First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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On New Year's Resolutions

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February 13, 2018
So how many of you still write “2017” on your papers?  Honest show of hands.

So, dear world, what’s up?  We were counting down the days.  I saw you at that party that went on ‘til 3 am.  Times Square on television.  You had fireworks.  Southwest served us free champagne.

And yet we can’t get it straight. 
(It's already February?)
So what exactly happened?

The answer is, quite simply…nothing.

New Years was a vacation.  But at the end of the day, or the year, we all revert back to our (monotonous?) jobs/classes/bills/taxes/hassles/lives.  And we expect it all to change just because the clock struck midnight.

We’re the ones who have to change.

Let’s start with New Years' Resolutions.  (Is this a sore topic for anyone else?)  The procrastinator/nonconformist in me chose to write about them two month past the deadline.

So, did you change something drastic in the face of all this stifling, mundane monotony?

Tell me that you managed it.  I don’t think I’ll believe you.

Because, at least for me, it doesn’t work that way.  Once the novelty wears off, there has to be something more invigorating than a set of numbers reading “two thousand and eighteen.”  I mean, how impersonal is that??

I made a resolution once, and the nonconformist in me did it in November.

I was traveling on a bus between Cleveland and Chicago.  Status: sleep-deprived, loving the freedom of the journey and the chance to eavesdrop on the travel plans of strangers. 

Other status: Too Much Sitting.

We had a lovely stop for lunch a few hours in.  Most of us did the common thing and rushed into McDonald's for milkshakes and mystery meat. Some folk lounged inside the bus and took advantage of the silence. I found a wayside gas station and bought chocolate milk and candy.

And one man walked onto a strip of grass and – not caring who was staring at him – began doing yoga in the middle of the parking lot.

I wanted to join him. 

But what if he was some creepy weirdo?
What if I looked foolish and everyone was watching?
What if he tried to talk to me?  What if – oh, never mind, we’re leaving.

Current status: Envious.  And I spent the rest of the ride thinking that I should have done it. 

So I made my resolution, in these exact words and you can quote me on it.  “I want to be the kind of person who isn’t afraid to practice yoga on the bus with strangers.”

Seriously, that’s the answer that I give people. 
And you know what?  It works. 

We’re the ones who have to change.  And we don’t need a day or number or a glitzy tower in Times Square to justify it. 

And you know what else?  We don’t need to worry what the mainstreams think about it. 

It’s just as likely they’re the ones watching from bus windows and wishing they could join us. 


Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 15, 2014 at 7:40 PM

    Dance like no one's watching, sing like no one's listening, and do yoga whenever you can!! Even on a bus... Even with potential creepy dudes... Huh...

    ReplyDelete

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