There is no better way to start off a New Year than with the hope and excitement of our littlest ones. Here are some photos of my nephew Noah and my niece Emi from New Year’s Day (with a special guest appearance from our littlest one of all, my cousin’s latest addition Phoebe!) It’s just enough to restore my constantly dwindling faith in the world.
The amazing artist Paul Richmond is featured prominently in the current issue of the art magazine Noisy Rain, the entirety of which can be found HERE. It showcases a number of his Cheesecake Boys and other works, all of them gorgeous, colorful, and fun. I have to say that his rendition of me is one of my favorite of all-time – as much for its collaborative aspect as for its cheeky notion. It’s been a little over a year since he so generously immortalized me as one of his Cheesecake Boys. I’m in some great company (hello Michael Breyette!), of which I’m not at all worthy, but it’s totally fun to be part of his world.
Matchy-matchy is rarely a good thing, as seen in this coat/hat combo.
They aren’t the biggest fruit in the Winter bowl, but they carried just enough color to catch my eye, especially when highlighted by the white of the snow and set against the pale blue of the sky. If my memory of spring blossoms is true, these are cherries. Not the kind you eat (and even the birds seem to have left these largely alone), but the ornamental sort grown for their blooms and foliage.
You have to look a little harder to find such color in the Winter months, and by March these will no longer be half as bright, but for now they’re up, dangling in the wintry sky, daring the wind to take them away.
Some people might dread the thought of twelve inches coming in the night, but I welcomed it. From inside I watched the snow fall, seeing how it stuck to the branches of the trees lining the middle of Braddock Park, how it coated the cars and covered the street lamps. Before my eyes nature transformed the fair city, and though it was dark, everything glowed magnificently, like the smoky air surrounding a display of fireworks.
The next day dawned with the splendor only a January morning after a snowstorm could conjure. In the bright light of day, there was a different beauty, a more crystalline, sharp sort of prettiness. Despite the arrival of the wind, the trees hung onto their crystal-carriage, lifting the snow to the loftiest light. Like some enchanted winter wonderland with an elusive ice queen, the city streets were chasms in the woods, the snow providing refuge and hiding places, a buffer in the brutal cold.
Only a scant few times does Winter in Boston afford such brushes with the sublime. This was one of them.
(It helps when someone else has done the shoveling, and the car is parked in a garage. Failing either of those points, I’d be far less thrilled.)
Outside the window, Braddock Park, and the city of Boston, began to transform. This was a sticky snow, a wet snow that clung to all surfaces, but instead of acting as a treacherous, tenacious parasite intent on bringing its victim down, it stayed light, and the trees were able to hold up its weight as the evening went on. I watched from my warm perch as the street took on the enchantment I’ve only partially captured here. You can’t hear the stillness of the snow, the hush that a snowstorm casts over the city. You can’t smell the scent of snow in the air, almost metallic, like some sort of atmospheric trick the elements play on the nose.
Alone, with the light of a flickering candle behind me, there is no other place I’d rather be than right here, in the midst of the first big snowstorm of the season. It is a comfort to be so stranded and unreachable.
I walk from window to window, straining to see more of the outside world, twisting my head to take in every angle. The city in the snow doesn’t last that long, and the wind will be along soon enough to ruin its pristine blanket. It’s only a question of when. For now, I sip at some tea, cozily ensconced in the warmth of the dim room.
It started as I was walking down Newbury Street. At first I wasn’t sure if that’s what I was really seeing. For the first hour or so, it was just quick white streaks appearing and disappearing out of the corner of my eye. When the snow first started, it evaporated before it hit the ground, and this went on for quite some time. I’d duck into a store, and come back out expecting to find the world painted with white, but it didn’t start sticking until dinner-time. Once it began, however, it did not let up until morning, though there were breaks of rain and sleet, and we would not get the hyped-up foot of snow that Andy had warned me about.
A snowstorm is best ridden out with a stock of provisions (food stuffs, cocktails, and an ample selection of entertainment options – in this case a book and a DVD of ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’ with Bette Davis.) It’s also nice when you can ride it out at a condo where someone else is responsible for shoveling you out the next morning (thank you condo fees), even if it packs a lighter whallop than originally reported. On this night, I grabbed a bit of dinner, finished up some shopping, and came back with the ingredients for an easy pasta dish and some bread for toast the next morning. I’d already found a tea kettle and some lavender/oat flower tea. I was ready.
Sitting on my parents’ family room couch, my brother brings up the above clip on his phone. It is Alica Keys on Jimmy Fallon, singing a theme that is both familiar and foreign. A vague Saturday-morning recollection of cartoons and chaos strikes my mind. Ahh, yes, the Gummi Bear theme – one of the greatest opening cartoon themes ever written. Side by side in the exact spot where we spent many a Saturday morning, my brother and I listened to the Gummi Bears theme, greeting a New Year in our childhood home.
And for extra-old-school authenticity, here’s the original version.
Let’s begin without a lot of fanfare. Let’s begin without any pomposity. Let’s begin where it all began, with a few snapshots – rough and imperfect and rudimentarily raw. Let’s return to the very basic tenets of sharing and exploring and creating. Back then it was the simple notion of telling a story.
It was the way we went around our childhood classrooms, each student giving a brief synopsis of their summer vacation. Some of us listened, some of us merely waited for the chance to speak (so sure that ours was the story of greatest excitement), and some of us did a little of both, leaning in to those who mattered most, politely ignoring those who dismissed us in the past. We each had a part in the play at hand, and it was how we learned to communicate and connect.
This is a far cry from kindergarten, (what I would give for nap time at any point during the day), but many of those lessons remain relevant. It’s not enough to share. It’s not enough to speak. It’s not enough to pretend that the world is only there to hear what your summer story is. Everyone has a summer story. Some are better than others, and sometimes it’s the way in which they’re told that matters most, but all of them matter – to at least one person in the world. That is enough. That is all.
We don’t have to be perfect. We certainly didn’t start off that way. We won’t end that way. And what’s in-between is as far from perfection as we can humanly get. It will be okay to make mistakes, to blink when the shutter goes off, to miss the proper punctuation, to run off with a sentence here and there.
The greatest thing is that we’re all in it together. Like that elementary school circle, when we first faced one another as children – whispering about Halloween costumes, making paper angels dusted with glittery snow, exchanging Valentines, and fidgeting until it was time for kickball – we are still the same in so many ways. There is more that we share than we don’t.
New Year’s Day was never one of my favorite holidays. It meant the end of Christmas vacation. It meant the return to the Winter doldrums. It meant a bunch of family had to be endured (and enjoyed, truth be told). And all because of the change of the calendar year. At the very least they could have spaced it out a few months, instead of coming right on the heels of Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Yet here it is – another baby to coddle and coo over, hoping that this time, this year, we can make it all right, make it all okay, send this one off into the world prepared and perfect, even when history, and every other year, tells us differently. We are resilient creatures, if a bit foolish, but it’s all we know, and we still do the best we can do. When I look back at the year that’s gone, and the year to come, it makes me glad that we are still trying, that we still care. The world can and may crumble around us, but we won’t give up. In a place where cynicism so often gets heard above all else, I offer this quiet whisper of hope to start us off. I’ll do my best to keep you entertained, if you’ll do your part to keep me safely grounded.
Happy New Year.
In a few minutes the year changes, and with it a new slate appears before us. How we color it, how we mark it, how we make it into something pretty is all up to us. In this midnight hour, we say good-bye and hello, and by morning it will all be different.
For now, it’s like the moment before a snowstorm, when you know the world is about to change, but it doesn’t quite feel real. Vestiges of the holidays remain, glowing differently now, a little sadder and yet somehow hopeful. Their real meaning, and the true spirit, remains. It doesn’t get thrown out with the wrapping paper and ribbons, it doesn’t disappear with the boxes and the string. Someone put up these lights, someone hung these wreaths, someone decorated these trees. Someone made the effort to make the world a little cheerier. To those who do that, I offer this unheard bit of thanks.
And now, as the ball drops in our biggest city, and I’m at a friend’s party, kissing my husband at the stroke of midnight as I’ve done for the last twelve years, I make a wish that your year is as happy and hopeful as you want it to be.
It just may be my favorite scene out of any musical, and it always makes me cry. The cynical story of Norma Desmond and ‘Sunset Boulevard‘ is not high on anyone’s warm and fuzzy list, but in this brief snippet we have a glimpse at what makes her lovable in the face of all her delusional arrogance and haughty defiance. This is just a fragile person, hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with someone else who doesn’t love her back, at least not in that way – not in that all-encompassing romantic way that we all deserve to be loved. The world had already left her behind, but that doesn’t stop the heart from wanting, from loving. It never fails to move me.
Originally I was going to do one simple quick end-of-the-year post saying ‘Fuck this, so glad it’s over’, but after watching Barbra Streisand in a recent interview, I gave in and looked back (don’t ask). No matter how wretched the year, there are things to be learned, if nothing else you know what to try to avoid. So without further ado, I present to you my Year in Review. Well, the highlights anyway, because most of it was too dreadful to recall to life.
In January 2012, I made a quick trip to frigid NYC, where Suzie and I finally got to see Bernadette Peters live in a revival of ‘Follies’. It calmed my yearly (monthly? weekly?) bout of wanderlust and fulfilled my fetish for hotel room living. If I had my druthers, I would leave my mark in a different hotel every night.
February 2012 was a bright spot, and probably one of the most fun times I had all year. Who knew I would shoot my wad so early? I usually like to wait… Anyway, it was the Superbowl. And Madonna was there. And I was Tebowing. And wearing a jockstrap. It was the best of times. Then came the shameful secret I had kept for two decades, and I finally felt freedom at revealing it. By March 2012, the only thing that mattered was Madonna’s new MDNA album, that got a wordy review here and here.
April 2012 brought the slowly healing balm of Spring, even if the Winter never quite bit as much as we knew it could. The Madonna Timeline continued on its merry journey, and she reminded me how marriage could indeed be x-static, among other things. I got my very first massage, and promptly became addicted.
In May 2012, President Obama came out in support of gay marriage, just a couple years short of ours, but good nonetheless. By the time summer peeked in, I had given my first, almost successful, time out. For my first summer read of June 2012, I dove into Andy Cohen’s ‘Most Talkative’ with gleeful relish. I enjoyed the moment, not realizing it would be the last one I enjoyed for quite a while – possibly the rest of the year, and possibly beyond. My life-changing tour of jury duty would alter everything I thought I knew. My summer – my year – was ruined before it barely began.
Just in time for this last stretch of holiday fanfare, I present to you the Pomegranate Sparkler, a festive cocktail if ever there was one. I served these for our Christmas Dinner, and they pack just enough of a punch to get you through the worst of holiday drama. The hardest part of this would be seeding the pomegranates, but it can also be the most fun.
The main component of this cocktail is the champagne. I’ve never been a big fan of the bubbly, but for occasions that require some extra effervescence I can do it. (And when used in a mimosa first thing in the morning, champagne has always proved deceptively powerful.)
I didn’t get the exact measurements on ingredients, but this is roughly what I did: combine equal parts vodka, St. Germain liqueur, pomegranate juice, and simple syrup. (Okay, I was slightly more heavy-handed with the vodka, and not as liberal with the simple syrup.) Shake with ice in a cocktail shaker, then fill a champagne flute half-way. Fill the remaining space with chilled champagne, and add a few pomegranates.
When the champagne meets the pomegranate seeds, the bubbles will bring a few of them to the surface, Galilean-thermometer-like, resulting in a drink that is both fun to watch, and fun to imbibe.
Having finally had this year’s very-late first proper snowfall, it’s time to explore the wonders of the white stuff. Almost every kid loves the snow, as much for its fun aspects as its power to close school. For me, it was, and remains, the enchanting blanket that transformed forests and streets, houses and hills, the ugly and the dead, into something magical, something beautiful, something pristine and perfect. It was, far quicker than time, the great equalizer. It stilled and silenced, and hushed the world with one fell swoop.
When I was little, I used to traipse out into the forest behind our house, bundled up in a snowsuit so heavy and thick I could barely walk, in moon boots and mittens so clumsy it’s a wonder I didn’t simply roll about like some tottering weeble. Somehow I made it into the woods, where I would spend hours sliding down banks, making snow forts, hiding beneath the snowdrifts beside drooping evergreens, and imagining worlds of solitude and wonder. I wandered alone in the beauty, content with what was suddenly sublime. Trails of squirrels and rabbits were ghostly reminders that others were around, somewhere, and it was enough just to know. The quiet back then was not eerie, the stillness not worrisome, and when it snows now I go back to that peace, and I remember.
