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I suppose it’s fitting that I would return to MHA on what proves, yet again, to be a snowy day in Denver.

It’s also anniversary time, two years and change since we started this blog. I read what I wrote a year ago, and it brought tears to my eyes. It’s sort of like reading a teenage diary entry written after being dumped three days before the prom (yes, that happened to me): You remember the pain, but that pain is no longer yours.
The money situation hasn’t improved appreciably, although my husband has a far better job now and our long-term prospects look much better. We still live in a land of seemingly endless winter, with spring a long way away, and I’m looking at another summer without my pond and my daylilies. But I have learned, as many do, that the only way to make it through that feeling of groundlessness is to look up. That transition was hard, of going from a life of convenience to a life with little, but I am stronger now. I am no longer traumatized or saddened by having to do without. There is something kind of restorative and (maybe death-defyingly) invigorating about knowing that, if we’re going to afford having constant bread for sandwiches, I’m just going to have to make it. Or that, rather than spending $15 a week on cereal, I can make it for a fraction of the cost. Or that, rather than throw out socks and buy less holey ones, I’m just going to have to learn to darn. People lived like this for years and years and years, and I can, too.
I’ve become an expert of sorts at this sort of basic frugality (or at least a cheerful enough proponent, I suppose), so much so that I have been invited to teach a workshop on it. I’m terrified – teaching is so completely out of my comfort zone – but at the same time, I’m kind of excited about it. This (along with the singing, which has continued) constitutes a new chapter of my life, and one that wouldn’t have come if we hadn’t left North Carolina and experienced some rather terrifying lean times.

We were back in North Carolina at the beginning of the month, and I was fine until I went to see an old friend on the last night we were there. She lives in North Raleigh, in the same house in the same nice, suburban neighborhood with the pool club and tennis courts, and my favorite house in the neighborhood was for sale. I drove past slowly, wondering, “Could we …?” before snapping to and remembering that, of course, we could not. And I felt sad that I could not live near her, and that our kids could not still play together and that we could not trick-or-treat together anymore; and at the same time I looked at this house, which looked too big, and this well-manicured neighborhood, and I thought, “I wanted THIS?” It is so far removed from the dreams I have now. It seemed too extravagant, too wasteful. I hadn’t realized how much I had changed, how much my circumstances had changed me, until I looked at the house I had always wanted and realized that I no longer wanted it.

Two Corrections

1. There are not 18 books in the Patrick O'Brian series about Aubrey and Maturin. I don't know how I got this idea. Actually there are 20, plus a 21st that was left not quite ready to go at the time of POB's unfortunate death. This means, since I have now finished the second book, that I have 18 books and change still to read. I have never been so happy to be wrong!

Monday, a dready day weatherwise, was enlivened by news from the Brooklyn Public Library that the third POB book, HMS Surprise, was waiting for me at my branch on the request shelf. I arrived there, returning Post Captain, and discovered to my surprise that it wasn't there. A mistake, the librarian said, looking into her computer. Should be here by the end of the week.

A tragic mistake. I had a long afternoon of riding the subway ahead of me -- to a meeting with my friend in the West Village, up to 116th Street to class, then back to Brooklyn to the dog, and back to work -- and the ghastly prospect of nothing to read, since I had come to the library with the hope of getting HMS Surprise, and left home with nothing but the book I had already read.

I ran upstairs in search of a quick solution, and left with Cousin Bette by Balzac. It's not bad. A famous novel I always meant to get around to reading. A logical choice in a way. Balzac, like POB, strove to create an entire world in his fiction, and to capture an age. It's amusing enough and yet it is leaving me cold, even as I read on to see what fresh mayhem Bette can wreak on the Hulots.

2. This is not really a correction. A clarification. Robin is OK. She has been having computer problems, which explains her mysterious silence. Details TK, as we say in the newspaper business.

Where is Robin?

Another minor mystery. No, actually it is major. Where is Robin?

Robin?

Are you there?

On a lighter note, I can't believe I went on the record on Jan. 25th complaining about Patrick O'Brian using too many nautical terms. It's Feb. 25th and I am 3/4 of the way through the second of the 18 books and am so happy, dizzy with delight, that I have this fictional realm to dwell in for 16.25 more books. There are so many good things to say about POB as a writer that I hardly know where to start. But perhaps with his extreme compression. He never explains anything twice. Sometimes he hardly explains it once. It is almost cinematic, without ever being cheesy. Consider this passage, a complete summary of Dr. Stephen Maturin's travels (presumably several weeks or more) as a spy in Spain:

Tides, tides, the Cove of Cork, the embarkation waiting on the moon, a tall swift-pacing mule in the bare torrid mountains quivering in the sun, palmetto-scrub, Senor don Estevan Maturin y Domanova kisses the feet of the very reverend Lord Abbot of Montserrat and begs the honor of an audience. The endless white road winding, the inhuman landscape of Aragon, cruel sun and weariness, dust, weariness to the heart and soul. What was independence but a word? What did any form of government matter? Freedom: to do what? Disgust, so strong that he leant against the saddle, hardly able to bring himself to mount. A shower on the Madadetta, and everywhere the scent of thyme: eagles wheeling under thunderclouds, rising, rising. 'My mind is too confused for anything but direct action,' he said. 'The flight disguised as an advance.'
The lonely beach, lanterns flashing from the offing, an infinity of sea. Ireland again, with such memories at every turn. 'If I could throw off some of this burden of memory, ' said Stephen to his second glass of laudanum, 'I should be more nearly sane. Here's to you, Villiers, my dear.' The Holyhead mail and two hundred seventy miles of rattling jerking, falling asleep, and waking in another county: rain, rain, rain: Welsh voices in the night. London and his report, trying to disentangle the strands of altruism, silliness, mere enthusiam. self-seeking, love of violence, personal resentment; trying to give the impossible plain answer to the question 'Is Spain going to join France against us, and if so, when?' Amd there he was in Deal once more, sitting alone in the snug of the Rose and Crown, watching the shipping in the Downs and drinking a cup of tea: he had an odd detachment from all this familiar scene -- the uniforms that passed outside his bow-window were intimately well known, but it was as though they belonged to another world, a world at one or two removes, as though their inhabitants, walking, laughing, and talking out there on the other side of the pane were mute, devoid of color and real substance.

A Minor Mystery

Ash Wednesday, and alternate-side parking regulations are suspended. Some people got the memo, and left their cars on the Wednesday side of the street. Some people did not, and parked on the other side, the side where normally you can park only on Wedesdays. Result: narrow 19th-century streets wedged tight with 21st-century cars on both sides, barely room enough to allow the street to fulfill its traditional role of being a passageway, not a parking lot. On one side, the windshields of each car bear the dreaded orange envelope containing a parking ticket.

And I have to wonder: There are a finite supply of cars in the world, on the Eastern Seaboard, in the New York metro area, in Brooklyn, in Brooklyn Heights, in my little corner of it. If all these cars are here, suddenly, the ones with drivers who didn't get the memo, where are they normally? Where are they not, today?

cold!

According to AccuWeather.com it is currently 16 degrees in my ZIP code. With wind chill factored in, 6 below. Robin would probably consider this a balmy evening in Colorado. Especially when you consider it is not snowing.

OK, it's winter. It's supposed to be cold. I should just get over it.

dreaming of the dead

Last night I dreamed I saw my dear friend Blair, dead these 10 years. We embraced and said nothing; there was nothing to say; all was forgiven. For what can we seek from the dead, except forgivneness? This dream has troubled me all day, and comforted me at the same time.