September 2019: Notes from the future
When I started this project four years ago, I liked the intention of meditating on the passage of time. Anniversaries and milestones are something I often think about, the easiest measurement of life, numbers organizing narrative into order. Four years ago I had just quit my longest job ever, being the office manager of a little nursery school in lower Manhattan. As summer wound down, Emily and I drove to the beach in Delaware to visit my mother. This weekend when we drove down, we passed by the IHOP where I turned down a job offer, sitting in our hot car in the parking lot, before going into the restaurant and ordering strawberry pancakes and trying to trust my gut that I had made the right decision. That young woman in the parking lot could not have imagined this woman driving by her former self, two jobs later, with a different relationship to abundance and success. The anniversaries are always creating themselves, mutating into new significances. It’s been a year since Emily and I got engaged. It’s six years since I finished the first draft of the memoir I’m now rewriting, an act of radical faith. This weekend at the beach, my brother and I went into the ocean together, bobbing in the deep water, riding waves and cackling against the salt air, for the first time in what we guessed was twenty years. When I asked him if he remembered the sound effect our father made when he held our hands in the ocean, pulling us by our skinny arms when the waves crashed down - boosush! - my brother’s eyes refocused, hearing it in his own memory, a sound he had forgotten. I liked that I could transmute a tangible moment from our childhood, a sound, and send it back like a boomerang to my only brother. Anniversaries also make for easy gratitude. It’s been twelve and a half years since my last drink. It’s been more than ten years since my mother had cancer. And then there’s the quantification of gratitude, the tangible numbers to help me organize life when I want to feel its significance. This summer I baked one tomato tart, three peach crisps, two blueberry cobblers, and one nectarine crumble, eaten in our warm apartment from chipped bowls with vanilla ice cream pooling into the crevices of the dessert. I wrote 23,753 words this summer in an attempt to rewrite the memoir. I read thirteen books. I went to the beach seven times. What I’m trying to let go of is quantification as a measure of worth - look what I’ve done! - and instead understand it as a diary of time. This morning I sorted through three boxes of photos, looking for photos of my father for something I’m making for his 70th birthday this month. (When I asked my niece and nephew if they’d like to draw seventy flowers for their grandfather’s birthday, they looked at me with skepticism - could they draw that many flowers? Wasn’t it too many? Who would keep count?) The photos in the boxes were jumbled, as if you threaded our family’s timeline into a box and shook it, the photos in mixed stacks - a kindergarten class photo, a Thanksgiving, an angsty teenager, a black and white square photo of a grandparent, a wedding, a Saturday afternoon with our dog Penny at the old house, a snow storm, a smiling couple, a graduation, a sleepover, a birthday, a reunion. I was flipping through the photos quickly, scanning for my mother, telling myself I didn’t have time to recreate narrative or organize the photos. I made a stack that I passed to Emily with efficiency, curt captions - that’s my cousin’s wedding. Those are my mom’s friends from college. Here we are camping. That’s when I played the trumpet. This is my father in his work uniform. This was a party at my aunt’s house. As so often happens with photos, there were images that felt familiar but not real, as if I knew they occurred - they had to, I was there, in the picture - but I couldn’t remember the occasion, not even a phantom memory. It’s a privilege to have so many photos, to have more occasions than you can place yourself in. It’s why I like lists, stories, anniversaries, numbers. Something I can count on. As the calendar changes to September, another school year, another summer closing down, another birthday season, another year creeping closed, I realize that this is the month I always take stock. Return to the stories. Count the anniversaries. They’re the launchpad I use when I throw myself towards the future.
xo,
c
P.S.
The Jia Tolentino book made me feel 100% smarter (even if that means I’m just living off the fumes of her own brilliance). It’s so good.
This is the best thing I know to do with late summer tomatoes.
Leslie Jamison’s essay “The Quickening: A Story of Two Births” is a master class in how to create a braided essay, in the second person, and something so well organized and poetic that it transcends.
I used to insist that our family guinea pig, Pih (yes, it’s name was a syllable, my brother and I were (and still are) weird kids), get its own stocking at Christmas as well as a stocking portrait.
Passing the hat! Thank you as always to those of you who subscribe! First of the Month will always be free, but feel free to chip in $5/month (or $30/year) if the spirit moves you.
