This Week's Good Chi: Perfect Fall Colors

Something about the peppers at the Farmer's Market this morning inspires red patent leather accessories. I'm thinking shoes, handbags, a rain coat, bangle bracelets. Maybe I'll just wear the peppers. What a perfect color. I love that the seller put them in such a comfy container.

Gratitude

From Dr. Randy Pausch's final Carnegie Mellon lecture this week, How To Achieve Your Childhood Dreams and Enable the Dreams of Others. The entire lecture can be viewed here. Here's the article in the Wall Street Journal. He concluded the lecture by saying, "This was for my kids," who are 5, 2 and 1 to watch when they're older.

Ours is a home that celebrates academicians. This one makes it so easy to see why.

Cams Gone Wild

National Geographic has live web cams set up in 7 locations. Take a trip to Botswana after dinner.

Colors for Tiny Hands

I picked up Cormac McCarthy's ash covered novel The Road when my daughter took a nap today and finished (hiding my sobs) just after she woke up. It's amazing, but I'm completely haunted. It is a particularly disturbing read for a parent. As Michael Chabon's New York Review of Books article concludes:

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world... And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

I read it too quickly to put in the freezer until I could catch my breath. So, I did the only other thing I could think of to chase away the demons and focus on the beauty in the world: I bought new art supplies.

Crayola has a few new products for little ones that we checked out today. The TaDoodles are almost like little ink blotters of color in weeble-like shapes that are easy for toddler hands and they come in a little car caddy that rolls. They are fun, washable and there are no caps to keep up with so you don't have to worry about them drying out. My daughter (2.4) loves them.



The Crayola Beginnings triangle crayons are great too and come in a plastic case handy for the diaper bag.

"Picture it: Sicily 2007"

I love photography. For photo gifts, I often rely on shutterfly, kodak, and exposures online. But, there are a few new companies out there offering unusual photo gifts who have me interested and thinking outside the frame for holiday gifts.


Like custom photo night lights and Laptop skins.


Here's a sweet little site, Photojojo, that will show you how to make your own photo journals.
But my favorite is blurb which can help you make bookstore quality books for everything from your photos to cookbooks, children's books to even publishing your blog into a book!
Here's a sample:


Where to begin?

Ode to Nora Ephron

Every Fall, I break out the Nora Ephron movies and bask in the perfection of the built-in bookshelves, tea cups, perfectly located, well-lit apartments and twinkle lights. I love the writing and casting too, but mostly, I want to move into her movie sets. And in my mind, we are girlfriends. She gives me advice and we lunch together like Kathleen Kelly and Birdie, having chicken salad sandwiches and tea.

Internet browsing on the subject led me to a 1996 graduation address she gave at Wellesley, her alma mater. The entire speech is wonderful. But this part speaks particularly to the theme of this blog. Enjoy:

"This is the season when a clutch of successful women -- who have it all -- give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.

And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever. We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years -- not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you.

Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said, "take it." Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that.

Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option."

Lucky, I am. I love that she says to embrace the mess and rejoice in the complications. This is particularly comforting coming from Nora because so much of what I like about her films is that everything has clean order, simplicity, and softness. In her films, the laundry and dishes are done. Everything is hung neatly in the closet so that the characters are free to watch a movie guilt-free or go to lunch with a friend. But it's more than just the housekeeping and decor. She creates seemingly close-knit familial communities in large cities where people who are not related love each other as though they were. And the greatest part is that the beautiful, picturesque, gentle community she creates seems just within our reach.

As parents, we stage our own films, introduce our children to the things that are most important to us and try to create an environment that feels safe and secure to them (or to us, or both). Part of what I've been striving for is to create a dreamlike place for my daughter to read books and paint and play and feel confident and supported by her community. It's nice to be reminded by girlfriend Nora, who in my mind creates the perfect kinds of those places (though fictional) that it's supposed to be difficult. It's up to me to sort through it all and find a new kind of peace for each new version of a (hopefully) evolving me.

For more Nora, she's blogging regularly now on The Huffington Post. Here's her link list.
Her most recent post, "It was you, Fredo," is spot on and so funny.

Something New

This month's Cookie, has a fascinating article about an American family living in Marrakech. The mom featured in the article, Julie Klear, talked about how hard it is to be so far away from family and to be raising children in a place, "without dance classes and children's museums as we know them, let alone Gymboree." My favorite quote from the article:

"I didn't have pointers for how to raise a child in this culture. Then I stopped thinking about what Morroco doesn't have and started thinking about what it does have." The family takes advantage of the Atlas Mountains where the kids can ride donkeys, and the flamingos and tide pools of the Atlantic beach. I love that. I'm so inspired by that kind of courage and creativity.

Whether it's Marrakech or Memphis, it's so much easier to focus on what is lacking in a community than the things that make it unique. I'm off to try to find something special and new in my community that my daughter will enjoy. I'll keep you posted.