More things that are helping
First, quickly:
This fall I had the great fortune of taking part in a series of conversations at Seattle Public Library about female middle age. The three-part series, called “Midlife: Private Parts in Public,” was curated by the brilliant
and featured a staggering line-up of writers and artists and experts: Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, the world’s first human composting company; writer Jane Wong; writer Claire Dederer; Dr. Deborah Giles, an expert on Southern Resident orca whales; author and journalist Putsata Reang; and poet and teacher Laura Da’. Katrina and I led a book-group-style discussion of ’s All Fours, and it happened to fall on November 7, just 48 hours after the election. Miracle of miracles, we still managed to have a very good time. Thank you x a million for including me, Angela.The last of the events was this past week, but they’re all available (or will be shortly) on SPL’s YouTube channel. Here’s the All Fours one, for starters:
(Unfortunately the mic didn’t pick up the laughter of the audience, so please use your imagination generously.)
My friend Ben visited from Memphis in late September, passing through Seattle on his way to a work conference in Salem, Oregon. We did what we do whenever he comes to town: eat and take walks. On one of the latter, we paused to read a memorial plaque on a park bench we passed, and Ben pulled out his phone to show me a different memorial bench he’d run across a few days earlier, in Vancouver, and had appreciated enough to take a photo:
What a delightful collision of hobbies Flo had. Can you even imagine how much someone’s got to love fireworks for it to be mentioned on their park-bench memorial plaque? Flo must have been absolutely bonkers for them. Of course Ben and I then had to brainstorm what might go on our plaques, should our loved ones choose to remember us with something so generous as a bench. I will not share Ben’s, since he might want to keep it a surprise for the people of the future who stroll past it. But I decided that mine should say:
MARGARET L. (MOLLY) WIZENBERG 1978-____
SHE LOVED PEANUT BUTTER, THE RUN-UP TO CHRISTMAS (BUT NOT SO MUCH CHRISTMAS DAY), AND ALONE-TIME.
(Based on the third list item above, I shall let my loved ones decide if I will be missed.)
I say all this because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the run-up to Christmas, and why I love it. It’s not that it’s a purely joyful time, because it is not. And that’s what I like so much: the extremely varied soup of emotion the holidays serve up, the way all the joys and traditions cannot be separated from the losses we’ve accumulated, the mourning, the wishing.
This song, if it’s helpful, is exactly what the soup sounds like:
I want to add that I don’t have anything against Christmas Day. It’s just not the part I like. The run-up to Christmas is all about anticipation — anticipation and reflection, which often look to me like twins, the two virtually indistinguishable. Christmas Day is their culmination, and it’s inevitable, I guess. But is fulfillment ever as pleasurable as anticipation? Maybe for other people. I’m Team Anticipation, always have been.
That said, I am finding it difficult to muster this year. I am tired. I know I’m not the only one. I hope it’s temporary. I’m telling myself it’s temporary. I’ve got a memorial plaque to live into, for gods’ sake.
Still, I’ve managed to do most of what I usually do. We got a tree, even hauled ourselves and the dog out to cut it down ourselves. I’ve made Russian Tea Cakes (but for eating, not giving) and (so far just the dough for)
’s Biberle, and I have my eye on a batch of toffee. I am semi-enjoying picking out and/or making a few gifts. Typing this out, it sounds like plenty. But I’ve been trudging through it, and mostly only for June’s sake: being my child, she too loves the run-up. And I am indoctrinating Ames, too, feeding him a steady diet of John Denver and The Muppets.My parents had it on vinyl when I was a kid, and nothing else has quite the same effect on me — or, so far, on Ames, who goes from hanging on my legs and whining to playing contentedly with his beloved bike helmet (“HEM-ET!”) as soon as he hears John Denver’s voice. Ames has no idea who Beaker is, but he can tell it’s pure genius when Beaker joins the chorus in the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”
December! It goes by so fast, and there are so many feelings to feel! If you need to let some emotion out through your eyeballs, Rowlf the Dog singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” somehow left me weeping while folding a load of laundry last week. And “The Peace Carol”! Omg sobbing.
Another thing that I have savored recently, in the soup of this year’s end: an essay that I found somewhere, can’t remember where, called “A unified theory of fucks,” by Mandy Brown. Please read the whole thing. In short, it’s about the notion of giving a fuck, and how and to whom we should do so:
[I]f you give your fucks to the unliving — if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates — you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into the bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft. You will realize the loss of something you did not know you ever had. But if you give a fuck about the living, about all your living kin in all the kingdoms, they will give a fuck right back.
Finally, I leave you with a poem I found somewhere, can’t remember where I got this one either, but I was moved enough to print it and tape it to our bathroom mirror:
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.
Happy holidays, however they find you. May the last few days of the year bring a lot of what you love — fireworks, maybe! We’ve got so much work ahead of us in 2025. I’ll see you then.
Always,
M.
P.S. Would LOVE to know what would go on your memorial plaque.
“She was the luckiest person she knew.”
I've been feeling pretty much the same way. It's such a complicated soup, and gets moreso every year.
My memorial plaque should probably be:
She loved growing things, petting cats and wandering around.