But only at writing, really. It’s been a bit busy lately on the home front. Work deadlines, a tiny health scare and the subsequent medical bills (it’s all okay now, but it was a pretty stressful month), and the impending entrance of Harry into Kindergarten have combined to form the perfect storm of mental exhaustion.

You know your life has gotten too complicated when you really crave a vacation that entails cleaning your house and sitting quietly in a darkened room with knitting needles and a book on tape. Exotic locations sound like just a wee bit too much work and excitement right now.

Not that I would turn down such a vacation if it dropped free into my lap, mind you.

I had summer for lunch yesterday and it was juicy and wonderful – tomato bruschetta made with heirloom “black” tomatoes, fresh garlic and basil and a sprinkling of salty feta.  For dessert, an Arkansas peach, so juicy that it ran down my fingers and arm to my elbow and I had to finish it over the trash can in my office.  I can still smell the sunny peach smell from the pit.  It still lay in the bottom of the can, under the napkins, reminding me that it is still hot and bright outside while I sit in my cold air-conditioned office.

When I get home I will peel peaches and slice them and dust them with a bit of sugar and put them down into the dark cold of my freezer and save them against the dark winter.  I will have peach sauce for my Christmas ham and peach and blueberry crisp for Valentine’s Day.

The summer heat is particularly brutal this year.   Today, as I sit in my office, the temperature outside is 106°F.  Yesterday we broke the record set over 20 years ago for that date.   It is too hot to even make swimming a desirable activity, and we cower in the shade our house with the curtains drawn and the fans running.   Even the brief walk across the grocery store parking lot is an endurance test, the waves of heat from the black pavement almost tangible in their ferocity.

I remember summers in New York as a child as a lazy time spent entirely out-of-doors.  We eagerly waited until the temperature hit the magic 70°F – the temperature deemed sufficiently warm to be allowed in the swimming pool.  After years in the South, I am still wearing light jackets at 70°F, and the thought of swimming in that weather is nearly incomprehensible.  But when your average summer temperature hovers in the high seventies, and 85°F is a heat wave, your perspective is somewhat different than when you live in a region where anything below 90°F is positively balmy.   This may be why New York is apple and grape country.   Peaches, really good peaches, need a little more heat.

I think I am definitely more of an apple than a peach.  The heat wilts me, and when I lived in New Orleans I asked native Louisianans how they could stand it.  The response?

We turn down our air conditioner.

And pass the peaches.

I have a lot of hair.  At least, for the most part, it stays on my head, which at an age where the hair starts thinning on our heads, and growing everywhere else we don’t want it to, I suppose I should shut up and be grateful.  But when I say a lot, I mean A LOT.  It’s thick, and wavy and heavy and it has a mind of its own. It took me until I was over 40 years old to figure out that maybe it’s just best to leave my hair to professionals.  Real, bonafide expensive stylists at real salons who know what they hell they are doing with the scissors.  It now takes an hour to cut and style my hair.  Back before I resisted the temptation to layer it, it took less than ten minutes to tidy up the ends, because I wore it at one length to my waist.  Now it is layered and blown and smoothed and straightened.  All to give that casual windblown “I just got out of my Jaguar convertible” look.

But I am a complete piker in comparison to my grandmother.  She was of the generation that had her hair “set”.  Twice a week she went in to be washed and teased and sprayed and it was definitely NOT designed to look effortless.  She wore her towering hairdo like a badge of honor.  She was a woman who could afford to be “done” and it should, by golly, look like she had been.  I remember going with her, sitting in the waiting chairs with a “Highlights” magazine, amidst the smell of perm solution and a haze of “Adorn” hairspray, waiting for her to emerge from under the giant bonnet hairdryers, a mountain of curlers on her head like so many spiked caterpillars.  I wince when I think of the times she sat, cigarette dangling from between perfectly lacquered nails, while she was sprayed down, holding the little face shield in her offhand.  It’s amazing she never lit the stream of hairspray on fire like a blowtorch.

My grandmother never went to bed without a open-top turban on her head, and she slept only on satin pillowcases.  That seemed so exotic to the younger me, the one that napped on her bed, with my cheek against the cool slick pillow, inhaling the smell of her face lotion.

It wasn’t until I was in middle age myself that I understood the salon thing.  For most of my life it was a giant waste of time, a scheduling nightmare done out of necessity.  I deliberately picked a career that didn’t require a polished look until I hit managerial status.   But a flexible schedule and a late need to dress and act like an adult (staved off until over 40) finally led me to appreciate the intangible joys of a salon, a real salon.

It is to be fussed over.

For one hour, I get an entire staff dedicated to making me feel good about myself.  The shampooist massages conditioner into my hair, and I can almost feel the tenseness wash down the drain with the rinse water.  As my stylist runs her hands through my hair we chat.  About nothing at all.  The weather.  The construction on the highway.  My child’s new school.  The song playing on the satellite radio feed.  They dress my hair with fantastic smells.   They bring me coffee and bottled water.  They touch up my makeup when I am done.  No pressure, no demands.

I pay for a premium salon, but believe me, for that hour it’s a bargain.  It’s a far sight less than I would pay a therapist and I come out feeling 100X better and my mascara is intact.  I tip well – REALLY well.

It’s something my factory-working grandmother didn’t need an office and a college degree to figure out.

I think, next week, I will schedule that manicure.

And maybe buy a couple satin pillowcases.

I stopped sitting in window seats on the airplane long ago.   One of the downsides of frequent business travel is that travel itself becomes more a focus on the destination and less about the journey. Like many pleasures that ultimately become your job, thing get routine and the lustre wears off.  After getting that hard-won elite status on a major airline, I am pretty much always guaranteed an aisle seat near the front of the plane, and since it is one of the few times that I can enjoy uninterrupted and guilt-free knitting sessions, I tend to put the earphones in, pull out the project bag, and don’t look up until we are well into the descent.

Recently, a site visit to a facility out west resulted in circumstances that forced me on to an airline I do not normally fly with.  No priority boarding or seating for me (I can hear your tiny hearts breaking for me, I really can).  I ended up mid-plane, sandwiched against the wall in a window seat just in front of the wing.  I was overtired and eyestrain and arthritis forced me to put my knitting away,  and my gaze fell outside and down.

There is so much of the country that passes unnoticed beneath me as I travel.  From heights too high to see houses, even in miniature, I used to watch the spiderweb patterns of roads and crop fields as I passed and my imagination built lives around that patchwork evidence of activity.   I watch the Rocky Mountains pass below me and I let my mind wander through pine passes, as I had done on family trips as a child, and I just wondered.   Below me,  it looked like the spine of the world, and my mind tried to grasp the scale of the Himalayas by comparison:

On the way home, I left my knitting and my books deliberately and let the tapestry of the world roll by beneath me and the drama of living play out in my head.  A forest fire outside of Albuquerque made me think of my great aunt, who spent the years of her life there, and who I never visited there even though she lived to be almost 100:

And the Grand Canyon,  where I inadvertently spent three days as a child when our truck broke down.  I never took a mule ride to the bottom.  It’s been on my to-do-before-I-die list ever since:

It look so much smaller from the air.  I remember standing at the rim as a child, and looking outward forever, feeling like I was suspended at the very edge of the world.

I guess, in a way, I was.

When we turn and we look beyond, and across, and away, we are standing at the outer edge of the world, no matter where we are.  There are always endless possibilities stretching out in front of us.

We only have to raise up our eyes.

As I mentioned earlier, I had a sit-down talk with myself about the future of this blog, and whether or not to renew my domain name. It ended up begin decided for me by the autorenew feature with the hosting company.

I have not been writing. (Yes. I am a black-belt master of the subtle art of stating the obvious.) I have been horribly overworked, on the road far, far too much, and a little at odds about where to take this little site.

In short, I have been a bit too busy living my life to have any kind of coherent commentary on it. Which has its own sadness. I think that I have been so overwhelmed that I have drifted through the last year or two on autopilot, without any time for appreciating the experience.  There are some writers that use the virtual world of their own creation as a substitute for genuine living.   But I think, like most, I use writing as an outlet for prolonging a moment in time and exploring, not so much the literal experience, but the truth hidden underneath it.   I think that without that outlet I have cut myself adrift, and I would like to return to it.

But my current lifestyle means I can no longer leave myself the luxury of unstructured writing if I am going to keep doing it.  I think I need to start giving myself underpinnings if I am going to keep disciplined enough to write every day.  I am just starting to form ideas about what that framework is going to be.

I also need to stop thinking about the readers.   Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate every one of you out there who bother to come by and spend any amount of your precious time reading what small coherences I manage to put out.  But too many times, I spent time crafting things that other people want to read – and not necessarily what I want to write.  It had started to suck the fun right out of it.  I find that I write best if I just simply sit, without a target audience in mind, and write.    Not that there isn’t refinement and rearrangement, but the initial structure of each thing I write is a creature unto itself.  It builds itself and pulls its first breath as I pour out words upon a page, and then the sculpting of the fine features comes later (or not at all, as I am inclined – sometimes I just abandon the poor hapless things).  I need to find my voice again, and not take on the one that I think everyone else expects to see.

To bring this long, rambling, monologue to a point, I am back.   I hope.  I really just need to be.

Harry: I want a Lego Star Wars Birthday Party.

Mommy: You do? Well I will have to look into that.

Harry: Just log on to www dot lego star wars dot com forward slash birthday party.

Mommy: Um.  Did you see that on TV?

Harry: No. That’s just the way it works.

… the more they stay the same.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

~ Robert Kennedy, 1968

I was 4 years old.  The age my son is now.

I reached a crux with this blog where I had to decide whether or not to renew my domain name and hosting package.  Ultimately the damned aut0-renew made the decision for me (my budget, it hurts!), but my commitment to writing, unfortunately, has not been on autorenew. I have read in several place that blogs are going the way of the dinosaur, that Twitter and Facebook have taken over as the new norm, and that nobody really wants to take the time to read a blog anymore. That makes me sad and somewhat alarmed.  We have become such a soundbite nation that I fear we have been overtaken with a collective attack of attention deficit.  I don’t think it serves us very well.  Looking at snapshots leads to snap decisions, which are rarely very good ones.  I don’t think that mindfulness should ever go out of fashion. I think that slowing down to collect my thoughts was a useful exercise for me, and I don’t think my one-year attack of ennui has done me any favors, either.

But I have lost my muse to a certain extent.  Depression is only partly to blame for that, but I think the other part is I was feeling increasingly slotted into the Mommyblogger pigeonhole.  In and of itself, this does not bother me, this categorization.  I did 25 reproductive years as not-a-mommy, so I find this curious, this sudden drop into the bottomless pit of mommy-identity.   The most eloquent writers I know writing in the medium (and I refuse to use blogosphere, it annoys me), are moms, writing about their kids and about being moms.  No, it bothers me only because I find my concerns and thoughts on motherhood and my son increasingly disconnected from those of my peers.

I do not worry about my son’s mental health, or developmental states.  When he has red days, I don’t really see it as anything more than a phase.  He’s going to the public school he’s districted to go into, and I don’t really worry if it will ultimately get him into Harvard.  Mostly, really, I simply celebrate him BEING.  I celebrate the entire little person, with his individual quirks, that are just a part of  his about-to-turn-five personality and are no sign of anything bigger.  I am simply grateful that I was able to make his acquaintance.

This is not to say I do not have fears for his future and well being.  I do.  There are times when I lay awake at night, and I wonder what the hell kind of world I am leaving him.  I worry about methane levels above the Artic Circle.  I worry about dead zones off the Gulf and Pacific Coast.  I worry about islands disappearing into the sea, and animals that will cease to exist.  I worry about our utter and complete dependence on fossil fuel.

In short, I worry about the things I can do so very little about.  But the things within my control?  Well.   I just trust myself to make the best decisions I can with the information I have.    It’s gotten me this far.

This realization, that my worries and my attitudes about parenting are so very diametrically opposed to those of my peers has stricken me rather speechless.  I just don’t know that I have anything people ultimately want to read,  or that speaks to them in any way at all.   I have no greater wisdom, no advice, and surprisingly little angst about parenthood.   We are all just making shit up as we go along in a giant experiment where there are no do-overs, and yet, we produce surprisingly few serial killers.

I am beginning to suspect that my standards may be a bit low.  At the end of the day, if we are all still alive and can laugh about it, my job is done.

I can live with that.

The Dark Side might have Cookies.

But the Light Side has…

…Elevators.

Just ask Harry. The current foremost expert on all things Star Wars.

I have NO IDEA where he gets this.