Anna in her new dress, cooking birthday dinner.
All is calm, all is bright
The view from my balcony this morning, in Florida for the holiday. Taking a breath and seeking perspective.
When bad things happen at the holidays
I planned it all week. First I got my work done, in my favorite coffee shop, a cheery place of brick and overstuffed couches, close enough to the art college to earn street cred even if the street it sits on is a meticulously groomed cobblestone roundabout. Then I was free to wander those historic streets, to drift in and out of shops dressed for the season. I saved my favorite for last. The Christmas Shop seems created just for me: nativity scenes by Wendt & Kohn, Mark Roberts’ wizened old fairies, puffy blown-glass Christopher Radko ornaments that I love to inspect if only for their outrageousness.
And best of all: an entire tree dedicated to the Nutcracker, dozens of Sugar Plum Fairies and Marzipans and Cavaliers and Claras. Gorgeous. One, in particular, caught my eye: a tiny pink blown-glass Clara, delicately poised on her toe, cradling her beloved Nutcracker. I wanted it. Oh, I wanted it. I had the cash in my pocket, and it was on sale …
But I didn’t. I couldn’t.
My husband was laid off, just last week. It wasn’t supposed to happen; how could such a thing happen? Quickly, apparently: the company cancelled an entire contract, so he went to work, as usual, on Thursday, but not, as usual, not on Friday.
“Today didn’t go well,” he began as he walked in the door, hours earlier than expected.
I fear that forever, now, I will look up in dread any time he comes home a few hours early. It’s just never good news.
Happy Holidays to us.
It’s a lot to take in. The best case scenario? The company is experiencing a momentary panic and will re-hire early in January. Painful but survivable. We’ll always tell stories about that “first tough Christmas in Savannah.” We’ll plan better, then laugh ruefully, remembering the year Christmas stopped in its tracks.
It’s too unlikely. The worst?
Please don’t ask.
So much is threatened. So much stands to change: where we live, where she goes to school, our economics. Our end-of-the-year financial review has churned into crisis management, shuffling, re-distributing, eyeing the short-term instead of the long, speculating instead of planning. Christmas has palled.
I know three states of being, these days.
In the best of times, I am oblivious to our situation. This most often happens with the little one, skipping and singing and enjoying. We so looked forward to this season: she is five, a magical time of cookie-decorating parties and letters to Santa and searching the skies for flying reindeer. When I am under the spell of the holidays, then all is calm, all is bright.
Too often, though, awareness comes in on little cat feet. I watch her twirl and dance and I am of two hearts: one full of holiday joy, the other buckling with the effort: Don’t let her see. Don’t let her hear. Don’t let her suspect.
And finally, occasionally, I turn and face it. I crawl into my closet, three shut doors and a hallway protect her from my sounds I make. I snapped at Allan the other day and he shot back, That’s just anger talking, and I knew: no. It’s fear. I have nothing to be angry at or about except the vagaries of corporate decisions, which feels like raging against the rain.
But fear? That’s real. It has dimensions and depth and edges. It’s tangible, visible in the curtainless windows, the empty space waiting for the dinette set we were going to gift ourselves for Christmas.
It’s palpable in the pulsebeat before the bank balance floats onto the webpage.
It lives in the space between my fingertips and the ornament, Clara dancing with her Nutcracker, a $20 bauble I would have easily purchased just a few short days ago but which, now, and for who knows how long, is just out of my reach.
Living in the in-between
Usually when someone talks of life changing in an instant, they’re referring to a tragedy or a miracle. Sometimes, though, regular old life can do that. One minute your routine is well trod and familiar and the next it’s new down to the tacks. Everything is strange here. My car doesn’t belong in this parking lot. The grocery store is arranged all backward. The radio stations begin with ‘K’ instead of ‘W,’ Vera Bradley — whoever she is — designed everyone’s purses and no one gives a flip about Arnold Schwarzenegger. A couple dozen people I didn’t know two weeks ago greet me every morning and no one is familiar. I get lost driving to work. Still, in a powerful way, I know we’re home.
Almost. “Home” for this month has been a corporate hotel, painted in Vanilla with accents of Milk. It’s a big complex, buildings of tissue and glue, communal trash drop, lousy internet service. Stuffed with mid-level execs transferring from one branch to another, military personnel waiting orders, recent college grads driving cars they can’t afford and at which they’ll look back and laugh someday. (Seriously. What 22-year-old needs a Cadillac Escalade?) Our apartment is larger than our house in San Diego and feels half its size.
As homely as it is, it’s important. Anna turned five here. Allan and I started new jobs. We’ve spent our first weeks as a family WITH TWO BATHROOMS. I’ve figured out how to cook eggs on a cookie sheet and we’ve eaten enough frozen pizza to choke any Italian. I’ve discovered just how much there is to think about when nothing runs on autopilot; it’s surprisingly disruptive to all of a sudden realize you have no foil, or aspirin, or tape. But Anna and Allan go swimming every night and there’s a huge pond with turtles and one large bass who bullies the littler fish so he can get all the bread we toss far into the middle of the big pond.
We’ll remember this forgettable place.
It’s interesting how freeing it can feel when your only real responsibilities are to yourselves. Our families give us a pass when we’re slow to return calls and I’ll take an extra week with Anna’s birthday thank-yous and not feel guilty. We haven’t yet joined in here, don’t yet have yoga classes to get to or playdates to schedule. We will, and soon, and I am looking so forward to all of that (it is lonely, living up in the air) but it’s also, I don’t know, simple. It reminds me a bit of our apartment in Moscow, when all Allan and Anna and I had on our agendas was to get to know each other. We’d load up with enough baby gear for a weekend, walk cross the big road to the market, try to recognize food by the pictures on the labels and hope we could keep our kopeks separated from our rubles. This would take us all day, somehow. It was a time, like now, when it was just us, a time so unadorned and yet so rich, so very, very rich.
FloridAAAAHHHHHH
We’re here!
For most of the world, Florida means some mix of sun, sand, Disney World, mosquitos, cruise terminals, fishing, or football.
For us, it means home.
With TV, of course:
