thoughts on the new year: the bounty of friendship, the dearness of Caribousmom

We celebrated New Years Eve with truly beloved friends, as we now do each year.  We choose a restaurant halfway between our homes, in a town called Skippack.  We talk students, dance, Hollywood, art, travels, books, life as it is and was.

The bounty of friendship.

In so many ways the year now gone terrified those of us who love this country and care about the rising class of dreamers.  I am vulnerable and incapable, often.  I have not learned what I can do in the face of national and personal tragedies, congressional cacophony and faulty machines.  I have lost my faith in the sanctity of theaters and classrooms.  I have worried about weather.  I have felt sickened by conversations that stopped far short of anybody actually listening.

I have wanted to make room.  I have asked myself how.  I have asked myself questions.

Why are we screaming so much at one another?  What is the payoff of cruelty?  How can we push a man into the path of an oncoming train?  How can we survive the gunning down of children, of teachers, of people watching Batman?  What can we do for the friend who has lost a brother far too soon?  What can we say when illness happens, and when it returns, when jobs are lost, when everything is so preposterously uncertain, when the storms sweep in?  When we don't know and we need to know?  When there are people relying on us?

We can, I think, be kinder to one another.  We can be more trustworthy.  Less self-indulgent with our anger or our needs.  Less quick to correct or accuse, humiliate or shame.  More aware of the connections between people and things, and how easily—pushed too far, intruded upon—they're broken.  We can surround ourselves with the bounty of friendship, and it is this bounty, and the love in my own family, that sustains me, that shows me how.  It is this bounty that I am particularly grateful for, on this first day of this new year. 

Earlier this year, Wendy Robards, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a caretaker, one of the smartest readers of books anywhere, a quilter, read an early copy of Small Damages and began to make a quilt that captured the colors in the story.  When it arrived I was astonished.  Since it arrived, I have shown it to every single person who comes, sometimes I show them twice.  It is symbolic, this quilt—bright, particular, personal, and made and given out of love.

Today Wendy has posted her favorite books of the year, and, Wendy being Wendy, first provides incredible reviews of a truly stellar collection, then finally names Small Damages as her favorite read of the year.

A tree grows for you in my heart, Wendy.

Love to all of you in 2013.

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Leave Your Sleep/Natalie Merchant: Poetry Made True

Back on December 27th, I wrote of Natalie Merchant on this blog, wondering out loud where she had gone.  In the intervening weeks and months, I began to hear rumors.  Ed Goldberg, a librarian, had spotted her, he said at a convention; she'd set poems to music, he reported, and they were lovely.  On April 18th, The New York Times confirmed Ed's promise; Leave Your Sleep, a project that took Ms. Merchant five years, was now available in stores.  My Friend Amy further confirmed the fact; on April 19th, she blogged of her long love for Merchant, as well as of her enthusiasm for Leave Your Sleep, which she'd already procured.  By then my copy was already on the way to me.  Yesterday it arrived.

Earlier today, my husband and I drove to a town called Skippack, where I sat beneath this wisteria tree.  When we arrived home, my husband went out to his studio to make the art he masterfully makes, and I stayed inside to listen to every single one of Natalie Merchant's 26 new songs.  There's never been a voice like hers, I'm sure, nor, perhaps, a musician's heart.  I cannot count the times that I have danced alone to her songs through the years or yearned after the quality of her lyrics—the stunning coherence and wisdom of them.  I have always loved Natalie Merchant; I didn't think I could love her more.

With Leave Your Sleep, Ms. Merchant didn't merely select and arrange often nonsensical poems into songs, yielding them new and delving meaning.  She also set out on an adventure to discover the lives of the poets who'd penned the songs that inspired her.  She fell in love, in the process, with the "doomed and luminous eyes" of Robert Louis Stevenson, restored the child prodigy Nathalia Crane to a place of honor, imagined seeing Ogden Nash at "a cocktail hour in a paneled den with cut-glass bowls of salted nuts on the bar and the air blue with cigar smoke," and refused to imagine the day that Arthur Macy learned that both of his sons had died.

In the preface to the book of poems and poet biographies (all researched and written by Ms. Merchant) that accompanies her two CDs, Ms. Merchant writes this:

This collection of songs represents parts of a long conversation I've had with my daughter during the first six years of her life.  It documents our word-of-mouth tradition in the poems, stories, and songs that I found to delight and teach her.  I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages and brought them to life for her. I willed into being this parade of witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a jaintor's boy, and so many others.

Art born of a mother's love.  I like that.  I like that a whole lot.

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