Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Pull of Mumbai

I read this rousing entry about Mumbai from Friday's NY Times...and I couldn't agree more. Mumbai or Bombay as I remember it from my youth, was for all it's problems an enchanted city for me. There was an undercurrent of the mystical and magical. It was a place of riotous life and death, a place where everything seemed suffused with meaning...this despite the crushing poverty we experienced leaving the airport and driving through the narrow streets at night lined with people sleeping near the curb, the flooding in the streets during monsoons and the choking stench of humanity during the dry months.

It seemed to me each person I met, whether well-to-do or destitute contained this concentrated kernel of desperate beauty, of ambition, of raw possibility. I've had a white hot streak in me to make a pilgrimage there for years...and if I had the wherewithall (which I unfortunately don't), I think I would travel there in the same way I ached to return to New York (my birthplace) after 9/11 or longed to return to the roost in San Francisco (my adopted home) after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Note to self: maybe I should start listening to these urges.

Maturity--for a time


I don't know if it was the 10 day break from my job or me finding my own rhythm but this Thanksgiving was more satisfying than many in memory. We did a lot of cooking...quality cooking without making huge quantities of food. It was nice to know I was working hard to make a really delicious meal...working hard for something I WANT is always a wonderful revelation.

And I coasted on that high the entire extended vacation and it had a palatable effect. Things that typically would have vexed me, didn't seem as difficult or as impactful. In fact it was only today that I found myself returning to my old pinched self, well aware that my rat-race begins again tomorrow. Once again I try to imagine myself doing something as remunerative but considerably more enriching....

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Living, Making it.

I walked down the stairs, mentally restacking the pantry before our company arrived when my wife called out to me, “I want you to stay home with me”.

“What?,” I said? We’d had this discussion before.

“I want you to quit your job…you don’t like it and it makes you cranky every day. I mean we can live on my retirement. I can put you on my health insurance. It’d be tight but we can do it. I want you home with me and I know you’d rather be home.”

Of course she was right. I didn’t like my job and I would be happier at home. But we’d be a hell of a lot poorer. And who QUITS a job when the unemployment rate is soaring? I was not a “professional” (doctor, lawyer, programmer, etc.) who could work from home. I was an administrator. Bored, overworked and 9 years away from hitting the perfect age for my pension plan. And administrators don’t work from home. Administrators work at the jobsite so the other classifications (the well paid professionals) can work from home.

Still I miss her since she’s retired. We lead very separate lives now. But I can’t depend on her financially, that’s not right and I haven’t the foggiest idea how to support myself to the tune of my currently feeble salary by freelancing.

So this is what 46 is about. 46 is like 26 is like 36 except there are fewer choices and less time to save for retirement. If your risks didn’t pan out in the previous 2 decades, there’s even less of a chance of it working now unless you are independently wealthy which I’m not or really determined. Which I haven't been but I'm shooting for.

Of course from the standpoint of numerology, I’m ripe for jumping off the rat-race train. I’m a wisker’s length from leaping headlong into a questionable writing or life coaching or something that brings the things I love to the forefront. But there’s a price to be paid for such freedom and I’m mindful of paying the bill.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

I miss my bff's

You know what’s hard? When your bff’s start drifting away. I used to have what I considered two very, very close friends…people that I felt a kinship with, people that made me laugh and who I’d let see me cry.

They weren’t my friends originally—they were my partner’s. But I basked in the glow of their companionship and then we became close in our own right; they became like extended family.

Once my partner retired, her attitudes toward these friends changed somewhat. She felt less beholden to them, had less of a desire to caretake the friendships. And I didn’t pick up the slack. Cracks began to show as we took them for granted, canceled dates to go do other things, or declined invitations just to stay at home.

The result now is both friends have moved themselves over to other friendships, making those other friendships primary, subtly counting on others to be their support and family. And where does that leave us? Without the family that we choose.

I don’t blame my partner. She was doing what felt right for her, protecting her beleaguered spirit. Many people come to depend on, then lean on, then deplete her strong soul. Between those demands and work that she hated, she was just exhausted. With retirement her priorities shifted and she wanted to breathe a little...to take a well earned vacation from emotional obligations.

I do blame myself though. If the quality of of their company were that important to me, I should have made more of an effort with these individuals. I should have picked up the banner or the phone and called them, had them over for dinner or met for a quick bite even when it wasn’t in my comfort zone…because now, all I feel is sad…it’s so hard for me to make friends and as I look around my life, the opportunities to make new ones is exceedingly small.

So, now I need to do the work of “friend curation”. I just hope it isn’t too late.

Friday, November 7, 2008

A couple mornings after

Mulling over the events of the week.

The election of Obama, which despite all my misgivings about him, is essential to our nation's future. But it is also wrought with anxiety. Our country has slid into a state so far from grace the necessity of prioritizing the most troubling issues will feel more like failure than intelligent governance.

I have no idea if he can pull off.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Get off the bus

So I’ve been reading Adam Gopnik… a man whose writing I find so intoxicating, it goes beyond reverence. Sometimes I feel lucky that I am not a god because in the personage of that god, I’d have wanted to steal Gopnik’s talent, his inquisitive, incisive but ironically worshipful/devoted view of the world around him. He is riotously self-referential and tangential in ways that so mimick my mind my best days, that I feel like he is channeling me…he is like my better half--- independent of my body, up, walking around eating a bagel, free of the flotsam that bedevils my everyday voice.

To wit…he’s a lover of those twin cultural icons, Paris and New York. I am a native if exiled New Yorker and a Francophile to the bone. These have been his principal subjects, though shot through with the gestalt of parenthood. That latter plain is one I can’t claim as my native land but I did a good 12-15 months abroad there my senior year, so I have a good working knowledge of the material.

I contrast Gopnik’s take on the world…arguably a world that has no concrete place in my life with the worlds populated with so-called California writers like Richard Rodriguez or in decades previous Joan Didion. I appreciate the nuances of both their writings, on how they find the nerve of a colonized place. I value the criss-cross, multi-hued points of view they present in their work…but there are points of separation. Rodriguez because he writes academically and knowingly with a cultural virtuosity that is very distinct and divergent from my own; while with Didion disconnection occurs largely due to the expanse of time. (Paradoxically, this ‘teseract’ of time is bridged for me by her amazingly textured latter-day descriptions of life observed by a transplanted Californian woman surviving the death of her family in Manhattan. I unfortunately could relate to the numbing sting of that loss).

But to return to Gopnik, for some reason I feel he is key to my own higher abilities, not because he is a god (well really, we all might be in our particular, highest achieving universes), but because he functions as more of a sentient trigger, a personal talisman that points the way to my honeypot of genius. That I am enamored of his talent is rather pedestrian...if I allowed my celebration of his skill to run amok, unexamined and delirious, I have a fear of it devolving dangerously close to the path of the sycophant a la Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. We become transcendent by association, not by achievement.

That I should use it to bootstrap my own gifts is perhaps the more difficult and companionable ambition, which is why I write this entry now. Accessing our greatness (as opposed to our idiosyncrasies, foibles, neurosis, and assorted low-hanging damaged bits) is not for the faint of heart. It invites doubt, scorn, and a bit of self-torture. It cleaves close to vanity, in the territory of pride, nestled snuggly in the county seat of narcissism. I don’t want to go there simply because I’ve made the trip before and not had much fun…neither did my traveling companions.

So to date, my answer to this call to evolve has simply been not to get on the bus. I intuit my capacity to err and then merely sit on my hands. Once again, I hope this time, I’m woman enough to risk more.