unfinishable proposal I'm writing for work
* Packing
* Bank deposit
* iPod loading
* General life planning
* Learning to tap dance

All Good Things

* Lunch today on the veranda of Bluewater overlooking the Intracoastal with A., who makes me very proud

* Seeing porpoises in the Intracoastal - two or three of them bumping above the surface with their shiny fins and bottle noses and then tipping under again

* The bright, bright yellow forsythia blooming in the front yard

* The "gas leak" (a.k.a. afternoon loopiness) at the office that lead to me singing "Fathoms Below" from Little Mermaid to a coworker and my inability to put together a coherent sentence (and we only needed the one sentence)

* Kudzu asleep on a throw pillow next to me, making sleeping kitty noises

* A very long good conversation with my mom in which she said all the things I needed to hear

* Windows down, crossing the Memorial Bridge, listening to "Blew Away" by the Smashing Pumpkins

Mother, Mother Ocean

With another run of unseasonably warm weather gracing our fine city, I thought I'd take advantage and do something I haven't done in a long time: I went to the beach. It was strange to see Wrightsville so crowded in mid-January. Girls shivering in their bikinis. Shirtless college boys throwing football, kicking soccer balls in roving gangs. Dogs of all breeds - terriers, retrievers, maltese.

After sitting on the dunes for awhile, I walked down under the pier and down the beach a stretch. At first, I tried to keep my feet and jeans from getting wet, but then I gave in and decided there was really no point trying to stay clean and let my jeans get all wet and sand-crusted.

I like to pick up rocks and shells when I'm at the beach. But only the ones that are flat and smooth and edgeless. Those are the ones that remind me why I love the ocean - it is ceaseless in its movement, the tides rolling over and over and over again. That tumbling water can make any jagged edge smooth over time as the waves crash in on each other and the surf bubbles up along the shore.

Days Gone By

Today I met with a man who was born & raised at the beach. He's a historian by hobby, and he has been collecting historic photographs from family, friends and other locals for a long time and assembling them into a historic photo essay of sorts. He's about 80, white-haired, brown-skinned. He was waiting for me to arrive, standing on the porch that faced the main thoroughfare of the island. He invited me to sit in a rocking chair on his back porch and chat for a bit before we took a look at the photos I was hoping to use for an ad series. We sat looking out on the waterway on a perfect afternoon - breezy, 83 degrees, zero humidity. He told me a little bit about his childhood and how the house he grew up in caught fire in '74 and took his father and he rebuilt in '78, retired in '85 and how his wife had just died two years ago so it's just him and his cat named Schooner.

When we looked at his photos together, he talked about each of them as a man who is profoundly devoted to place. He described riding the trolleys from downtown to the beach, stopping at Station 1 at the beach to get a soda and watching nickleodeons at the downtown theater. He remembers when no cars traveled over the main bridge. When the 200-room hotel burned to the ground in the 50s, he stood across the channel on the mainland and watched as bits broke off and caught the whole north side of the island on fire.

It was fascinating to know another part of this place that I know in my own way. To see for an afternoon how he has grown old as the island has grown up and developed around him in his little waterway-facing cottage. As I drove over the bridge, I thought about my history with the place. And something about the air and the light and the time of year reminded me of when Kim, Hoang-Anh & I drove out to see the sunrise in the early months of our first year of grad school. Those are some of the first pictures I took when I got here. And I couldn't help feeling as nostalgic as the old man for the memory of the way it was.