Dream Job

I've been interviewing people these past few days at work.  I sit on one side of the table with my questions. They sit on the other wearing suits and ties (we are not an office of suits and ties.) I see their brains working in overdrive.  They wonder how to answer, what to say that will make them desirable. They hope to utter the right words.

When I ask a question, I am not fishing or leading. I want to know a person.  I want the truth.

I always ask: what do you really want to do?  What is your dream job? 

They think they'll be able to say what I want to hear.  It takes them a minute of stumbling and worrying to realize I simply want to know.  All of them, as it turns out, have dreams that are bigger than a space of 9-5.  A stand-up comic.  A DJ.  A writer.  


So, I learn there is a distinction.  There are dreams. And there are jobs.


I feel as if we are all being given the impossible task of dreaming elsewhere.  That we must get a job.  Then live a dream beyond that.  


Dreams.  


Jobs.


Dreams.


Jobs.


Are we allowed dream jobs?

The Inconvenience of Being

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been thinking a lot about the ways we are in touch with one another, the ways we connect. Through an email, a tweet, a call, a text.  It comes in and a choice is made. To respond immediately.  Or later.  Or never.  It has become easy to dismiss a person, to save them for another time, to have them when it is convenient.

I wonder about the permanence of sitting beside someone.  The possibility of silence.  A word that falls before I can catch it. The vulnerability of a me that can not be constructed.

As a writer, I always want to arrange story in a way that makes sense.  I never want to be a stutter, an interruption, a bother.  But I also know we can take one another to the river, at sunset, that we can stand beneath ribbons of color, and still not be kissed.

It is not convenient to love or be loved.

I'm fearful of convenience.

Learning How to Write

When I sit down to write I always want words, words, more words.

I don't know if it's because it's still so hot I can not move, sitting in front of this fan, next to the blue and green and brick of the window view, not wanting to get up, go anywhere, be anywhere, but, today, I forced myself to stop.  To sit and wonder and think it all through.

It's what I needed.  I sat.  I imagined. I thought of what could be, rather than obsessed over what is.

I feel like I don't know how to write and I'm learning every day.  Today I learned to imagine better, to stop fighting for words.

(And this is the view from where I'm learning. My writing/thinking/imagining spot. This is my tree.)

Thoughts On Girl Unmoored by Jennifer Gooch Hummer

I had been waiting, impatiently, to fall in love with a book this summer and I fell for this one.  It's not the kind of book I can discuss with long, sprawling, passionate sentences. I have no desire to nudge my way through a deep analysis.

This book is, at its simplest, good writing and good story.  It's quirky.  It's sweet.  It's sad.

It's a book with a lot to say.  In the kind of way that a quiet person becomes fascinating the more you get to know them, the more you come to understand that they are sincere, genuine, kind.  The best way to describe it?  This book has heart. And I give you just one excerpt, from the main character, a most tender, loving, flawed but funny heroine, a girl named Apron:

At the door, I looked back at all those people I didn’t know and thought about how small your heart is but how big of a space it takes up. And how, even though you can’t see it, that heart space grows so quietly across a room or up some stairs into someone else’s living room, that even if you never step foot in it again, the air in there is changed forever.

Another reason I loved this book is because it reminds me of a musical I have always loved and wanted to see but it came and went many years ago: the Tony Award Winning Falsettos by James Lapine and William Finn.  I am in love with the soundtrack and this cast of quirky characters.


Like Girl Unmoored, it features a group of people trying to find their way through love and loss during during the early 1980's and the first recognized cases of AIDS in the US.  And in each, there is a bright, beautiful young person who puts things into perspective for everyone.

Belonging Still

For a long time, I had been looking for my beautiful piano teacher, Mrs. Lance. I went on exhaustive internet searches that came up empty. Her blue shingled house had been sold.  Her phone number no longer in service.  I had tracked people down on Facebook, students I had known but not really, kids at end-of-year recitals whose parents my mother would run into at the market while I stood bored and annoyed as they chatted.  I sent these strangers messages, do you know where she is?  The reply, always the same: No.  But I am wondering too.

A few weeks ago, I was in my parents home and I mentioned my search.  My father, in a that-reminds-me-moment, went into the other room and handed me a book.  He had found it while cleaning out the garage.  Weep No More My Lady by Mary Higgins Clark.  A tattered, yellowed cover, and on the inside, scrawled in pencil, J. Lance.  

I have no recollection of her loaning it to me.  I can not imagine that she meant for me to keep it, with the way her name had been so deliberately and proudly written, there was no doubt that the pages belonged to her.  When I find her, I'll give it back to her, I thought.

So the news, from my mother, that she had run into E. did I remember her?  And of course, I could not forget E. nearly six feet tall at thirteen years old with her wild hair and crooked glasses who played piano and sang songs she had composed herself, one strange song in particular, I Can Fly, which we always remembered because she sang it at the top of her lungs, soaring boldly and confidently to non-existent, off-key notes.  The news that my mother had run into her and learned that Mrs. Lance had died three years ago comes at me with such a strange and terrible pow.  The permanence of her disappearance just doesn't seem possible.

Her children took the piano, my mother told me.  And truly, this seemed like the most important information, the biggest reassurance, that the piano had not been snatched at some estate sale, had not been left on the street to be taken away.  That it belonged to them, to her, still.

I can think of no greater gift than music. Not the talent for it.  Not even the sound of it.  I mean, the love of it. To be shown that, given that, I am forever grateful.  

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday: A Pair

When I was in San Sebastian Spain, I came across these twins, one boy, one girl, who reminded me of 'my' twins in Brooklyn.  I walk with them every morning to the subway.  They go to school. I go to work.  We walk at the same time every day.

What a strange and perfect balance.

(Insert transition here)

Happy Independence Day to those in the states. :)

San Sebastian Twins

Brooklyn Twins

Easy Summer

So much time in New York City is frantic, over-programmed.  I am not a huge planner. So I often get left behind.  There are times when I email or call a friend and say how about dinner this weekend? Then, I am given their calendar, the dates they have available, oh not this weekend but maybe 6 weeks from now?

It's not rude or even surprising.  It's something I've grown accustomed to, living in a place where calendars are important, where every hour is an hour to fill.  (And I'll admit there have been periods in my life where I have done the same.)

Of course, Tyler and I are in a phase where we only plan our day the morning it is about to unfold and we often find ourselves in the predicament above. 

On Saturday, however, something wonderful happened.  I had known one of my favorite friends would be in town from Boston to see a musical with her family but timing was unclear, so we hadn't made plans, and the day before, we decided we'd meet at Grand Central, we'd wander from there.

Another favorite friend had told us to stop by, the same day, to see their beautiful baby girl, who came into the world 5 weeks ago (5 weeks too early, in fact-- aha! babies don't like calendars either!) 

And, as all this took place, a text from more favorite friends: we'll be in your neighborhood, want to meet for a drink?

It never happens.  But it did.  So we skipped around and saw some of the best people we know.  

It felt a lot like being at Rosemary's house, my mother's cousin, who I adored more than almost anyone in the world, who always let us stop by, unannounced, and people floated in and out while I sat in one of her wooden kitchen chairs drinking sweet iced tea, eating crumb cake, with everyone laughing, telling loud stories.


When you were at Rosemary's it always felt like being at the best party because you didn't know there was going to be a party at all.

So I think of Rosemary and summer and friends and post these two photos. I took the first in winter.  I took the second on Saturday.  Look at the difference.

Saturday was summer, feeling the way it should.  Sun-soaked. Green. Easy.  Like running out the screen door, jumping the three steps to the grass, racing down the street, banging a fist on the door of a friend's house, wanna play?