On The Road

A few notes from my virtual travel journal...
-an essay from Anna Quindlen about the fleeting nature of parenting
-a lovely recommendation for, "night music for when it's night, it's quiet and the kids are in bed."
-a thoughtful blog about creative parenting with a killer link list in the right hand column.
-my new favorite resource Bloesem Kids.
-another amazing photographer, Paul Johnson, gettin' it done. I mean, damn. Don't these images make you want to go on vacation, listen to Jack Johnson, paint a wall cerulean blue, get a sunburn, go dancing? Just me? (I painted my front door that color a few years ago. It still makes me happy.)

It All Began With That Shoe On The Wall

My most recent obsession all began with this delightful post from Spagat about her upcoming trip to Procida, the gorgeous Italian island where they filmed The Talented Mr. Ripley. Then it started to grow when I read this post about a trip to Portland. Then I remembered a vacation spot which seemed like a good idea at the time, but would be a much better idea now that my daughter is older. And, just like that...the vacation obsession is born. I've planned about 60 in my head since Friday. One includes an amtrak up the west coast.

I've planned a weekend in my mind to Maine and trips to Bainbridge Island. And to the Greek Isles and Hawaii. Or back here to my favorite place.
And just for kicks, check out this place in the Maldives.

There are so few consecutive blank days on the calendar this summer, that I'm desperate to find a break in the work. We've looked at places close by and places far and I'm still coming up with not enough of something to make it happen. I'll keep looking.

Where ever it is, I hope it will be a new adventure, have salty air, a little bookstore, sandy paths and time to read, and carve out a space for just us.

In the meantime, maybe I will plot these imaginary vacations on the calendar and during those weeks, eat food that would be local to that area, play music from the region.

Where are you going this summer?

Just Perfect

Yael Naim
New Soul
About the album, she writes, "It's a dream I almost gave up along the way."

Poets among us

I've been posting a lot about music lately. I think it's because music is helping carry me through the day, keeping me in my chair in my office (which my daughter calls a castle) doing what I'm supposed to be doing while my flowers are blooming and my daughter is going down a slide in the sun across town.

On my lunch break, when the breeze is just strong enough to lift my hair off of my collar, it's really REALLY difficult to walk back into the building when I'd much rather turn around and bust my daughter and husband out of their routines and head south. I started sailing as a 4-year-old. Wind was always something that picked me up and carried me somewhere. Now, it's just a reminder of all that stands still.

Jason Mraz has this beautiful phrase in You & I Both when he sings,
"See I'm all about them words
Over numbers, unencumbered numbered words
Hundreds of pages, pages, pages forwards
More words then I had ever heard and I feel so alive"

I love those lyrics. I love words. I need words like other people need sleep.

I turn to music, often, because it's a way to have poetry in the day while doing something else you have to do. Ingrid Michaelson's music is, in my mind, great poetry and has me thinking about so many things.

She writes in her so-beautiful-i-can't-listen-to-it-without-crying song, Breakable:

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts.
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

You fasten my seatbelt because it is the law.
In your two ton death trap I finally saw.
A piece of love in your face that bathed me in regret.
Then you drove me to places I'll never forget.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.

I have listened to this song so many times and it always surprises me about how many different images come to me each time.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?

I think about it all the time Ingrid. I think about how breakable we all are in a literal sense when I look over medical records and accident reports and photographs of injuries, coroner reports and witness statements about losses. Splintered wood. Singed property. Shattered lives. Unrecoverable damages. Everyone's losses. The purpose of torts (which is a word for broken) is to put people back together again, as best as possible, to the way they were before the break. But it never ever can. It's like trying to reconstruct a wave before it breaks at the shoreline. The lawsuit is almost never about the cracking bones. It's about the sense of broken spirit. Of feeling disrespected. That the frame you have built up for yourself has been shattered.

When I drive to work, past certain intersections which I know are prone to accidents, I see the names of former clients on street signs. I hear their words. There's a stretch of highway in a rural area that curves. I spent months reconstructing the events before the impact. It has been several years, but I can still drive past the scene, no longer blackened with tire marks and burned grass and pinpoint every detail. It "resumes play" like a DVD exactly where I left off and the words from each witness in the chain who treated the driver whisper out of the blades of grass.

And then there's how breakable all of us are, boys and girls, men and women on the inside. I catch a lot of shit for being too sensitive. I don't really know how else to be. I sense someone else's vulnerability and I don't know how to pretend that I don't see it.

I cleaned out my basement last night. I have many of my grandmother's things that no one wanted when she died. Mostly scraps of fabric and newspaper clippings. In the boxes, there are 1 inch squares that I recognize as pieces that later became my curtains, her dress, my dollhouse bedspread, her table cloth, a quilt she made for my future child. Looking through the box of small parts of her, I find it so so so so so so hard to let go of a single scrap. She has died all over again and I am left in pieces trying to make something of them: these scraps of her past and my future.

My daughter, who is named for a poet, asked me what I do at work.* That's just it. I try to put pieces together that were never meant to be put together and make something we can all live with until something else tears at the seams. I am so thankful for music to hold on to while I try.

Here's Ingrid singing Breakable:



**To hell with Bee Movie telling my child that her mommy is a blood sucking mosquito. I'm sure Jerry Seinfeld is glad to have his attorney keep his wife out of copyright infringement trouble. I could rant about that for 6 pages, but this is not a ranting blog.

31.

Drumroll...
for the 31st post in my 31st year that is inspiring, lovely, hopeful, joyous to me?

30.

Keep calm products here. I keep looking for the pink poster.

29.

We loved the Spoon concert. I'm so excited to have this bag featuring one of their clever album covers (for Gimme Fiction) to carry my fiction around in. It's Red Riding Hood. I flipped out about it.

If you are interested in checking out some Spoon, my favorite album is Ga Ga Ga Ga. Every time they get out the marracas, I have to dance. Thanks to my brother-in-law for the birthday gift of show tickets!

28.

27.

26.

I love this Artist who sells on Etsy. You can personalize many of her pieces with favorite words, names, thoughts. I bought this piece for my assistant who spends every lunch hour with her bible. Here's a link to her shop.

25.

Photographers like Anna Kuperberg. Check out this post. Don't you love the held hands on the bridge. I actually clutched the pearls on that one. LOVE IT!

24.

Dorothy Gaiter and John Beecher. I love their recommendations, appearances on CBS Sunday morning, their WSJ column Tastings and most of all their memoir, Love By The Glass: Tasting Notes from A Marriage, which always makes me cry happy tears.

My husband once sent them a book and a self-addressed envelope to them to sign for me for a special occasion, and they did!

23.

I love this song, The Way I Am, by Ingrid Michaelson and put it on my Valentine's Day mix for my husband.
"Sew on patches to all your tears."
She's amazing.
The video is sweet too and reminds me of the red and green in Amelie.

22.

Pottery Barn Kids has new little birdies inspiring me to take some of my grandmother's old fabric scraps, cut out shapes and glue them to a painted canvas....as soon as I get that prescription for speed so that I don't have to sleep anymore.

21.

English Tea Biscuit Tins.

20.

These bookshelves have me looking at every nook in the house as a potential library. For more of the photos, click the bookshelves link above.



So beautiful! It's like Shakespeare & Co. Books meets Dwell Magazine.

19.

Bloesem which always find the most magical things, like this ring

31 Flavors

To kick off my 31st year, and this Blogiversary, here are some of the 31 things inspiring me today....

1. I adore Darondo. I first heard about him on this NPR piece. The music is amazing, but what I love MOST is the details in the liner notes of his album, Let My People Go.

He was opening for James Brown, cruising around San Francisco in a Rolls Royce, with a career on the verge of really taking off when he left everything to travel. When he finally returned to California after meeting his wife in the Fiji Islands, he became a physical therapist and helped treat people with music.

He writes, "I used to incorporate the music with the therapy," he says. “I'm very versatile so I'd sing everything to them; pop, country and western, jazz, etc. I worked with head trauma cases, amputees and folks like that. I'd bring my guitar in and watch miracles happen. Once, I told a patient of mine, who was in some serious shape, that she's going to be dancing by Halloween if she just listen to me and do what I say during therapy. The director and I fought about what I told her, but three months down the road she got up out of her wheelchair, did her little dance and lip-synched a Madonna tune, and then walked back over to her chair and sat down. That thrilled me so much and put so much love in my heart."

My favorite song on the album is Didn't I which you can hear if you click this link.

It will quickly become your favorite windows-rolled-down song for spring.

2. The coolest dollhouse ever.



3. My favorite author Jhumpa Lahiri's new book was released today!



4. Cinematic Orchestra makes me want to go take photographs.



5. Anthony Minghella's work continues to inspire me. What a tremendous loss. I think we own every one of his films and the accompanying soundtracks. The Charlie Rose site has some nice interviews with him available.

6. Hope for a more perfect union.

7. Artist studios like this one.

8. Writing out loud in every color of the rainbow with my favorite pen.

9. Weird Beard Weil's vitamin advisor. It's free. You answer questions and he tells you what you should be taking. Turns out, B complex is life changing for me. Who knew.

10. Pureology hair care. So worth it. And my Rite Aid started carrying it as well. My daughter says it smells like Candy Cams. This stuff, Aveda Hang Straight, is the greatest too.

11. Can lip-gloss really inspire? Hell yes. Especially if it's created by Goose's wife. (You know, Anthony Edwards. Top Gun. Goose? Work with me).

12. Romantic comedies like The Love Letter. Books, boats, coffee, lovin', jokes. What more do you need. And the porch. Good God, that porch. And Blythe Danner, who I adore.



13. Artist Moms like this one.

14. Dwell for Target. I picked up pink tulip decals and a matching night-light for my daughter and had to make myself stop there. So cute.

15. Spring clothes in yellow and kelly green.

16. Jonathon Adler's line for Barnes & Noble.

17. I've been listening to Nina Simone since 1993 when they used her album as a plot point in Point of No Return. It has been a staple in my record collection.
But at a recent Michael Buble show, (I'm still adjusting to the fact that the kids now call them "shows" and not "concerts") he did an amazing cover of Simone's Feeling Good that has reminded my why I love her and had me humming this song throughout the day ever since.

It's a new dawn,
it's a new day,
it's a new life for me,
and I'm feelin' good.

18-31 to come....