Since Last Week

Where do I start? I got home from the hospital with Sophie last week on Thursday night and left at 4:30 on Friday morning for my first trip to New York City in about eight years, I think. I got a killer deal on two flights -- took Oliver along because he's just a kick-ass kid with a full-time job, finishing high school early and on to University of Arizona in the fall! Here we are bleary-eyed in the plane just before take-off.

We arrived in Newark and were picked up at the airport by my cousin Paula's husband Jim. We spent Friday night with them and their dear daughter Faith, and the next morning they drove us up to my cousin Philip's house so we could finally join all the other cousins and aunts and uncles for the annual Pittule Day celebration. Pittule is a Calabrian specialty -- basically, fried dough that is either sprinkled with sugar or stuffed with anchovies. Both are pictured above.

Here's me taking a stint at the fryer with my cousin Mary:

Here's a few more pictures from the afternoon:

My mom, 80 years old, Aunt Dorothy, 90 years old and Aunt Mary, 87 years old

My cousins Frances and Mary

The whole Famiglia

Matriarchs and Patriarch

Me and my cousin Philip

That's a lot of beautiful family, and I'm grateful for every single one of them and for the opportunity to get together with them, talk and bond and eat delicious food. I'm so glad that Oliver got to experience it as well.

I should end this post here, but you must know that I also went into the city and stayed with two of my oldest friends, Jane and Phil, in their beautiful home on the Upper West Side. They lit candles for the first night of Hanukkah. I also got to see my very oldest friend -- not biologically but from my junior high years and onward -- Audrey.

Friends for 42 years!

On Sunday morning I took a Lyft uptown to visit Sandra, a woman and fellow caregiver whom I've been close friends with for at least six years -- yet have never met. I could have wept when I finally did get to hug her -- and her son and husband. For any of you social media naysayers, I reiterate that these online friendships have proved to be some of the most deep and profound of my life in every single way.

Speaking of profound connections, I also had the pleasure and nearly unspeakable joy of finally getting to meet Rosemarie. I held on to her for an extra beat as well, just so grateful to find this person as beautiful and graceful in real life as she's been to me online.

I think I'll save the rest of my New York City photos for another post. We flew home on Monday night and on Tuesday I started feeling chills and a general lousiness that ballooned into some kind of horrible flu-like thing -- no fever or congestion but damn, I feel like crap. I haven't been sick in so many years, I guess I was due for something or another, so I'm not complaining.

See ya'll later.

Bodhichitta

Pacific Ocean

Sometimes, when the suffering is great, I call on the names of those who've helped me (us) most. Names come to mind and lips in a stream Carrie Anna Stephanie Bonni Cindy Allison Mary Dr. Frymann Jody Sandra and on and on and more.

I think help is on the way.

Pema Chodron this morning after seizures and tears and Mary cards.

In the process of discovering bodhichitta, the journey goes down, not up. It's as if the mountain pointed toward the center of the earth instead of reaching into the sky, instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence and doubt. We jump into it. We slide into it. We tiptoe into it. We move toward it however we can. We explore the reality and unpredictability  of insecurity and pain, and we try not to push it away. If it takes years, if it takes lifetimes, we let it be as it is. At our own pace, without speed or aggression, we move down and down and down. With us move millions of others, our companions in awakening from fear. At the bottom we discover water, the healing water of bodhichitta. Right down there in the thick of things, we discover the love that will not die.

Desert Jewels

I stood and looked to the east and took that picture as the sun rose on Sunday morning near the Salton Sea. I shouted hallelujah in my mind and looked to the west where the moon was going down.

The birds were truly like a chorus, and I whispered hallelujah in my mind. My troubled mind so heavy along with my heart over Sophie's struggles. The photographer of birds who holds my heavy heart with such light hands.

Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.

Ann Carson, from Short Talks

I hope you can play that video because it's sublime. I also posted it on Instagram where you can find me at elizabettaa.

I went with C to see the desert bloom, supposedly over-the-top-once-in-a-decade because of the unusual amount of rain we had this winter. The desert didn't disappoint, even though about a million people were doing the same thing. The ground was covered in a carpet of yellows and purples and whites. I took pictures with the fancy lens, but I haven't uploaded them, yet, so here are some from my iPhone.

We met dear Yolie and Tearful in the desert where they're living the boondocking life. It's like a dream both to meet them and see what they're doing. They are a couple with whom I connected many many years ago on the world wide webs. Now we've met in person, and it was an intense collision. We already knew one another. I held onto both of them for a good long time, absorbed their goodness and strength.

These internet friendships are the real thing, people.




This morning I read about the trauma that Syrian children have suffered, have absorbed, will suffer. I read about the people of the Sudan, of Yemen and other countries -- the starving bloated face of a child, the warning that displacement, famine, warfare will bring on the greatest humanitarian crisis since 1945. I looked at the smug faces and read the words of those who rule the plutocracy that is the Disunited States of Amerikkkaa. I felt the dread of what is to come even as I heard my own daughter's sigh into seizure over the baby monitor. I rushed into her again and again and again and all the years of agains. Suffering. The world is so vast, the suffering so enormous, I texted a friend, our efforts to stem it so paltry. If I am charged to care for Sophie and suffer in doing it, I will try to do it with strength and love.

I repeated that over and over and over today.

Perspective as Higher Power, my friend Chris said. Yes. The ongoingness of it all.

Books & Bakes Re-cap

We missed you!

Here's the menu, a kooky and entirely delicious collection of Shopsin's recipes from his memoir cookbook Eat Me and the above featured Mini Baked Alaskas:

Bing Cherry Vodka Mojitos

Avocado Guacamole

Banana Guacamole

Creamy Tomato Soup with Garlic Toasts

Coconut Rice

Pita Feta Salad with Tabbouleh

Andy's Way Sandwiches

Chicken Pecan Enchiladas

Chicken Pot Pie

Mini Baked Alaskas

The most wonderful, erudite people came last night -- some I'd never met and now call friend. We laughed and discussed the book and ate ourselves silly. 

There's still time to sign up for next month's meeting on June 22nd. Email me if you think you can make it. And have a happy Saturday --

Birthday Number 51

My first birthday
August 27, 1964

Good lord. Evidently my love of cake began at an early age. Look how young my parents were, how adorable! That was fifty years ago!

I guess there was another party which meant more cake for me:

Doesn't Sophie sort of resemble my darling mother in that photo?

Oh, here I am eating cake on my sweet sixteenth birthday with one of my oldest friends, Audrey.  She lives in New York City but usually calls me a day or so after to wish me happy birthday. We've made a ritual out of that, and I would never want her to call me on the actual day. I'll pick up the phone and she'll say, Happy Birthday! and I'll say It was the 27th! and she'll say I thought it was the 29th! and then she'll tell me that the only reason I remember her birthday is because she was born on the exact day that my parents were married, which was in October of 1962, ten months and several weeks BEFORE I was born, my mother is quick to remind me. You know, just in case I thought less of her. In any case, this silly ritual has amused Audrey and me for decades.

Sometime this week I'll probably eat cake with my other oldest friend, Moye, and we'll laugh together and I'll realize how much I love her and am grateful for our long friendship. Later today, I'll eat cake with my children, open presents from my sisters and my parents, be grateful for a body that is strong and healthy, and a  life that is blessed with beautiful children, family and friends.

I hope to live another fifty years on this wonderful planet, particularly if I morph into my southern Italian peasant grandmother and live in Bora Bora in one of those huts over the cerulean sea.

The Fish, The Clouds, The Slipstream

My friends are seeing their first born children graduate from high school this month. They are preparing to take these children to college sometime this summer, and they are, to a one, filled with trepidation, with the bittersweet grief and certainty that in some respects, it's the end. You know where this is going. For a moment this morning, as my writing percolated in my head, as it does, the wonderful phrase what fresh hell is this? flitted through, a cloud, a fish, the slipstream. We are going to a graduation party this afternoon for the oldest child of one of my dearest friends. Sophie would have graduated from high school last May, so this May is the year that the younger children of my friends pass her by. Again. Despite the many years and all the experience under the proverbial belt, despite the strength, thickened even under the armor imposed upon me by circumstance, the return of pain, the pinprick of it (the fish, the clouds, the slipstream) takes my breath away. If I hold it, it grows, so I give it a nod and admire its shimmer, watch it go.

The Every Six Months or So Poem***

I thought today about how tiresome it is to be nearly always trying to get up, pick oneself up, put one foot in front of the other. It's not so much about staying up or even being down, as it is the keeping up, the act of getting up -- well -- do you even know what I'm talking about? To tell you the truth, I'd rather be lying on my bed half the time, reading and recovering.

That's why it's good to remind yourself, every six months or so, of your own personal success, of how wonderfully your life is going, how blessed you are, how perfect it is in every way. You know -- gratitude, living in the moment, only being given what God knows you can handle. I'm talking to you, Denise and Sandra and Christy and Craig and Heather and Erika and Tom and Dick and Jane. All of you. Carpe diem. One day at a time. You only live once. Oh, and count your blessings.

Success Story

My clothes are perfectly contoured
to my body. my shoes & socks
fit just right. My cat is a delightful
intelligent animal. My apartment
is great. The right location,
cheap rent. I eat the best food.
My friends love me. I adore them.
My lover is terrific & beautiful.
The sun is shining. There are trees
even in the slums in Washington.
I have tons of money & a gorgeous 
air conditioner. Great art hangs
on my wall. I live a spine-tingling life
of delirious sex & intense happiness.

Terence Winch


***Take from it as you will, but the tone of this post is sarcastic.

Full Moons and Fires and Seizures, Oh My! Oh, and Earthquakes!

Downtown Los Angeles, 1/16/14
photo via thewire.sheknows.com

No sooner had the ink dried on the two-week proclamation of Sophie being seizure-free for two entire weeks, then I received a text from her teacher at school that one occurred. That was Wednesday afternoon, and yesterday was a bust -- many seizures all day long, the subsequent clamminess and then the combined out-of-it-ness and agitation.

Small sigh.

The sigh is small because Sophie went two weeks without a seizure! I'm going to attribute the breakthroughs to the full moon, the fires burning just outside Los Angeles (the picture above, although not mine, is what most of us saw all day yesterday and then,late in the afternoon, smelled), the incredibly dry air, Santa Ana winds, small earthquakes (so far) and Oliver's Cold That Sophie Might Be Catching.

Medium sigh.

In the meantime, my record of meeting bloggers in person and adoring them stands as perfect. Christy Shake of Calvin's Story was in town and stayed with us last night. She is as lovely in person as she is a beautiful writer online, and I felt as if we were old friends. We talked and talked, ate a delicious dinner at a Korean small plate place in Beverly Hills -- tiny Brussels sprouts, roasted with tiny dried prunes, zucchini and peppers, a seafood pancake with salty dipping sauce, a salad of avocado, tiny figs, crispy rice and pomegranate dressing, and whole grain pot stickers with chicken -- and then talked some more back at our house before going to sleep. I am so grateful for these online relationships that morph into real-life ones.

Do you need a sweet laugh?  Read John Hodgman's New Yorker essay"Downton Abbey" With Cats  for a grand one.

The Long Distance Casserole Brigade: A Guest Post

So, I was loathe to post anything about this amazing thing going on behind the scenes of my very active life, but I'm going to do it here in a lame attempt to accept grace -- well -- hopefully -- gracefully. Here's a guest post written by one of my oldest and dearest college friends, Missy B. 

There is an old tradition in the South (does this happen everywhere?) involving casseroles and frozen fruit salads.  This tradition demands that whenever there is a family crisis, a death, a hospitalization, a new baby, or an illness, friends line up at the door with food in disposable aluminum dishes that will hopefully bring some sort of comfort to the family in distress.  When my mother was run down by a hit-and-run driver in our lovely suburban neighborhood in the late eighties (she improbably survived with only a broken leg), my family received so many casseroles that my younger brother set up a ranking system where fantastic meals were rated a 10 and the not-so-yummy might even receive a 1 (green bean casserole with canned French fries on top anyone?).  When I improbably birthed twins at the age of 42 after years of infertility, we did not cook for a month because of the generosity of our friends who set up a meal brigade.  I will never forget the shit-kicking smile on the face of one friend as her family of four marched down our driveway, each person proudly holding a piece of their lovely meal: salad…casserole…crusty bread…dessert.

It is what we do to somehow participate in the joy or the sadness of our friends.  I mean, sometimes, what else can we do?  We can’t take the burden from our loved ones but by this symbolic act, we are saying: “Know that you are loved.  Know that we are thinking about you.  Know that we want to help in some way.”  It beats the hell out of handwringing and doing nothing, you know?

Those of you who love Elizabeth and her family from this blog might sometimes experience this feeling of desperation.  My God!  What can I do to help? Those of us who have known Elizabeth since college or even before and now live so far away join you, her new friends, in these feelings of inadequacy about our inability to somehow pitch in and help.  

Remember Elizabeth writing about her weekend reunion with her friends from college a few months ago? (read about it here) Well, we all decided during that weekend that we wanted to somehow create a long-distance casserole brigade because none of us live close enough to support her in the day-to-day of taking care of her beautiful Sophie.  We can’t bring her casseroles, give her respite, take her out for a drink, watch her in her plays, run a carpool one day or any of those things that we would be able to do if we lived around the corner.

So, instead of these things, we created a fundraiser page so Sophie can ride in style in a new Duet wheelchair bike.  You can visit the site here if you want to participate:  

https://www.youcaring.com/aduetforsophie

(nota bene: Elizabeth was reluctant to share this on her blog but we convinced her that you guys might like to join the fun!)

I am, as you can imagine, speechless. A rare thing, all around.

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

Me, taken by D in 1986

I can never write too much about my friendships -- those with women and the rare ones with men. There is one man who is, certainly, my dearest male friend, but he's also one of my best friends, ever. I met him before I turned 21, in a restaurant where we both waited tables. At some point, I read him aloud Eudora Welty's short story Why I Live at the P.O., and nearly thirty years later we've made a pact that we'll read the other the same story, whoever is on his or her deathbed first. Or maybe I suggested the idea and forced him to agree. We continue to argue over who's dying first and will probably do so until he takes his last breath, as I read the final paragraphs:

Of course, there's not much mail. My family are naturally the main people in China Grove, and if they prefer to vanish from the face of the earth, for all the mail they get or the mail they write, why, I'm not going to open my mouth. Some of the folks here in town are taking up for me and some turned against me. I know which is which. There are always people who will quit buying stamps just to get on the right side of Papa-Daddy.
But here I am, and here I'll stay. I want the world to know I'm happy.
And if Stella-Rondo should come to me this minute, on bended knees, and attempt  to explain the incidents of her life with Mr. Whitaker, I'd simply put my fingers in both my ears and refuse to listen.

Have you ever written about your friendships? Leave a link in the comments, if you want, and tell us about it. 

Here's mine, to D:

TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2012

Love letters to friends

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious

daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty

We ate shrimp and grits at a small round table, and we drank a lot of wine. We drank so much wine that I drew stick figures on a napkin proving that I wasn't a prude, and you leaned so far back in your chair (you might have been laughing) that it tipped over. We might have been screaming with laughter, as far as I know, the rest of the people in the restaurant receding, their mouths open, silent. Years later, I picked you up from a Greyhound bus station in Nashville, Tennessee, trailing an enormous suitcase. You fixed my air-conditioner and swept out my apartment, and when I came home from my shift, I lay on the bed and you on a sleeping bag beside me and we talked in the darkness, and we talked through the years on the phone and in letters and now over polenta and eggs and no one makes me laugh harder.

The Greatest Weekend in a Decade, at least

This is the year we all turn fifty -- and to celebrate we flew and drove to a grand house in South Carolina. We came from Paris, France and Los Angeles, California. We came from Georgia, and North Carolina. We came from Virginia and South Carolina and Maryland and Tennessee. We are married and divorced. We are with children and without children. We have adopted children. We have children in college and children at home and children with disabilities and children without. We are gay and straight. We love our families and we love each other, passionately.

We went for a big hike in DuPont park on Saturday morning. Some of you who saw the movie Hunger Games might recognize the gorgeous, wild beauty of the place.

We enjoyed the scenery and took many group photos,

But we mainly talked. We couldn't stop talking!

In fact, it was nearly impossible to take a photo of anything other than us talking!

After dinner, on Saturday night, we convened at the homestead for caramel birthday cake and champagne.

We ended the evening with wish papers that I brought from Los Angeles. Evidently, this has never been seen on the east coast, and I was roundly mocked for the whole ceremony being "very LA." But we all made wishes and watched them float up and into the ether.

I am home, now, happy to see my family, but I am filled with warmth and love and happiness and gratitude for friendships that have lasted nearly thirty years, for the women who knew me when I was oh, so young, for the beautiful ways that they live, for the beauty of their faces, for the sound of their laughs and their voices filling my heart.