the busy heart

Last Wednesday we went into Boston so I could clear out my office. We brought Henrietta, and I met with my (former) boss and she got us a box, and I put everything in it: My notes to myself, my pictures of Sam, my lemon pepper for my lunches, my purple velvet ballet flats I used to change into after wearing my snow boots into work, my framed prints. I threw out stale walnuts and old soup and dozens of sandwich baggies and grocery sacks I'd kept just in case I needed to bring something home on the train. My coworkers gathered around the door to my office, there to see the baby and say hello. They were so kind and asked nice questions about Henrietta and said how pretty and alert she was and Sam told them about our new house. I cleared out all of my files while Henrietta fussed, and Sam held her, telling her we were almost done, it was almost time to go home. It was cold that day, very cold. My car temperature said it was 12 degrees outside when we left home, and it felt cold...

I've been thinking about a day over a year ago, when I found out I was pregnant for the first time. I'd later lose that pregnancy thirteen weeks in, but mostly when I found out, I was terrified. I mean, I was excited at first, but on the heels of that excitement came the holy-wow-what-on-earth-am-i-doing feeling. They say when you have a baby your life is changed the instant you give birth, and that's true of course, but in a way my life changed then, the first time I found out. I almost instantly felt eclipsed, like I was disappearing, like I'd never be "me" again. I worried about the baby, about the things he or she would have to go through, about all of the sadness and struggle involved in a normal human life. I worried I wouldn't know how to help, or that the sadness of his/her sadness would overwhelm me beyond my capacity to function. This wasn't an unreasonable fear: incapacitating sadness is something I'm familiar with, and there have been...

I'm not good at cleaning.  I mean to be.  I want to be.  In my daydreams I am.  I often spend time mentally cleaning my house, imagining putting things away, moving through the rooms like a whirling, order-insisting robot, arranging everything in its pristine position.    But that's not actual what I'm like.  At all.  Chaos and entropy reign in my house, especially when I'm working full-time. Occasionally I pretend to be that robot and I spend hours upon hours and more hours cleaning everything, and by the end I'm exhausted and cranky.  And here's the problem with not being the robot, with having a messy house: it makes me sad.  Not like in a literal sense.  I don't look at the messiness and sorrow for it, though a little of that might be involved.  I mean that I've noticed that if I come home on Friday and everything is a dadgum disaster, I feel hopeless and overwhelmed, and I won't even realize it has ...

Someone should explain what it means to match, because I thought it was about matching similar colors or like black/red, blue/white--obvious pairs--but lately I see girls wearing purple shoes with yellow blouses and green patterned headbands and it's so pretty but I never feel brave or smart enough to do it myself. Color stresses me out, in part because I love it so much, and I want to "get it."  Once, in a most wonderful store called Accessorize in London, I was trying to find something to match an outfit I had bought that was all about brown.  And I was looking at a brown necklace, thinking I would get it, when I asked the sales lady and she said, in her perfect London accent, "No, no.  That's far too obvious."  Oh.  She helped me pick out something with green--green with reddish-brown flecks, and it was much better. And I won't even talk about how I used to wear a purple shirt, plus a purple collared shirt, plus a purple sweater, PLUS a purple ...

[looking up, right outside the front door] It's not truly early spring anymore, but bear with me. I took my camera to work one day, and snapped pictures all along the way. Here's what it looks like to walk to the train in early spring. It's a beautiful world, no? [walking down washington] [blossoms, up close] [a house i'm obsessed with + tree i'm obsessed with] [Cleveland Circle] [train stop] [train a-comin'] [emerging] [arriving] [once there, i play with very fat books]

On Monday I visited a college campus to meet with a professor. I observed a class he was teaching, and as I watched, I wondered if I missed it. The teaching, I mean. I did, some. I missed the students coming in and I missed standing in front of the room. I missed seeing the looks on their faces when I made them laugh or when they "got it." Still, I suspected I was glad to sit where I was sitting, watching it happen as a third party. I thought: Maybe I just love teaching and learning; everything about it is fascinating to me, so it's nice that I'm still involved in some capacity. Or maybe I really miss it, I thought. Then, near the end of the class, the professor asked a student a question about a poem. Her response: "I don't like poetry. I don't really care for poetry, to be honest." This was, of course, a complete non sequitur. She was telling him something about herself, rather than the poem, as he'd asked. And I thought: Yes, I'...

Don't know if I can capture this experience, but I feel compelled to try. A few weeks ago, when I first started taking the train, I told Sam that watching people wasn't that interesting, because in Boston everyone's a student or young professional, and they pretty much all look the same. I've felt guilty ever since I said that. I knew it meant a piece of me was buried. It didn't mean they weren't interesting, it meant I couldn't see them, and that made me and my writerly self feel very sad. So last night, on the train, I was listening to a podcast ( RadioLab's latest: Animal Minds), and somehow, since my ears were occupied and not my eyesight, I could see how incredible everyone was. It was a crowded train, and I was up higher than about a dozen people, and there were these three kids, three young men (student ages)--and this is the part where I'll fail to describe what happened--they had eyes . I mean, all three of them had these insanely uni...

Don't know what to say about my days, now. I get up, get ready, walk to the train. Sometimes I get a seat, and then I read. Sometimes I don't get a seat, and then I despair and listen to my ipod. I'm starting to get aggressive about seat-getting, well, passive aggressive at least. Then I work. And I like it, but it's work, and I doubt it's interesting to anyone not working there. I come home on the train, reading some more. I walk up the wee hill to our apartment, and discover I've missed Sam so much that I nearly follow him around, telling him how much I like him. (You'd think this would be charming, but my suspicion is that it gets old.) We eat dinner (We've just developed a clever system that is FINALLY helping us not go out to eat every 35 seconds. The system goes like this: Sam's in charge two days out of the week. It's brilliant.) I conduct my elaborate routine so I don't have to do much the next morning to get myself out the ...

Hello, friends. I've unprivatized, which I think will help me feel more like posting. I've been, as you've seen, relatively postless lately. Don't know what the deal is. I haven't really been commenting on ya'll's blogs either, but I'm working on that. Since it's been hovering around 6 degrees (!) lately in Boston, I've been eating my lunch at my desk and bopping around the Internet for an hour. It's pleasant, but I really can't wait until I can bring my lunch over to the Public Garden and watch the swan boats. Yes, I am already dreaming of spring, longing for it with all my heart, remembering what it feels like to have a sunny, lovely day. I can just barely recall. I can recall just enough to miss it viscerally. Anyway, pneumonia's mostly left me, although a cough lingers, and this afternoon, when I meant to just read for a moment, a nap took me its clutches and I slept for two hours. Whoops. I'm exhausted still, is what I'...

the raging cold turned into pneumonia. Sigh. It was a nice two days working, anyway. It was terrifying to call in sick on day three. Hopefully, one more day and home and I'll be ready to get back in there.

Day one of work was pretty wonderful. I mean, not anything too exciting yet, mostly filling out forms and such. But I was surprised by how much I loved sitting at my desk, writing emails to my editorial assistant, trying out my new lingo, etc. When I came out of the building to go home, it was dark out, and I had wondered if that would bum me out, but I giggled a little, because the whole city was there in front of me, and it was incredibly beautiful,as Boston tends to be. The trees were lit up with little bright lights and all these young professionals were walking to the train and there was a beautiful window display of trendy home furnishings, and I felt like I was living the dream. Okay, so then I fell when I was crossing the street. But even that was sort of cool because this kid (read--kid the age of my former students) stopped in front of me so that I wouldn't get hit by a car, and as humiliating as that was, what he did seemed so kind, and made me feel like we were ...

I got the fancy, downtown publishing job. Thank heavens. Literally.