July102009
7/5/09 - Taking notice.
(Niny & Gary’s dinner Part II)
While waiting for dinner to start, Gary took a few of us out to pick blueberries. Having already collected a boxful the day before, I decided to trail along with my camera.
From the top of a ladder, through the net, I zoomed in on my friends’ ecstatic faces glowing with the setting sun. They laughed, popping berries into their mouths more often than saving them in containers. It’s astonishing, how something so simple can bring about this happiness.
When it was about time, Gary called out to the group,
One more minute to go!
I heard Krissy give a little shriek from the corner, and saw that she was frantically reaching for every berry in sight. Amused, I switched to video and followed her around until at last, she was satisfied. She stood for a moment, studying the treasures in her hands and then, she looked up at me.
A smile - such a smile - blossomed on her face.
My hands shook as I fumbled to switch back to photo mode. By the time I figured it out, she had already looked away.
Smile for me again, I called to her.
And there, there it is.
***
That night, while watching everyone dance, Dasha sat down beside me.
You know, She started, when we are listening to the same music, it’s hard to explain to each other, what we hear. But when we dance, I can feel how you listen to the music.
Later, she would correct my memory.
It’s: I can hear how you listen to the music.
But it’s more to feel! I said.
Or, Kristin joined in the discussion,
or is it about noticing what it feels, tastes, smells, looks, sounds like? It will always be there, whatever it is, until you notice whatever it is and then, you are transformed and cannot go back.
***
Not long ago, I sat with Gabriella on the rooftop of Vango Skybar. We looked up at the patch of sky above and saw lights from skyscrapers surrounding. That night, we had only city stars made on earth.
So what’s new? I asked her.
She smiled, Oh every day is new.
Our conversation flowed from topic to topic before she picked up the thought again, I realized that not every day has to be a big, dramatic adventure. That’s not what it’s about. Our lives are not novels.
The key, she continued, is to notice the little things.
And so it is.
This passage, from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, is dedicated to all of my friends who delight in life’s details. I hope we never stop taking notice of what truly matters.
… “Flora and fauna reports,” I used to call the long, winding letters from my grandmother. “The forsynthia is starting and this morning I saw my first robin… The roses are holding even in this heat… The sumac has turned and that little maple down by the mailbox…. My Christmas cactus is getting ready….”
I followed my grandmother’s life like a long home movie: a shot of this and a shot of that, spliced together with no pattern that I could ever see. “Dad’s cough is getting worse… The little Shetland looks like she’ll drop her foal early… Joanne is back in the hospital at Anna… We named the new boxer Trixie and she likes to sleep in my cactus bed - can you imagine?”
I could imagine. Her letters made that easy. Life through grandma’s eyes was a series of small miracles: the wild tiger lilies under the cottonwoods in June; the quick lizard scooting under the gray river rock she admired for its satiny finish. Her letters clocked the seasons of the year and her life. She lived until she was eighty, and the letters came until the very end. When she died, it was as suddenly as her Christmas cactus: here today, gone tomorrow. She left behind her letters and her husband of sixty-two years. Her husband, my grandfather Daddy Howard, an elegant rascal with a gambler’s smile and a loser’s luck, had made and lost several fortunes, the last of them permanently. He drank them away, gambled them away, tossed them away the way she threw crumbs to her birds. He squandered life’s big chances the way she savored the small ones. “That man,” my mother would say.
My grandmother lived with that man in tiled Spanish houses, in trailers, in a tiny cabin halfway up a mountain, in a railroad flat, and, finally in a house made out of ticky-tacky where they all looked just the same. “I don’t know how she stands it,” my mother would say, furious with my grandfather for some new misadventure. She meant she didn’t know why.
The truth is, we all knew how she stood it. She stood it by standing knee-deep in the flow of life and paying close attention.
My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad’s cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the heat.
My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
***
Andrew’s apartment in the Mission overlooks a row of little shops: cafe, bookstore, florist, bakery, fruit stand. I love the tall ceiling and his narrow, old-fashioned bathtub.
It’s surprisingly chilly here in San Francisco. I brewed a mug of warm Turkish coffee and helped myself to the girl scout cookies on the kitchen counter. Feeling guilty, I texted him about the theft, to which he gladly replied that he didn’t mind - the cookies were very, very old.
Moral of the story:
Don’t steal your friend’s cookies and get out to see the city now.
