looking back at the photographs (for a new project)

For a new project due out next fall, I just reviewed some 25,000 digital photographs taken over the last fifteen years.

I skipped the gym.

Tomorrow, in the company of John and Andra Bell (and my husband), I will watch slender young things dance their hearts out in Bethlehem, as part of the "So You Think You Can Dance" tour.

I will wish, watching them, that I'd gone to the gym.

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Morning will arrive, and my husband with it (San Francisco fog)

We drove toward Santa Rosa at two in the afternoon, when the fog, which had been absent all weekend, began to roll in. In the distance, the plumes of the Mount Diablo State Park fire had begun to show; I would read about this massive fire later, when I was home in Philadelphia. On the Golden Gate Bridge, pedestrians stood watching the bay fill with the yachts of the America's Cup.

By six that evening, on the way back to the airport, the fog was dense and blowing hard—so fast that it seemed to be on a chase of some kind, escaping something. I felt chased with it, but not escaped. It would be a long ride home in a cold plane that hurtled through winds—turbulent, noisy, a little panic.

I am always glad to be home. Always grateful for this quiet place and for my handsome husband and for the things we do that keep me grounded in a life that moves too fast. We talk business over lunch. We rearrange the house for client photo shoots. We watch Project Runway and So You Think You Can Dance and Master Chef and congratulate the winners, discuss the losers, allow ourselves to be seduced by the idea of the "real" in reality TV. And when I cannot sleep at night, and these days I so rarely sleep at night, I always know that he is up there, near. That if I really cannot bear the weight of so many things, morning will eventually arrive, and my husband with it.

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Things don't always fall apart

As anyone who might have read my second memoir, Into the Tangle of Friendship, knows, I don't have the best relationship with my mouth.  Just about anything that could be wrong with it is (I'm talking about structure and soft tissue now, and not verbal emanations; there's much wrong with that as well).  And so, through the years, I've had small surgeries and big ones, I've had jaw bones bolted to jaw bones, I've had the mouth wired shut for weeks on end, I've had a root canal gone desperately wrong (a shattered tooth, a pain killer to which I had a nightmarish reaction), I've had gum grafts that have made me feel and look like a flying UFO. 

It's just my mouth.  It is not life-threatening.  People face far far worse things every single day—many people.  But still.  I woke up this morning and didn't feel like going to the periodontist who is perfectly nice and tres talented (his nephew is also high up on Obama's team, so he tells good stories).  I didn't feel like it.

Here's what happened to make the day sweet anyway.  My son woke up and said the kindest thing.  My husband offered to make me a late-night brown cow (something to savor while watching So You Think You Can Dance).  Matthew Quick sent along these generous words about The Heart is not a Size.  I heard from friends (I love my friends).  And.... the yellow finch that banged on my office window for months following the passing of my mother, the finch that launched Nothing but Ghosts (or its near cousin), started banging again the very instant I arrived following this morning of surgery and stitches.  It had not banged for months and months and months.  But here it was again—another message, I suspect, from my mother.

Life is good.

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What Matters: Dancing to Life

It was not a good day; it was not. It was a day in which I was reminded of just how difficult this writing journey can be—of how hoped-for support from a publisher does, indeed, fail to materialize, even if that support is as simple as putting a book forward for an award. Even if it is as simple as simple faith and advocacy.

But there was, in this day, a foxtrot-waltz with Jim. There was my son reading from his newest work, and oh, my son is a writer, a real one—funny (he's always been), plot smart (reliably so), dialogue rich (better than me), and now (wholly, fully) compassionate. And there was So You Think You Can Dance, which is not some mere TV show. It is a place where artists go to work and where people like me, who need artistry, who cry when it materializes, who are fierce and complicated and sometimes broken by the way they choose to live, go for communion, community.

Tonight Melissa and Ade danced a Tyce Diorio routine that portrayed a woman imperiled by breast cancer. Melissa, in this dance, fought to survive and to hope. Ade fought to believe in her journey, to lift her up. The whole was, in a word, unforgettable. It was strength and power and release and it was, damn it, don't take this life away from me. I cried, I couldn't stop crying, for the beauty of the dance and for the reality of one of my very best friends, one of my oldest, dearest friends, who has been fighting this cancer battle for an entire year now. She has fought, she has not complained, she has believed, and she is out there, raising her two sons, cheering them on at baseball games, and asking, when I call, How are you, Beth?.

How am I?

My friend's journey has broken my heart, and tonight she was danced for. Tonight all of those in the fight were danced for, and we were reminded of what matters.

I was.

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Snapshot

She was rolling down a hill, and then she stopped. I was walking with my camera, and I stopped.

"Christina's World," I thought. The Wyeth painting. The essential transcendent pause.

I am thinking about the "So You Think You Can Dance" dancers today. Those finale four—Joshua, Twitch, Katee, Courtney. I am thinking about something Mandy Moore, the guest judge, said last night—that they danced the Mia Michaels choreography not with their physical selves, but with their souls.

We need to write our books that way.

We need to live inside out, authentic and forgiving.

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