Snapshots of gratitude

On Nov. 1 (Will’s first birthday! Oh, still reveling in all this. And yes, his full name when he comes home will be William Jiho—I neglected to mention that in my last post), I noticed that a few friends on Facebook were starting a daily gratitude post for each day in November. I liked that idea, but I didn’t want to update my Facebook status every day. So I decided to keep a list in a notebook.

Of course, my life changed on Nov. 10, and suddenly I was overflowing with so much gratitude I could hardly see straight. But still, I kept up with the little ritual, and I’m so glad I did. It’s a snapshot of a month—who knew it would be the month everything shifted so amazingly?—and although I tend to be a person who’s usually mindful of her good fortune, I still appreciated the exercise of choosing one thing each night to record.

There are a few recurring themes in my list: Will, of course, and friendship, running, and sickness (it wasn’t my healthiest month). Also beer, apparently. Here it is:

11/1: I’m grateful that three of my editors are getting extremely well deserved promotions.

11/2: Grateful that Stella has grown to be able to enjoy and savor her walks! Gone is the super-spooky shy dog; now it’s all sniffing every blade of grass and greeting people with a waggy tail.

11/3: Grateful that my cold is almost gone and I’m able to run a fast three-miler again.

11/4: For the brilliant red and yellow trees that I walk under on my way to the train each morning.

11/5: For friendships that are 16 years old and counting!

11/6: For the discovery of new music—in this case, Milo Greene and the Civil Wars.

11/7: For being able to afford a doctor appointment and sinus infection meds, no sweat.

11/8: For living in a city where I can enjoy cultural events like the Chicago Manual of Style’s 100^th anniversary (editorial geeks unite!).

11/9: Grateful for a good friend with a shared ethnic heritage.

11/10: For Jiho. A thousand times over, for Jiho. [Picture lots of little stars doodled around this one…]

11/11: For early Friday nights, cozy in bed with a book (preferably one from the Game of Thrones series).

11/12: For a sweet peaceful day spent largely with John: errands in the neighborhood (the notary!), Old Town School of Folk Music, drinks and dinner out in Lakeview, sharing a tender new knowledge of a little baby boy living across the world.

11/13: For my son, William Jiho. [This was the day we spoke with the pediatrician who reviewed Will’s files and made our final decision.]

11/14: For the sunshine when I walked to the post office to mail our acceptance package to the agency.

11/15: For the tears shed and sincere joy expressed by my friends when I share the news with them. Feeling overwhelmed with the blessings of friendship and not sure I deserve so much of it…

11/16: For beer, mussels, frites, and a good friend to share them with.

11/17: For a run when you just feel strong and good—even on a treadmill.

11/18: Grateful for a cozy evening at home: guitar, beer, pizza, movie. Him and me.

11/19: Lots to be thankful for today: Sleeping in, ballet class, brunch with friends, artists at the DIY craft fair, the online adoption community, an Italian dinner with John and our favorite bottle of Chianti (which we discovered in Rome!). Also, we’re lucky to have lovely neighbors!

11/20: Grateful for having cousins who are also good friends.

11/21: Thankful that I have the ability and talent to write—working on our first letter to Will’s foster family.

11/22: For having a husband who enjoys—and is good at—cooking.

11/23: For wonderful, supportive, thoughtful and kind coworkers.

11/24: For two beautiful Thanksgiving feasts, for two families that are growing, for all of my relatives who are so genuinely excited about Will.

11/25: For yearly traditions with Mom: Hobby Lobby and lunch!

11/26: For my parents-in-law. I want to be them when I’m older.

11/27: For the glow of indoor Christmas lights.

11/28: For being able to walk to so many restaurants and shops from our home.

11/29: For medicine and our easy access to it.

11/30: For 10 terrific years (today!) in the big, beautiful, brawling and never boring city of Chicago.

What a month.

Just start writing

My friend Jessamyn, who is very wise about a great many things, suggested that I just start writing. “You don’t have to wait for a special event, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time editing what you write,” she said. “Just write.”

Of course, she’s right. And there have been so many times in the last eight months that I’ve thought about writing here. I don’t know why I haven’t, exactly. Only that the longer I didn’t write, the easier it was not to.

This year hasn’t brought much change to my little corner of the world. Still married to John, still living in our Chicago condo, still sharing that home with Moose, the nine-year-old greyhound who limps with arthritis every once in awhile but spent last Sunday tearing around the cold, windy beach like a puppy on speed, just to remind us that he isn’t that old.

Still on the fence about having a baby, and still overthinking it way too much. Still working the same job, but I was promoted to an editorial management position in the spring, so that’s brought a lot of change and challenge and a nifty new feeling of self-worth and accomplishment. Still Episcopalian, and still wondering sometimes, for a split second, whether Christianity might just be an immensely popular, elaborate, long-lived myth and whether agnosticism is the real way to go. (Despite that, still fairly involved in our church—helping out with meals for the homeless and editing the parish magazine.) Still loving photography and posting somewhat regularly on Flickr. Still fully committed to my moderately liberal views.

New things, besides the promotion: I ran four 5k’s this summer and achieved a personal best of 29:53, not too shabby for a 31-year-old. John and I traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, and to Sonoma and San Francisco—the latter being one of the best trips we’ve ever taken in terms of relaxation and food consumption. Speaking of food, I feel myself leaning more and more toward becoming a vegetarian, although I may be too lazy (see: eight months since I last updated this journal) to make the complete leap. I’m also trying to make small, environmentally friendly changes in my life: saying no to plastic bags, reusing sandwich baggies, cleaning with cloth rags rather than paper towels, buying organic fruits and veggies weekly from a local co-op.

I just submitted a poem for consideration in an anthology. I’ve been working on an essay.

So that’s where I am in November 2007, near the end of my 31st year. It’s a good place to be. My mind is full of work and family, politics and books, friends and neighborhood, and our upcoming trip to the Out Islands of the Bahamas, where we’ll meet up with my dear friend Rachael and her husband, Tim. They’ve sold their house and quit their jobs, and they’re spending a year living on a sailboat, traveling down the East Coast and into the Caribbean. I’m incredibly excited to try on their strange new lives for a few days, to feel what it’s like to be moving, always moving—from marina to marina, town to town, island to island, always following the dip and sway of the water. They remind me that anything is always possible.

I like imagining

I could write about how cold it is here. That’s boring to read. But it’s been influencing how I go about my days, what I wear to work, how long Moose’s walks are, which errands are essential to run during lunchtime (answer: not many). The predicted highs for this weekend are less than 10 degrees.

I could write about how after three months away from this journal, my first entry starts with a weather anecdote. But if that’s what made me start typing on a blank screen, who am I to judge?

I could write about how John is definitely ready to become a parent. But I already think about it every day; frankly, the idea of writing about the weather is preferable.

So many times in the past three months, I’ve thought to myself, I should write about this in the journal. This is what the first line would be. But then I don’t do it, and I don’t know why. I suspect it’s laziness—that blend of lethargy and procrastination tinged with fear that all writers face. I know I need to sit down and write, but these plants need to be watered first. Then I need to floss.

A few weeks ago, while walking with John, Moose stepped on a piece of glass in our alley and sliced open his paw pad. Blood everywhere, a limping dog, both of us freaking out. Hydrogen peroxide, a hastily made bandage, a trip to the vet. Everything was fine, no infection or stitches, but the cut took forever to heal—he still limps if he steps in road salt or snow—and John left for a four-night work trip a few days after the incident. It is not fun changing a greyhound’s paw-bandage every day, taping a plastic bag over it to keep it dry in the snow. That was a long week.

I am trying to eat better, more healthily. I know; aren’t we all? I ate a lot of cookies during Christmastime. But I did pretty well in January—more vegetables, smaller portions. I need more protein, fewer sweets, fewer calories. I need to work out five days a week. I know my body will change with age, but I also know the risk factors for heart disease, and the amount of control I can have over my own health. I turned 31 last weekend. (I actually feel pretty darn good about that.)

A new storefront restaurant recently opened in our neighborhood, Indian-Pakistani cuisine. We went there for a Sunday-night meal with our neighbors and their two-year-old, whose nickname is Sly. It was an early meal—see mention of two-year-old—and Sly was more interested in running around the restaurant than eating. Luckily, we were the only ones there except for a large extended family celebrating a birthday. They were Indian, I think Muslim. Their group included some gradeschool-age girls, and Sly was fascinated with them. The kids played together, skipping around the room and giggling, while the adults ate samosas and lamb and naan and other amazingly tasty and cheap food. At the end of our meal, the Muslim family had the waiter give us a huge slice of their birthday cake. And all of us—Christian, Jewish, Muslim—dug in to the pink-and-white confection and smiled at the kids hopping back and forth between tables. Now, whenever I feel hopeless after reading front-page headlines, I remember that.

About a month and a half ago, right before Christmas, I received a letter in the mail from an address in Washington D.C. It was from the Spanish consulate there, and they were forwarding on a letter from the American embassy in Barcelona—returning my stolen driver’s license. There I was, 25 years old, pink scarf, eyes half-closed, none the worse for wear. Where has this card been since October 1? Who took it, and how did it get to the embassy? Did the police find it? A sympathetic Spaniard? A fellow American traveler? I’ll never know. But I like imagining.

President Bush flies over my dinner table, and other updates

Last night I had dinner with my friend Mandy at Taste of Heaven, a charming little café and bakery in our neighborhood that has fresh, cheap sandwiches, leafy outdoor seating, and giant frosted cupcakes (as well as perfectly reasonable expectations for diners with children in tow that blew up all over the national news recently). We were sitting outside, enjoying our half-sandwiches and pasta salads, when our conversation was drowned out by the harsh blop-blopping of eight helicopters that appeared over the horizon and flew over us, heading west. “It’s the president!” Mandy said. “He’s here today in Chicago. I just saw it on the news.” Dubya? Here in Chicago, my beloved liberal bastion of liberalness? He doesn’t come here that often. But he graced us with his presence yesterday, buddying up with Mayor Daley and celebrating his sixtieth birthday downtown. And interrupting my dinner.

*****

So apparently I have a master’s degree in writing. A master’s degree! I graduated in June after four long years of classes—classes that I really did enjoy (well, mostly—we won’t speak of Classical Rhetoric here), taking only one a quarter instead of two so as not to give myself a stress-induced heart attack and become estranged from my family. It seems like a long time ago that I was 26, newly arrived in this city and mulling over the possibility of grad school. I wrote a journal entry about making that decision, but it was lost when Diary-X gave up the ghost. Suffice it to say, it was a big decision and one that I doubt I’ll ever regret. Jobs aren’t plentiful in the editing/publishing field, so anything that increases my marketability is a big plus.

It’s funny—people keep asking me, “Wow, so now that you’ve graduated, what are you going to do?” I mean, co-workers have asked me this. As if I’m going to retreat to some private island in the Florida Keys and get started on my great American novel. I usually reply, “Uh… keep working here?” I like my job; I’m not looking for anything else right now. Although it’s true, there is a sense of “What next?” after finishing something so monumental. (My mother’s answer to that question, it turns out, is “procreate.”)

It turns out that the first thing I did with my degree saved us $150. After returning from a weekend in Michigan last month, John and I parked for a few minutes in our alley to unload the car (our building doesn’t have a parking lot, and there was no street parking available). After one of our arm-laden trips up to our condo, we returned to find a cop writing us a ticket for $150 for blocking the alley. No horn honking, no warning, no mercy. I immediately contested it, composing a clear, straightforward, persuasive letter—even using bullet points to enumerate all the reasons that ticket was bullshit. And what do you know, it worked! The ticket was revoked. We celebrated by taking a neighbor out for her birthday and spending $165 on dinner.

*****

We’re heading out east for vacation soon, spending a few days in Manhattan and then a few in the Pocono Mountains. There we’ll stay with my parents, my sister, and her husband in the same cabin where my family vacationed every year until I was 18. That was the year we left Pennsylvania for Michigan, and I haven’t been back to the Poconos since.

I’m excited about this trip—the mix of city and mountains, the combination of tripping around NYC in heels and oversized sunglasses and hiking Bushkill Falls in cargo shorts and running shoes. Eating at the Shake Shack, fishing with my dad, exploring Central Park, breathing in the cool, clean mountain air… being transported back to all those late Augusts in the cabin: listening to Monkee records on my portable player and delving into a pile of Babysitter Club books; hoping, with my sister, to stumble upon a bear when we took our after-dinner walks with our parents; swimming in the cold blue lake up the road; always coming in third when the four of us played miniature golf… my heart kinda swells at the mere mention of all that. Manhattan will be fast-paced and dirty and eye-opening and glamorous; the Poconos will be a clean slice of simple pleasure with a generous side of nostalgia. I can’t wait.

Take II

So this is my second online journal.

The first one, also called The Purple of Life, lived at http://strass.diary-x.com. Diary-X crashed and burned rather spectacularly in February 2006 and has gone to the great server cemetery in the sky, where it maintains a death grip on about one-third of the entries I wrote between March 2002 and December 2005. The other two-thirds, luckily, were cached on Yahoo and preserved on the Internet Wayback Machine, for which I am profoundly grateful. You see, in almost four years of writing, I had never bothered to back up my online journal. And yes, I’ve learned my lesson. (If you’re looking for my recovered Diary-X archives, I’m planning to place them on this new site. I just need to figure out how to organize them.)

I’ve landed at Blogger for a few reasons: one, it’s easy to post entries and photos here, and two, it’s a reliable site that’s been around for awhile and only seems to be improving. I don’t know much about coding and html, and frankly, I’m not all that interested in learning. So the simplicity of the site is a plus. And actually, I don’t intend to post entries in a “blog” format—you won’t find quippy two-line entries about what I ate for lunch or my reaction to the latest episode of The Daily Show. I’m not looking to amass hundreds of comments from readers, although of course I’d love to hear from you! My plan is to keep my old format of long-ish, essay-ish, journal-ish pieces of writing. (But I do hope to write more frequently than once a month—sadly, I was pretty lazy about posting during my last few months at Diary-X.)

If you’re brand-new to The Purple of Life, you should know that purple isn’t my favorite color. The expression actually comes from an amazingly wise woman and writer who taught creative nonfiction workshops at my alma mater. I adored Nancy N. and her work. She wrote about dying silk to make her own wedding dress and about riding a train through wintertime Russia and about life-changing notes left on kitchen tables, and I sort of worshipped her, truth be told. Soon after I graduated from college, she sent me an email that ended with this guidance: “Hold on to the purple in your life.” And I knew exactly what she meant, even though I’d never heard the expression before. That purple is the richness, the shadow, the mystery, the beauty and the bruises, the deep, dark, dusky places of life. It’s a candle in an Advent wreath, a juicy summer plum, a Kool-Aid mustache above a child’s lip, a queen’s velvet robe, the color that I wished my bedroom was when I was young. It’s what I find when I remember to keep my eyes open, and it’s what I want to write about.

Tax Day, and catching up

Originally posted on Diary-X

From now until January 2005, my husband will get home from work before six o’clock, not after nine o’clock. He will sleep in with me on Saturdays, and we’ll make scrambled eggs and coffee and read the paper together. O happy, blessed Tax Day! This time of year, the end of tax season, always feels like the start of my summer. Later sunsets, warmer weather, and someone to grill me a chicken breast. Life is good.

So last week was Holy Week, and…

…John, who suffers from pretty bad heartburn, had an endoscopy, which went fine (or as well as things can go when you’re sedated and have multiple tubes snaking down your throat). John has no ulcers to speak of, so the doctor’s just going to up his heartburn medicine. He also commended us for placing cement blocks under the head of our bed—apparently this is a great way to combat heartburn. I’m getting used to slowly sliding down the bed as I sleep, waking up with my feet dangling off the bottom. Oh, the sacrifices one must make in a marriage…

…I started my spring class, a poetry writing workshop. And I don’t think I’m the worst poet in the room. (This is the kind of thing I worry about, tiresome perfectionist that I am.) I’ve taken many a fiction writing workshop, but never poetry, so I jumped at the chance to learn the craft. For my first poem, I wrote about Moose. I know, I know: isn’t that something a crazy dog lady would do? But I didn’t want to share deep dark family secrets or embarrassing emotional stuff right off the bat—I hardly know these people. I was actually proud of my work (it’s not a sappy, I’m-a-freak-about-my-dog kind of thing). I’m debating whether or not to post it here. Not sure yet…

…I went to my first neighborhood block club meeting. It was held in an old Jewish synagogue. There were about twenty people in attendance—a few white yuppies, an Indian guy, a Vietnamese guy, a black guy, an older white woman, an older gay man, a grizzled guy with a long ponytail who took copious notes, and a blue-haired dogwalker wearing biker half-gloves on his hands. It was a good feeling to be there; it gave me a sense of community. And I also enjoyed being inside the synagogue, looking at the Hebrew carvings, reading the announcements for Passover events. I just finished the book Girl Meets God, so I felt like I had some understanding of what takes place in a Jewish house of worship. (I recommend that book, by the way. It’s so refreshing to read intelligent spiritual writing that’s not all touchy-feely, syrupy evangelistic stuff—and that doesn’t have an axe to grind. The author is very real, very human, and not sanctimonious at all.)…

…I went to our church’s Good Friday service alone and knelt in the darkened sanctuary, listening to the story of the Passion and, as I do every year, trying to understand the magnitude of what I profess to believe. Then, less than 48 hours later, we celebrated Easter, incense and fancy hats and smiles and alleluias and an embarrassing moment in which I actually teared up during the hymn “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” and had to stop singing and bite the inside of my cheek in an effort to compose myself. I have no idea why that happened…

…the pigeons had babies. The three of them are mashed together in the nest, ungainly and matted with scrawny necks and big black eyes. Their mother keeps a careful eye on them from the rooftop next door. I’m tempted to walk up to the nest for a close look, but then I picture Momma Pigeon swooping in and clawing at my eyes, so I keep my distance. (She's somewhat evil looking—charcoal gray, with those glittery red pigeon eyes.) A few weeks ago I wished the pigeons were perched over our door instead of our neighbor’s, but now that I see the tributaries of bird poop running down her screen door, I’ve changed my mind…

…while I was walking Moose one afternoon, we passed a scruffy-looking man on the sidewalk who paused to ask this question: “Have you ever eaten dog meat?” When I replied that I hadn’t, half-amused and half-horrified, he kept on walking. These are the times when I’m grateful Moose doesn’t understand much English beyond "dinner" and his own name.