365 Memories

Warning: the content of this post is not for the faint. On our way to and from a baseball game today (the New York–Penn Minor League), my son and I crossed New York Harbor on one of the cheerful orange boats that make up the Staten Island Ferry fleet. The ride was fabulous, passing Lady Liberty on calm waters, and the second round-trip we've made on the S.I. Ferry. I hope we'll do much more of this. The thing about the trip, though, was that it brought up a not-so-pleasant memory of another ferry ride, in June of 2006. My son was three years old then, and my parents were celebrating their ruby (fortieth) wedding anniversary. Despite how not romantic it might seem to celebrate a wedding anniversary with a daughter, son-in-law, and three-year-old grandchild in tow, this was how my parents wished to celebrate: with a family vacation to Block Island, Rhode Island. I had never been there, though I had heard wonderful things. The island lived up to its reputation—it was charming, l...

This is what I am, once again: sleepy. Bone tired. The kind of tired you are not sure you will recover from, and the kind that makes you feel like a child no matter your age. My memory of the moment springs from this feeling, which my son apparently shared tonight. This depth of fatigue is no problem when you are able to lie down and drop immediately into a profound sleep. Sometimes, however, that's not possible, which is when you'd be glad for someone to rub your back. For years now—since a particularly tortuous transatlantic flight with my then-toddler—my son has asked for someone to "rub my back and count to twenty." Counting to twenty is getting off scott free: the whole ritual took form on that cramped airplane, when the only way I could get my son to sleep was to start counting . . . and count all the way to two hundred before it had any effect. Now it's either one of us (my husband or I) who counts at night, but there's another thing that only I do; I ...

Nine years ago today, I sat in a trailer, wearing a fluorescent green nylon jumpsuit and watching a "safety and risk" video along with my then-fiancé and two friends. The trailer was parked to the side of an airfield, where Sky's the Limit offered people like me—ordinary, I promise—the thrill of falling thousands of feet through the air. I was about to perform my first-ever parachute jump. Outside, I remember, the sun shone bright: the sky beckoned, clear and blue. Inside the trailer it was dark. And it was dark inside myself. For months I'd been fighting depression. As anyone who has ever been depressed can tell you, a dose of guilt attaches, especially when by external measures your life seems full of good, happy events. Six months earlier, I had completed a Master of Fine Arts program, gotten engaged, and had found a job with a great group of people who would stay friends long after we went separate ways. But I found the transition devastating. After years of relat...

Lifting, bending, touching, twisting. The sensuality of dance with a connected partner, with a man who knows how to move. The shifting energy of give and take, fluid in the open air around us. The expanding and contracting distances, the invisible cord tethering our bodies, so that no matter the steps taken in opposite directions, still we could only describe a set circumference, an orbit we could not break. I remember only once in my life dancing with a man in a perfect rhythm. It may be significant that this was not someone I was involved with at any time, romantically I mean, and this was long after I had abandoned as lost my almost-career of professional dance. That world—professional dance and ballet specifically—was one I left before achieving any training in partnering, in pas de deux . That was a milestone for us adolescent ballerinas in training—a symbolic awakening to the adult world of coupledom —and I often wondered what it meant that my dance pursuit ended before I could ...

It's getting late. Not later, really, than my usual posting; maybe I'm just more tired today. I have a lot on my mind, mostly time-intensive work projects. And really, I feel empty of memory. I am having a hard time remembering even my name at the moment. Just a big, black void that—hey!—that reminds me of something. Reminds me of a big, black void, in fact. One I experienced when I was sixteen years old (though I suppose a person could argue that simply being sixteen is enough of a black void in itself). This, though, was physical. I remember it was a summer day, and hot. Not middle-of-August-and-humid kind of hot, but hot enough to be uncomfortable . I was home from school and home from the hospital. I've posted about my Sloan-Kettering experience already, so won't go into details, but will just toss out a bone to those who don't know (a reminder to those who do): I was, in the summer of 1986, subjected to surgery followed by nine months of a fiberglass cast on ...

A memory from early teen years. I was in Los Angeles, and it was the summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school. During the academic months, I was attending North Carolina School of the Arts, boarding there, chasing the passion—the obsession—of professional dance; of ballet. It was a profession with strong skin-color barriers, preaching an aesthetic, for women more than men, that did not embrace dark skin. Who could imagine a bronzed Odette? At that time, no one it seemed. In Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, even the Black Swan with her thirty-two fouettés was always white. Insulting (and I suspect largely unchanged, with mostly segregated dance companies)—and yet I didn't overthink it at the time. Now, remembering all the things it seemed permissible for the ballet teachers to say to us students, I am surprised that no one mentioned explicitly that we should stay out of the sun. That particular summer, though, it wouldn't have mattered. I remember going to the...

A perfect Indian Summer day, nearly eleven years ago. An afternoon in early September, sunny and warm, blue sky, a day for being outdoors. I had recently gone out on a series of dates—platonic coffees, pleasant lunches—with the man who would in time become my husband. And just a week or so before, he had upped the ante significantly: he told me he'd be going home to France for a vacation in the fall, and did I want to go with him? At that point, although there was clearly a mutual attraction, we hadn't even kissed; I had no possible answer to a "meet the family" proposition. On this end-of-summer day, though, I didn't need to give an answer to that question, only accept an invitation to go skating around Central Park. At his apartment on East 92 nd Street, we strapped on our in-line skates, and too little protective gear, and headed out. It had been about three or four years since I'd skated. Maybe not since I lived in Saint Louis, when I'd burn off stres...

Along with sunshine and the reggae beat of UB 40 coming from a friend's boom box by the lake at my Michigan boarding school, late spring in 1985 brings another memory: the first "real" kiss. I was fifteen years old, school would dismiss for the summer in a few short weeks, and when I came back in September, I'd be another couple weeks shy of turning sixteen. Sweet sixteen and . . . never been kissed? I remember feeling ambivalent. On the one hand, I didn't much care. On the other, I knew that I was supposed to care, so it began to bother me. And springtime conspires to create young love. And there was this one guy who seemed kind of interesting, a little different—though it's hard to remember now exactly what it was that struck me as unusual. Maybe it was the way he dressed. He was tall and slim, and clothes draped nicely on him. He had very blond hair, and the brightness of it was emphasized by his choice of wearing mostly white. He wore linen, I think; he w...

When I was much younger, still a teenager—when danger held an allure, and when I thought my outward appearance was the best defense against a vulnerable heart—I wanted a tattoo of an ornate dagger on my arm, up close to the shoulder. And yet, I knew better than to mistake myself for someone ready to make a permanent commitment; I'd have to grow into that mentality. The urge subsided, then returned years later. Older, I became more discriminating, and less defensive. I became a social pacifist. I was intensely relieved I had not inked the image of a violent blade on my body. But I still wanted a tattoo. I began to do what my adult self has nearly always done when confronting a decision: I started researching. I was living in Chicago at the time, and I remember my quest for finding the best (and cleanest) tattoo parlor, though I don't remember the results of the search. I never even got to the point of meeting any tattoo artists, though (the research was by reputation), because I...

Another memory came up during lunch today. I was with my father, and we were in the Tap Room, in the Yale Club of New York City. It's a fine, traditional university club, and has been a convenient Midtown haven for our family on frequent occasions over the years. My father has been a member for quite some time. His membership is a result of having graduated from Yale Divinity School. Yes, if you're keeping track through my posts, my father has been an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, as well as having been employed by Playboy Enterprises. Bizarre mix? A clever man (I don't remember who) once summed up my father's career path by saying that he'd gone: "from the pulpit to the grease pit to the cockpit to the flesh pit." Quite right, the grease pit being General Motors, where he completed management training and got his start in the corporate world, the cockpit being Pan Am; each bookended by the obvious references. As I said, clever. I have a me...

Imagine you have just taught a writing workshop to a group of a dozen women (more or less) at the YWCA in Greenwich, Connecticut. It's probably around 8:30 at night, maybe closer to 9:00, and you leave the classroom with a few others who've stayed behind to talk to you about the evening's work. You head out through the building's back doors, into the cool spring air. You say good night and find your car in the spacious parking lot. It's dark already at this time of year, though the days are lengthening at last. You get into the driver's seat, lock the car doors out of street-smart habit, and sit for a moment to write some notes on the workshop before you forget. The others have left by the time you turn the key in the ignition. You slowly roll the width of the building toward Putnam Avenue, the main artery connecting this privileged town to its neighbors: on one side, a sub-community of means, and on the other, a poor cousin just past the New York State border. ...

On this day six years ago, at the corresponding moment of this post, my son was exactly one hour old. I had delivered him (after a two-day medical dance of IV pitocin , raised and lowered doses, fetal monitors, anticipation, frustration with the stalling process of induction . . . ), and I had held him close to my heart, touching skin-to-skin after nine months of wondering what that moment would be like. Then he was whisked off to the NICU . I was too exhausted to think straight; my blood pressure too high to be calm, and yet I had no energy left to be anything but. I wondered when I would see my son next—the fact that I'd had a son took time to sink in, as we had elected to wait until birth to discover the baby's gender—and I wondered whether it was somehow my fault that he was in an incubator and not sharing my postpartum room. It turned out to be something fairly common (who knew?) with a horrible sounding name: he had a pneumothorax , a tiny air leak from the lung tissue in...

I have to say: my son has a wonderful P.E. teacher, and he (my son) is only in kindergarten. Unless there's a big hole in my memory, I did not have a coach or a P.E. class until I was in middle school. Kindergarten was kind of like a one-room schoolhouse, without much of a curriculum other than learning how to "get along." The two elementary schools I attended—one a private school in Chicago, the other a public school in L.A.—did not have physical education classes, or really any organized sports activities at all. We had recess, though in Chicago I remember watching the older kids practice field hockey. The school in Chicago was K-12, so there were junior varsity and varsity teams, but as I was only there from first through fourth grades, I knew nothing about these. The kids our age just ran around outside playing tag. In the fifth and sixth grades (still considered elementary school in L.A.), same thing. There was recess. There was lunch. There were games of four-square...

Then there are the books that shock you. Really shock you. There's a book like this for me, a book by Shel Silverstein . It wouldn't shock me as an adult, and especially not now that I myself am a writer: I understand the desire to make sometimes drastic departures from your best-known material. (Plus, sometimes your best-known material doesn't even represent your best self, though I'm not saying one way or the other with respect to Silverstein .) We all have many facets to our personalities, many wells to draw from in our quest for creative expression. Today, I'm sure I'd love this large-format, coffee table book of drawings—or if not love it, then at least really appreciate it—and I hope my parents still have it in their personal library. I'm guessing that they do. But when I saw this book for the first time, I wasn't an adult. I was around ten or eleven years old, and the book in question, despite Silverstein's huge contributions to the world of...

Almost exactly seven years ago, early April 2002. It was three months after my small civil marriage ceremony, performed in Connecticut by a justice of the peace; it was three months before the church wedding and reception planned for family and friends in southwest France. Married, yet somehow not, in a state of transition, I embarked with my father on a "heritage trip" by car, driving down into the Deep South. Georgia, Alabama: the roots of my father's childhood, the seat of a civil rights revolution in its infancy. I had really never explored this part of the country, not in any important way, and in no way with a feeling of connection. My grandparents, Southern to the core, had moved to a Florida retirement town before I was born, and visiting them never really seemed "Dixie" to me. This was a bonding trip, a time to pause and honor ancestry before the life of the future (my separate, legal family life) came to assert itself, forcefully, everywhere. We had pl...

Discharged from Sloan-Kettering after two weeks of bed rest, I was an atrophied version of my sixteen-year-old self. Atrophied physically from lack of exercise and loss of muscle tone, but also somewhat in spirit. I sported a toe-to-thigh fiberglass cast that immobilized my right leg; my left was graced with a wicked scar. (My surgeon did not give a hoot for the aesthetics of his sutures; he was no plastics man). Weakened, in pain, but nonetheless happy to be leaving, I was wheeled through the hospital doors in a chair, then driven to our family home in Southport , Connecticut. It didn't feel like home to me; my parents had moved to Connecticut when I was away in boarding school. I knew no one there and felt isolated. And then there was the problem of autonomy, or lack thereof. Independent from day one, the family joke is that I "moved out of the house" for the first time the day I was born—two months early and put in an incubator where I "lived alone" for the f...

Dorothy Hamill, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, and America's Sweetheart for some time after. If you didn't see her on the ice—if you didn't really see her at all—then you saw traces of her image reflected in neighborhood acquaintances who copied her style. In the late 70s and early 80s, everyone knew at least one person with the "Dorothy Hamill 'do," that hairstyle she made incredibly popular: the wedge. Despite the fact that I was dancing, and ballet still mandated long tresses, I made a bold move the summer I was ten and cropped off my hair; it would always grow back. It was the first time I wore my hair that short, and once the shock of being light-headed wore off, I remember thinking that it looked very sophisticated. (Give me a break; as I said, I was only ten!) But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this was not exactly a universal opinion. Maybe it was the fact that my wedge may have looked a bit more like a bowl cut than is...

I remember the words "giant" and "bone" and "tumor." I remember looking at fuzzy black and white X-ray films (fuzzy-looking to me anyway), and being told that the bone in the lower part of my right tibia was the thickness of an eggshell: a fracture would pose severe risks. The deformity was ever so slightly visible from the outside; there was a softly swollen, bowed look to the outer line of my leg above the ankle. I thought of my ballet mistress, Madame S., and her parting assessment of "thick ankles" when I left the pre -professional dance world of NCSA (see previous posts on dancing). I suddenly longed for the luxury of earlier days when I could still tell myself that anything wrong might be fixed with paraffin wax and Ace bandages. Instead, I sat in the office of one of NYC's top orthopedic surgeons—a near deity with whom an appointment was worth its weight in gold (we obtained one through a man named Stanley G., who worked with my fath...

It being Friday the 13 th tonight, I have been doing some thinking about "super" things--superstitions and the supernatural in particular. And somehow, this track of thought has led me back to the "tween" days of BFFs (though back then, of course, no one used these terms); to those goofy, giggly, just-starting-to-cop-an-attitude years, when it suddenly became clear that friends were infinitely more important than family. Back then, the most coveted of all invitations for a Friday night was the slumber party. If it was a birthday party, too, so much the better. We would have pizza and cake; we'd strain for the best view of the birthday girl opening presents, making our mental notes (who gave the coolest gift?); we'd spend long moments haggling over where our sleeping bags would go, who'd sleep next to whom (this would invariably provoke friendly accusations of drooling, snoring, talking in your sleep, and so forth); there would be a pillow fight, a game...

Back in the Paris Métro , I don't remember which station. I was with a couple of friends, G. and (I think) N., one male and one female, both of them participants in my study-abroad program. We were on a cultural excursion that day, waiting to the side of the ticket booth for the entire group to assemble before continuing on toward the platform. I remember it was a very cold day. All the more reason for us to take notice of the two men (Scots, we assumed) in their kilts on the other side of the entry/exit barriers. None of us, not even the most feminine girls, could imagine wearing a skirt on a day that cold—at least not without tights, which the Scots certainly did not have on. They were trying to exit, but were having some difficulty. We watched them attempt repeatedly to get past the barrier without success. Was it N. who asked whether the rumors were true? It was said that men in kilts wore nothing underneath. In a flash, it was decided: the men shrugged and vaulted over the bar...