Friday Dispatch: A Beautiful Life

After the first week of summer

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Friday greetings,

I’m sitting on the sunporch with my coffee. Chalupa is here, too. The birds are busybodies. It’s cool enough to sit outside wearing a sweatshirt. Unlike the potted flowers that struggled in this week’s heat, the jade spills out in every which direction as if to say, BRING IT. I relate to them both. This week brought board meetings and doing my part, river floats and sister swims, farm fridge popsicles and 30 Jewish writers in a space I didn’t even know I, too, needed. This week brought morning Tarot and the Lovers card and wisdom I also didn’t know I needed until I heard it. (Thanks, Dad!) This week brought catching up with old friends, tender news, and joyful updates. This week brought thinking hard and listening harder. This week brought a world that goes on and on, like the roadwork down the street, like the days flying off the calendar, like falling in love and staying in love and deepening in love and writing a wee little poem about love.

Finally, this week brought a poem that poured in last night, after another Thursday with Peggy. (Thanks, Mom!)

A Beautiful Life

This beautiful life –
winding roads, a mother, a daughter,
a dive bar in Wales, but not THE Wales,​
next to Lake George, but not THE Lake George.

Stories she has told me countless time​s,
each with certain reliable elements –
like when Loren Baritz asked,
Peggy, what do YOU want?
​She told him and it was done,
as if Loren was​ some kind of proxy for God. ​
Later, she asked him,
Loren, how did this all happen so swiftly?
And he pointed to the sky without a word.

A beautiful life. We drive
through Somers, Stafford Springs,
then into Brimfield and Munson
and onto Wilbraham, and she tells me
it reminds her of when she and my dad used to wonder,
what would it be like to live in New England?
Then she says, Be careful what you wish for
and, Thank you, Loren Baritz.

It's a beautiful life, when I am driving
and my mother is naming the colors of cars,
marveling at the cars,
in awe of the brake lights
with their newfangled designs,
how the whole world looks like a new car lot.
White, red, blue, dark grey, light grey, grey grey.

She remembers the Ford wagon
with wood paneling in Great Neck
and how she would duck and hide
from her newfangled friends with fancier newer models
until she became a rebel
and decided her family's car had sufficient panache.

A beautiful life, she ​says,
We are like Thelma and Louise​, just on Thursdays.
A​nd without the cliff, I suggest.
​Then ​we throw darts​, badly at first ​
until we get the hang of it
enough so that a local dude ​with a guts and glory t-shirt
shows us ​the light switch, upping our game. ​

My mother knows bodies ​
the way my father knows minds,
and ​she tells me to turn my torso a bit to the left
which I do and will you look at that​,
the dart a ​w​hisker​ from the bullsey​e.

I am surprised at how much I love this game.
I am a natural darts player, it turns out​.​
My mother says I should go into eldercare.
I am already in elder care, I tease​.
This is it​!​

We step into the parking lot – raining a little,
a full 35 degrees cooler​ than yesterday​
and she says, now we know
all we have to do is look up BARS. ​
Hahahahaha. She is 81 and I am 51 and now we know.
The road hugs the trees, or is it the other way around
and she can't get over all the shades of green.
I feel like my mother!

At lunch, a pang of missing her sister,
the one who spent summers in the Adirondacks​,
whose last words were an apology.
At lunch, a pang of missing her other sister,
the one who lived in a loft downtown
before lofts downtown were LOFTS DOWNTOWN,
who told her that when Loren Baritz
said yes to everything she wanted
it was only because Sagittarians are lucky​.

​And so later, on our way home,
we talk about luck,
we talk about living with intention,
we talk about the difference between waiting for things
to happen and taking action, doing what we can
to put ourselves in situations that open doors.

Darts and dive bars, a beautiful life,
daughters and so many daylilies​ paired with stone​walls,
a broken heart held at bay, if only by a hair's breadth,
if only by the way we turned our bodies today, ​
if only because we got lucky again.

What did your week bring? I’d love to hear!

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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