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October 21 2013

Driving and Working

I have a new and exciting project – a book called, “100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go,” to be published by Travelers Tales in Palo Alto, CA in 2014. This is not a guidebook per se, but more of a bucket list with a women’s perspective for people who love France, or might yet fall in love with it. This is not a simple task, as I can name 100 places just in the Marais, Bastille and Oberkampf neighborhoods of Paris where il faut aller. Without divulging any of my choices, I can safely say that Provence – the area from Arles to the Alpilles, and down along the Mediterranean coast from Frejus to Menton on the Italian border is likely to figure prominently. Americans are drawn to the James Bond sexiness and insouciance of the South of France as much as the act of puttering around the markets to inhale the scent of persimmons picked this morning, and a cool glass of rosé at lunchtime with fish just pulled from the sea. Not to mention the cinematic perfection, which filmmakers have been making good use of since the days of Louis Lumière.

So far, I’ve been writing, writing, writing. Taking notes on the color of the sky. Picking a cluster of tea olive blossoms that I press into my notebook. The clouds thicken up on the road to St. Paul de Vence while I’m at the wheel of a 1968 white Mustang convertible, the same one driven by Honor Blackman when she was 007’s foil in Goldfinger. I round one hairpin curve after another and the sea disappears into the distance, as does the awareness of my role on earth. I’m a mother, a wife, a daughter, a friend but right now I’m all focus and drive. There is one road underneath and my mind is on only it. Get there safely, note the shifts in the air now that the temperature has dropped, press the brake. Note the sight of the medieval walls. Note the pattern in the footpath. Note the banyan tree near the Colombe d’Or.

It’s not a hard job (well, making a living and getting people to return your e-mails can both be rough) compared to telephone pole repairmen and triage nurses. But the work comes with me everywhere I go. Now, my mind ticks as I start to collate the search for 100 places in France, my print articles, the stories I want to write, the other unknown places I wish to know. As I descend to Nice, then settle onto the indoor terrace in my sea blue and green room at the Hi Hotel, the ideas are slamming onto the walls of my brain. The day spent galavanting along the Riviera in a sports car was an gorgeous one, but it was always and ever a workday.I’m not a car person and neither is my husband. He has a pickup and I have Toyota, and we use them to take us places we need to go, usually to the Stop & Shop for groceries. But today, the question looms: is this why people love to drive? There are wheels below, a sky above, a mission to accomplish in getting there, wherever ‘there’ is, and little else.
Except for writers who by definition, are always working. Even a stop at the CVS for a pack of gum is a chance to observe human behavior, sponge it all up, glean snippets of conversation.

October 21 2013

Up the Coast

I’m here on the Côte d’Azur to gather background material for some magazine articles, in the place where luxury came to nestle over a century ago in custom-built mansions among wild jasmine and palm trees. The odors of rose and citrus seem to be brewed in the coves that carve giant scallops into the coastline. It’s the same now as it was thirty years ago, when I first went to Nice. I had just completed my freshman year at Princeton where the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 2017 (dropped out, actually), floated for better or worse through all of us. It was part of Princeton lore to imagine the soon-to-be-great young man from Minnesota traipsing along Prospect Street and we joined him in these wanderings. His was a story with which we all became familiar: about his tragic wife Zelda, his relationship with his editor Maxwell Perkins, all freshly told by his biographer (another Princetonian, though from more recent years) Scott Berg.

He wrote about the gilded age and it was the side of paradise that was seductive because it was no more. Hard days had come and the good times had passed and how we craved them. How we crave them still.

At one time, I became aware of the great scholarly debate: The Great Gatsby vs. Tender is the Night. If the first is considered the most perfect novel ever written, the second (his last book, written after Zelda was hospitalized for schizophrenia) can be deemed a hot and craftless mess. I’ve always preferred the latter precisely because of its flaws: they create its own harmony. It’s also a richly descriptive novel (count the plants in the garden chez Diver in the first three paragraphs of Chapter 6: lemon, fig, lilac, iris, rose – and the corresponding colors) and from the first words, a classic (think Henry James, Edith Wharton) in the American in Europe genre. Despite the melancholy and infidelity and bleakness that unfolds so shatteringly, Dick and Nicole Diver threw great parties, with heirs and novelists and royalty and ne’er do wells. We didn’t want to be them, but we wanted to know them: “to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience,” the narrator says early on in the book, which I re-read on the Air France flight over.

Late in the afternoon, my car pulled up alongside the Belles Rives (once called Villa St. Louis), Fitzgerald’s former rented house in Juan-les-Pins, which is now a plush hotel. Some of his original furniture – art deco tables and chairs which German soldiers hadn’t destroyed or used for God-knows-what during the war – remains, as does the building, all spruced and polished to perfection. From the terrace above the cove, you can see the islands across the way, and imagine Gerald and Sara Murphy, on whom Fitzgerald based the characters of the Divers and to whom he dedicated the book. Most beautiful by far was the dining room, which was his office. It is lined with large windows that look out to the terrace which give way to the sea. There, inspiration is a tactile thing. Magic + talent = masterpiece.

It was impossible to expel the man from my thoughts later, over dinner at the Hotel Royal Antibes. Fitzgerald’s Riviera – the rose-colored hotel and long beach afternoons – was not simply his playground. It was a fertile field to be tilled and harvested many years later. Tender is the Night was published in 1934 – eight years after he left the Riviera.

October 20 2013

Arrivals

My head was pleasantly heavy upon arrival in Cannes. Air France – may it ever be so – still serves complimentary champagne even in economy class, and who am I to refuse it? We no longer wear white gloves when we board an airplane, but the French know that the voyage means nothing unless it is punctuated with ritual. To your health, the gesture seems to say, and to France’s. Vive….

The sea spread out before me from my balcony at the Hotel Splendid in Cannes. In years past, I would sleep when I landed from an overnight flight – peel off the traveling clothes, pull the crispy sheets over me, and stretch out at last until I awoke to my second morning that day. This time, I opted to sleepwalk in dreamtime through that first Sunday afternoon on the Cote d’Azur. The day was endless, a delicious blur of possibility: antique markets, fresh-picked figs in baskets and three cups of coffee at three different cafes. I walked La Croisette and clambered down to the beach. I think I saw two different carousels in Cannes that day but perhaps I imagined it.

Even for early October, the sun grilled my shoulders the next day on the boat to St. Honorat, a tiny island thirty seaborne minutes and a world away from Cannes. I’d just been indulged with a five-star lunch at the Grand Hotel, and the clink of glasses filled with rosé faded into silence on the water. Mediterranean pines and pomegranate trees dotted the landscape – and vineyards, where the Cistercian monks on the island produce six very fine and difficult to find wines.

I imagine, as I often do these days, if a stretch of contemplative time would be prescriptive or even possible for me nowadays. I recently interviewed Sherry Turkle, a scientist at MIT, who writes of the importance of solitude in a time when we are so connected by gadgets we are nevermore alone. I think about this a lot when I’m hiking in the woods at home, phone zipped into my cargo pants, and I get pinged by a friend. It takes some restraint not to write back, and usually I fail. When there are 200 messages in the Inbox and 42 texts to return, might not all of us harbor a desire for sunshine, a simple bed, and 360 degrees of rolling sea to separate us from every single person that needs us immediately, from my accountant to J Crew who is offering me a 20 per cent discount? Jetlagged, content, well-fed and far from home, there are more questions than usual to ponder.

June 18 2013

An Audience with Jan Morris

Recently, I attended an interview with the Welsh writer, Jan Morris. It was conducted on the stage at the Times Center in New York by author and editor Don George, who has his own stellar travel writing resume. The event, hosted by Geoex, was a benefit for the American Himalayan Foundation, its hook being the 60th anniversary of the conquest of Mount Everest. Morris, who at the time was James Morris and a reporter for the Times of London, is the last survivor of that expedition and it was she who, using a series of codes and couriers, broke the story to the world when Sherpa Tenzing and Sir Hillary reached the summit. Her scoop reached London just in time to share headlines with Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, making that June day in 1953 a triumphant one for the British Empire, whose history Morris documented in her three-part magnum opus, Pax Brittanica.

Morris’ mane of white hair gives her a multi-tiered aspect – aristocratic (think Barbara Bush tending roses on the lawn at Kennebunkport) but also grandmotherly as well as academic. And, she seems utterly approachable, even as she spun her anecdotes into gold, so naturally at ease with her extraordinary life and achievements that the rest of us may as well be, too. Morris is an icon among writers, especially among the diverse and disparate community (of which I am, as often as possible, a member) of “travel writers”. The fact that there is such a thing is due in great part to her, and Morris’ dispatches published in Rolling Stoneremain some of the most elegant and penetrating essays ever written about place. I remember one she wrote about Manhattan, which I recently found in a collection of hers called Destinations. I read this piece when I was a freshman in college and her words stuck with me: the city’s “glowering ecstasy”, it’s “reluctant and secretive beauty”, it’s citizens who “like the bear, are heightened, in one way or another, by their confinement.” The sting of ambition, the horror of failure: no one has gotten New York better than this European writer, and I kept this issue of Rolling Stone for years because I knew: I need to live there.

This might be the best a writer can do: leave an imprint, splash an image on the brain, plant a seed of desire to transport or be transported. Morris is a master at extracting the essence of a place, including the people who dwell within it. When Don George asked her about her methodology, her secret to doing what she does so well, her honest answer still managed to be a lesson in humility, which many writers either lack or toss off as self-deprecation – usually suspect. “Forgive me,” she said. “It really is a gift from God. I really didn’t know how to do anything else.”

Sitting in the audience, listening to Morris talk about Everest ’53 with as much casual wit as the anecdote about yesterday’s al fresco lunch at a New York City café, it was difficult not to entertain thoughts of, “Why bother?” This is something all travel writers must ponder, at some point. It’s no longer possible to write the seminal work on Venice as Morris did, with its magnificent opening sentence, which Don referenced in passing: “So, the Venetians became islanders, and islanders they remain, still a people apart, still tinged with the sadness of refugees.” Probably a trek through Oman with the Sultan and a team of slaves, an adventure Morris documented in 1957, isn’t going to happen either. That followed 1956’s Coast to Coast, her chronicle of a year spent driving across Eisenhower’s America, a year which Morris claims was the most marvelous of her life and one that, incredibly and in her words, “changed me more than Everest did.” She traversed the same highways towards many of the same places – San Francisco, Nevada, Salt Lake City, Chicago – as Jack Kerouac had done a few years before, but at the time there was no On the Road – that wasn’t published until 1957.

Rather than discourage me, however, my audience with Morris left me emboldened. No, I don’t think I or any of us can find an original way to commune with the ghosts on yonder Mayan ruin or imagine a fresh take on Paris’ Hidden Treasures. But what we can do, when we immerse ourselves in the strangeness of dislocation and remain aware enough to notice and write about it, is offer perspective. By virtue of time’s (and life’s) relentlessness, perspective constantly shifts, adapts, astonishes – this is where the stories come from. Getting stranded alone without a passport in Dubrovnik bears no similarity to dreaming away your honeymoon there ten years later. As long as the travel writer’s hunger to venture forth collides with the desire to drift along the fringe and observe, there is no limit to the tales that can be told. I agree with my friend and editor Lavinia Spalding, who says that all travel stories should ultimately be about the meaning of life (wisdom she, in turn, attributes to Don George). It’s a challenge we accept because of the significance of random events – how discovery comes when you least expect it. Think of the mango fresh from the tree an hour from Port-au-Prince whose juices dripped down your wrists as you peeled it without a blade. Remember the Dire Straits tune blasting through a bar in Samarkand when you were dry and thirsty from travel. Remember the young, off-duty soldier who helped dig your car out from under a fallen tree one icy Vermont morning.

These days, inspiration is most effective when it contains a revelation, and here’s what I thought as I listened to 87 year-old Morris, her narrative bouncing away with stories as fresh as tomorrow: Why not? Because if all else fails, there was something else she said that night, something elemental and yet spectacular: “I write for my own pleasure.” If she can do it, so can I, even if my Everest is just a simple hill, somewhere I’ve never been before.

March 20 2013

Relax and Enjoy the Cake

I wrote this essay for a series called ‘My Happy Age’ in the British magazine Easy Living, and since there’s no link, I wanted to post it.

On an evening last May, my friend and I sat in one of the plushest bars in Manhattan sipping white orchid Martinis, a prohibitively expensive drink we indulge in when there is something to celebrate. This time, it was her forty-seventh birthday, and while I set out to toast her endeavors and good health, the occasion turned a little soggy.

“I’m almost fifty,” my still-gorgeous and very accomplished friend said despondently.

She spit out the last word as if a hornet had just landed in her mouth. Her panic of living beneath the Damoclean sword of the mid-century mark was palpable. And I felt for her. My forty-seventh birthday was also the pits. I was tossing about on a sea of erratic hormones and midlife regret, convinced that the impending milestone meant the beginning of the slide into decrepitude (and death). But my consolation to her lay in a prediction from my own experience: her fear would, ironically, end at her fiftieth birthday. In fact, now that it’s behind me, I can say that the only bad thing about turning fifty is, well, turning fifty. When the sun comes up the morning after and shines on your sixth decade, the horizon is utterly brighter and full of promise. And here I am, at 51, certain that this is the best year yet. Sixty is still too far off to dread.

When I finished high school, I had no idea who I was or would become and it seemed that each day, another cataclysmic decision loomed. It is terrifying to realize that your life has yet to be lived, and to know that the choices you make could reverberate forever. My twenties were spent falling in and out of love, and toiling eighty hours a week in the newsroom. I was married at 31, and seven days before I turned 34 my first child was born. I remember almost nothing of the rest of my thirties because I was obliterated by fatigue and second-guessing my own wing-it style of parenting. These years arrived and passed in a blur because whatever identity I had was given over – both willingly and unconsciously – to raising my children.

My forties were the worst. I saw my youth begin to fade in aging’s slo-mo tragedy. A few gray hairs sullied my glossy mane, and I noticed folds on my face that I swore weren’t there the day before. I neglected my marriage and my friendships, my community and my ambition. Fortunately, my health was fine, but there were new strains in my hips and knees, and I could no longer hold more than a single gin and tonic or prance around in four-inch heels all day. At 47, I had an epic midlife crisis. I became obsessed with my disappointments – financial, emotional and otherwise – and what I believed I was losing, as if the future held nothing but blackness. My 50th birthday felt like an oncoming bullet train. I decided not to celebrate with great fanfare, as others had done. Instead, after an intimate dinner with a few close friends, I jetted off to Russia solo, to relive a voyage I had made frequently in my twenties. All I could do was wallow in memory.

But on my birthday, almost instantly, the great weight lifted.

I’m not sure if the years have offered me wisdom, but like every adult, I’ve been through the ringer. That’s just what happens in a life spent raising children, working for a living, being broke and flush, facing every kind of responsibility, experiencing elation, despair and mostly, everything in between. “Happiness” as a state of being is not something I strive for or even believe in, but if you contend, as I do, that life is full of happy moments, then 51 is the age where you can finally see and appreciate them.

I welcome the onset of courage. Now it’s easier to say “no” when the impossible is asked of me, and I no longer care if someone gets mad about it, or if they like me, hate me, love my writing or think I’m a hack. I know my good qualities, and understand my faults even better. When I experience personal or professional rejection, I brush off my boots and soldier on. There is no time for whining, only the urgency of maximizing these still-fruitful years. These are conclusions I have made with my own free will, earned day in and day out over 51 years of life, always gaining knowledge.

I’m fortunate that I finally have a strong marriage (though that was hard-won), and my kids have grown into fascinating, accomplished people. Yes, the facial lines are getting harder to camouflage and I have to exercise twice as much as when I was 25 to get the same results. I defiantly refuse to cross any dreams off my list but I have a realistic assessment of what I can demand of myself and others, and with whom I’d like to spend my precious time. Lately, I’ve seen too often how quickly a robust person can become a severely ill one. But for now, I’m healthy and I have the presence of mind to appreciate that fact, as well as my good luck to be born in a place and time where living to 51 is even possible. I have much to look forward to, and I wouldn’t go back for anything – except, maybe, a second slice of cake.

December 10 2012

Who Gets a Seat at the Table? (and other questions)

Photos: Heidi Gutman

Recently my friend Michael Maren directed a scene in Brooklyn for his movie, A Short History of Decay, that fast became part of New York literary folklore. In this shot, Nathan (played by Bryan Greenberg who looks quite a bit like Channing Tatum) is a flailing writer, who is certain he’s a failing writer. His girlfriend (also a writer, but a successful one) is tapped out from his lack of confidence and has just shown him the door, so he escapes to Kos Kaffe, a coffee bar in Park Slope. With one excruciating gaze, Nathan sees the place stacked end to end with writers, real ones, famous ones, people with book deals and editors who care about them and bylines in the New Yorker. Is it real or is it fantasy? In either case, he senses he’s an interloper to a club where he has no business belonging. Cruel reality then deals him another blow: he sees that there is not a single seat left in the coffee shop. There is no room – there or seemingly anywhere else on earth, even a corner to weep into a lousy cappuccino – for the likes of him. It’s an achingly universal moment and when Michael let me read his lovely screenplay over a year ago, it touched me as a personal one.

It was great fun and the air was electric, aided by the coffee on tap the staff tirelessly churned out. But I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit, as I sat with Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham, Roxana Robinson, Elissa Schappell, Philip Gourevitch, my dear friends Abigail Pogrebin and Dani Shapiro (who is married to the director), Kurt Anderson,Hannah Tinti, Jane Green and a passel of other writers, that I was infected with a large dose of Nathan-esque doubt. Mostly I asked myself: had I had I earned a place in their company? Yes, I’ve been writing all my life, but it’s been less than three years since my first real published piece – in Vogue, an essay about marriage – offered me a launching pad at last. I already had piles of rejection before then and since, I’m constantly finding new ways to define ‘disappointment’. Some days I do have to wonder: what’s the point? Who’s even listening? Seriously, folks. Does the world really need another writer?

What’s remarkable, though, is how quickly and reliably the buoyancy and rush can return. It takes a simple piece of good news in the Inbox – an editor who likes your idea or your voice or the essay you sent, cold, having mustered up all the courage in the world, crafting an e-mail with the perfect mix of self-deprecation and scorched-earth intrepidity. And sometimes I just peck out something for myself that no one may ever see and I revel in the sheer, magic elasticity of words. It can actually take the dark out of the nighttime, as Dylan said about a woman (but it can go for work, too).

I’m not sure if I’m a writer because I have something to say or I simply want to be heard, or if I just want to try to make gorgeous sentences because it’s so ridiculously satisfying. I do know that though every morsel of bad news ushers in a fresh episode of disappointment, these defeats are integral to productivity. This is the truth: they get me in my chair every day. My husband is a sculptor who has lots of wisdom and even some useful bromides. My favorite is: you’ve only failed when you stop trying.

I would guess that most every writer in the café has, at one time, seen failure, experienced bad reviews, or been set back by a crisis of confidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone among them, from whatever rung on the success ladder, might have thought him or herself lesser, in comparison, than someone else across the room. I’m still eager, sometimes anxious, for one of my books to be published. Where does that put me on the spectrum? And really, does it matter? I suspect that there is a little Nathan in everyone (or most everyone) in the coffee shop that morning. It was, after all, just a room full of men and women, working hard, moving forward with the next big idea, unwilling or unable to rest on laurels if they’re lucky or talented enough to have earned them. Poor Nathan was having a bad day in that scene – the kind we all endure. I wonder if any of the authors on the movie set that morning might ever have their own dark, irrational moments, where even they might question if they belong at the table.

April 19 2012

Paris Always

$\"\"$ It rained like hell the last two weeks in Paris. It’s hit or miss weather-wise in April, but always beautiful and charm spills all over the boulevards. As it happened, I was staying with a dear friend in her apartment very near the first place I lived in Paris. I moved there in the summer of 1989 and arrived early on a Sunday morning. I dumped my bags in the new digs and walked around exploring the neighborhood, looking for coffee, or the market that was to become my go-to grocery. I ended up on Avenue George Mandel and I remember the chestnut trees and the stately beauty and the melancholy of arriving in a new country, poised to begin a new life. These are the trees today, exactly as they were 23 years ago early on an August Sunday. But it’s spring and like the great song “April in Paris” says (I find Ella Fitzgerald’s version particularly haunting), the chestnuts were in blossom. You can just barely make out the white funnel-shaped flowers in the photo.

I was working on a magazine story, and found myself seeking cover (no umbrella, no raincoat, just sheer focus on getting the article researched and written) in between meetings in some of Paris’ covered arcades, or galeries. These are some of my favorite spots in Paris, especially the Passage Jouffroy, where there are a slew of elegant toy stores. I remember once asking for Babar figurines for my son who was little at the time, and the store clerk shooed me out. You get the idea, no plastic to be found. Anyway, in the Galerie Vivienne, I found this book, which I snapped up for untold Euros – I had to, under the circumstances.

$\"\"$ I thought it would be a memoir of midlife, like the one I have been writing, and a saucy one at that, given the author’s beguiling name, Marquise de la Tour du Pin. Palace intrigue! Seduction on a grand scale! Infidelity, French style. Instead, I discovered it’s a quite well-known autobiography by an aristocratic woman of her experiences from the French Revolution through Napoleon’s return from exile. At some point, she and her family spent some time sequestered at a farm near Albany, New York. It’s rather slow going – can’t do Google translate for a whole book, but it’s quite a comprehensive and fascinating historical document.

As another diversion and escape from the torrents, I decided to visit as many perfume stores as possible. They seem to be concentrated in two neighborhoods for the most part – in the Marais, and in the 1st near the Ritz, off the rue Castiglione. I think it’s fair to say that I’m obsessed with perfume again, even though I actually like so few of them, especially the deep, spicy fragrances. What I love is anything that smells like rose or orange flowers. But the shops, some of them very small, have some of the most original concept and design in Paris. This picture is taken from outside one of the Parfums Nikolai boutiques. The aroma as you walk in, as the French would say, is sublime.

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At the end of each day – before drinks and dinner and late night chats with my friend – the metro dropped me off at the Place du Trocadero and I’d duck into La Carette, where I usually had to wait for a seat. It didn’t matter – I was soaked to the skin and it was good to be inside, awaiting a hot drink. This tea salon is packed from the moment it opens to late at night. All day long, I craved the macaroons which (everyone talks about Laduree, but not me) I think are the best in Paris. My favorite is the salted caramel flavored one, with just the perfect combination of cream, crunch and chew. Another revelation was the cassis-voilet combination. Fruity and floral, as you might imagine. The stuff of dreams.

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After that, I strolled back to the apartment under the chestnuts that I remembered so well from my four years in Paris, another lifetime ago. Usually, I detoured to walk past my old building, the first place in France that I called home. I’m not sure how, but my feet just took me there.

March 5 2012

Lesson from One of the Greats

$\"\"$ Twelve or so years ago, I went to a friend’s anniversary party in downtown Manhattan and found myself seated next to the late, great Frank McCourt. He was delightful and captivating in every way – and very modest. He was also a neighbor of sorts up in Connecticut where he lived with his wife, and where I was about to relocate to, full time. It was the first I had met him, though I would do so on a couple more occasions up here before he died in 2009.

He may have asked me what I did for work, as most people do by way of icebreaking at a New York social gathering. That was an easy question before I became a full-time writer, when I was TV news producer – a job that was concrete and verifiable, the kind with a weekly paycheck. Although I have thousands of pages of unfinished stories aging in cardboard boxes, and now I try to write all day every day, it’s still hard to say, “I’m a writer,” as if I have yet to earn the right.

But of course, I didn’t need to ask Mr. McCourt what he did. Angela’s Ashes had won the author a Pulitzer Prize, and became – and maybe still is – the gold standard for memoir, which then, I think, we called autobiography. I had been staggered by the grace of this book – the hilarious and shattering depiction of his childhood. I asked him, “Do people ever say, “Now I know everything about you?” He smiled, hesitated and then said, quite seriously, “Nobody knows a single thing about me.”

I copied this exchange on an orange post-it, one of three that are stuck on the back of my desk printer. Now that I’m writing a memoir, I think often about his words. This – my – book can’t possibly be a window into me because honestly, who cares about that? What I hope it will reveal, though, is something that will read like a story, with or without my presence in the pages. Even on days when I’ve exposed more than seems right and proper, I am reminded – constantly – of my dinner chat with Frank McCourt. He couldn’t possibly have known that he was giving a future writer the best advice of her career.

January 2 2012

All is Calm

$\"\"$ For those of us who inhabit the planet of half empty, New Year’s Eve is usually a time for strong sentiment and more than a little regret. I could have worked harder, loved stronger, seen certain people more and thought of some other people less. I should have been more patient, productive, appreciative, understanding and true. I should have gossiped less and given more. I should have woken up earlier, and should not have watched four whole seasons of Breaking Bad in basically one sitting. I wish I hadn’t wasted time on things that didn’t deserve it, and that I’d spent more time on the causes and people who did. So that’s what this night is about, the wind-down, the gearing-up, the atonement to the imperfect self and the promises to those you love. It is about reflection and making the most of what’s ahead. After forty (okay, fifty), there simply is no other option.

When we’re young, New Year’s is a noisy, boisterous affair, an adventure that punctuates the year – both the one that’s over and the one that’s beginning. As if a dramatic entry and closure makes the life you are leading somehow more worth living. I’ve spent New Year’s Eve stumbling drunk, in love and out, nursing babies, fulfilled by work, depressed by bad luck, entangled in drama, soaring in love, surrounded by friends, bereft by loss, some years flush and others broke. I’ve stood frozen on Central Park West at 4 am, wearing a big shouldered, black velvet dress, sheer stockings, and a thin wrap, searching in vain for a cab while the champagne drained from my system. I’ve kissed too many strangers, my husband, my kids and my soul mates in Paris, twice in Marrakesh, Salzburg in 1988 and for years, New York. I’m lucky, so far, to have been alone only once on December 31, following a bad break up. But I was in the city, so I wrapped myself up in a parka and walked and walked, absorbing other people’s celebrations.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve been right here at home, in small-town New England. Three years ago, I was so undone by the bump I caused in my marriage that I went to bed sobbing, and greeted my family and 2009 with a red, swollen face and a silent assurance that I would begin to try to make things (myself) right again. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but since then, I haven’t hosted houseguests or New Year’s dinner at my home. I always loved the excitement and preparation, the meal, the company. Above is a photo of my table that night after all the guests had gone, because I also loved the dissipated lighting, the wrinkled linen, the empty bottles, the candles still burning. But that year, the morning after lasted for months.

Tonight, we’re going out, where we’ll eat well and drink even better. I’m almost ready to go. I’m wearing a top a dear friend gave me, loose and off the shoulder, more fancy than anything I’d buy for myself. I painted on some serious eyeliner and have put on a bit of jewelry – gold bangles, a friendship bracelet woven by my daughter, and a beaded one my son bought me in Mexico. All I need is my shoes, and Mark and I will leave the house for the last time in 2011. I recall the bustle in my house on New Years past, but for now, I like it calm like this. Here’s to 2012 – and hoping we read more, listen more too, but speak less and try not to deceive at all. May we make good on our promises and forgive ourselves if we don’t. Especially if it involves season 5 of Breaking Bad.

November 2 2011

Living History

$\"\"$ During a classroom visit at Parent’s Weekend at my daughter’s school, I was stunned and delighted to see the kids in freshman English reading Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece, Things Fall Apart. They were dissecting passages, underlining the various authorial devices, executing a critical read of this story about village life and British colonial rule in Nigeria. They looked upon the book as literature and language, as fourteen year-olds should do. But it’s the history contained in the narrative – the actual context – that made me want to read it again, after many years.

The day before Parent’s day, I had returned from two weeks in Rwanda. so Africa was very much on the jetlagged brain. It wasn’t my first trip there, but I went deep this time, and splurged on a driver (but not really hotels) to ferry me to all corners of the tiny country, while doing some consulting for a small and brave NGO. To prepare for my trip I re-read Adam Hochschild’s mindblowing book about the Belgian conquest/rape of the Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. It reads like a novel, but every word of it is true.

While in the town of Gisenyi, I walked the short distance to the Congo border, with the country’s brutal and sometimes incomprehensible history (so recently brought to life for me by Hochschild) in mind. I wanted to cross over to Goma for the afternoon, but the charge for a visa recently went up to $300. Cash. The volcano, Nyiragongo, hovers menacingly over the city it destroyed in 2002. At night, it’s even more beautiful and terrifying, as it glows red, spewing fire into the sky.

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The walk to the border provides lots of quaint architectural reminders of the region’s German, then Belgian-dominated past – rambling stucco or wood houses, all in European style. I don’t know who lives there now – Europeans, wealthy Rwandans, but they are quite beautiful, and well-preserved. It’s a country where 92 per cent of the population is Catholic or Protestant, and where most people in Kigali speak French. Colonial history lingers everywhere; it’s inescapable.

Days later, back home, while flipping through my daughter’s book in her classroom, I came across this passage, written in 1958 about characters in 1890’s Nigeria:

“We have heard stories about white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true.”

It’s still impossible to wrap the head around. – the mingling of such disparate cultures, the wholesale replacement of local sovereignty, the forced introduction of the Christian god. But it’s important to be reminded – in fiction and in non-fiction – of a history that, unless you’re in Africa, is often overlooked.