love

Post #69: In Love

Cindy Frank memory, middle-age, musings, personal philosophy, Uncategorized , ,

IMG_0642IN LOVE

I don’t know the source.  I don’t know where it ends.  But it’s there, it’s always there,  wide and deep and churning.   Running as ever through the center of everything. Be brave, deep breath! I close my eyes and leap and all of a sudden the shock of wet cold presses tight against me, covering me, constricting me. I’m going down.  Once again in way way over my head.

But in another moment I am swept into the flow and somehow lifted aloft, onward and onward, flowing onward with the river itself.   The water prickles and plinks against my skin like the plucked double strings of a mandolin.   I am at the same moment woozy and deliciously alert, euphorically breathless yet breathing anew. In love.

***

The Love You Gratefully Accept

Windows cranked down, my Dad’s  arm is resting jauntily on the sill, the breeze rippling his shirtsleeves, skewing his tie. A lefty, he wears his watch on his right wrist, turned inward.  Me too.  With the casual cool of a suburban Marlboro Man, he gently pinches the steering wheel between his thumb and forefinger steering by degrees.  No matter the potholes, the road smoothly undulates before him. No one drives better.  I am where I always dream of being. Right in the front seat next to him.

The moment I’ve been waiting for. I have his complete attention.  I have absolutely no idea what to say.

The silence in the car is thickening.   Then very casually, he reaches over and taps my knee.  There’s a pause.  Then a grin.   “Did you know that I love you?” he asks.

I did.  And I do.

***

The Love That Chooses You

They say it all, all  the time!  “Love ya!” “Smootches!”  “Hugs and kisses!’  XOXOX!  “I do I do I do!”   You do?  The words tumbling and turning,  rolling and rumbling along, a casual cascade.   A flippant quip, we  toss the words around like popcorn, gobbling them up, never quite getting our fill.  It don’t mean a thing.  And then?  One casual hug  unexpectedly zings—and then suddenly it does.

***

The Love You Choose 

The lamplight glints off his horn-rimmed glasses, gleams from his cufflinks, glows from the shine of his shoes.

We had been to the theatre. The dinner was done.  Just us, a city street corner.  I was frightened.  He was—he is—so very tall. But even so,  I reached up just  at the same moment he reached down. That is all it took.  We met, just as we were meant to meet, right in the middle.  And as we stretched towards each other, the evening itself, sweet as salt water taffy, seemed to stretch forward as well.

The Love Beyond Words

We looked out the window into the darkening evening and there she was. Shivering, hungry, alone. The snow was deep and it was so very cold.   No one, no creature,  should have been outside like that   But she was.

But not for long. We scooped her and wrapped her, and cuddled and coddled her.  Elegant and etherial, our princess of a cat, our little Annie Rose.

*Found!  After searching for days when she crawled through the vent in the heating system.

*She stroked my face in the night, sometimes even retracting her claws.

*The tiniest cheerleader for our team of boys.

She is so delicate, so frail now.

As always, I try but I can’t say it.  There is always a catch in my throat.  Alone, I practice sometimes, saying the words over and over to myself, like a mantra, a dirge. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” 

Believe me, I do.  Even if I can’t say it properly,  I do.

I look into her eyes. Does she know?  She knows.

Post #67: The Mandelbrot

Cindy Frank memory, middle-age, musings, Uncategorized , , ,

FullSizeRenderWe hoarded them. We dreamed about them. We craved them.

All three of us were derumpled from our languorously dreamy Sunday afternoon. Candyland, Scrabble, and Monopoly mixed together and shoved  messily back into their boxes. Smudged faces hastily wiped clean with a wet washcloth.

Why do we have to get dressed up?  Because.

One of us has to be in the middle.  Through the car window we watch the linked telephone poles guiding us, rhythmically  moving us forward, further and further down the road.  Almost there!   On our knees we turn to look through the back window of the car. We’ve been waiting for it!  At last we look up.

A cathedral of elms links their arms together in verdant welcome,  arching over Lauder Avenue, the light tipping tenderly in and out of the shadows, Sainte-Chapelle itself on the streets of Detroit.

At last and then we were there.  Grandma and Papa’s house.

A run up the staircase—a Wide World of Sports slide down again on our stomachs, dipping sharp to our left just at the landing. Over and over. Like the rusty hinges on the vault of Croesus, the refrigerator door creaks open.  Bottle after bottle of pop emerges!  Pry off the caps and slurp straight from the bottle. 

A tableclothed and proudly arrayed dinner of roasts and fricassees and loaves holding their breath, awaiting the requisite slicing.   A tiny, solitary dish of Birds Eye mixed vegetables, isolated, untouched, alone.

Papa is there, enthroned in his armchair, munching the heart of the lettuce, saved specially for him.  Lawrence Welk  bubbles onto the screen in the living room, just behind the Geritol ad, delighted as always to introduce, “The lovely little Lennon girls.”

Too soon, time to go.   Anxiously, from the depths of the kitchen, my Grandma Anne emerges, clutching the chock full tins that she pushes into our hands.   The  Mandelbrot.  We’ve been waiting for it.

Pressed into the tins, studded with chocolate chips and arrayed as a glorious fan, they are in fact the most tenacious of cookies, tough and  twice baked.  My sisters and I stuff them in as fast as we can.  My Grandmother wonders, will we remember? We will and we do.   Twice baked, these cookies last.

***

Over the years my memory has become sharpened at points, softened at others, like the undulating yet jagged edges of a fractal.  A simple equation resulting in infinite complexity.

No matter.  And the recipe itself?  Precisely written in my Grandmother’s even hand my sisters and I possess several versions on just as many scraps of paper.  Half or three quarters of a cup of sugar?    Walnuts or almonds?  Butter or oil?  My continued  mismeasuring is a messy equation  in and of itself.

And yet, no matter how much or or how little of each written ingredient I put in, every time I bake my Grandmother’s mandelbrot they seem to come out perfectly, just as I remember.  How can that be? 

I only know that our Grandmother loved us. We could taste it. And that undefinable thing that is love is both transcendent and transformative and sometimes even magical, mixed into a million different batches in a million different ways.   

Post #62: Wunderkammern

Cindy Frank city life, life choices, memory, middle-age, musings, personal philosophy, reinvention , , ,

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Oh she was sublime! Bubbly Judy Holliday was at once like every one of us and at the same time like no one else. Blond and vivacious, wacky and lovable she ignited the big screen like a brilliant bauble in everything from Adam’s Rib to Born Yesterday to Bells Are Ringing. But I love her best in a small, quirky little movie, It Should Happen to You.

Have you seen it? Oh come on! You must!

It is not fancy movie, no grand pretensions. It’s not even a musical, although there is one lovely little number when Judy croons “Let’s Fall in Love” with a piano playing Jack Lemmon.

It Should Happen to You is a story of deep yearning. A twentyish New Yorker named Gladys Glover, buffeted and bruised from the humdrum of daily living, determines that for a moment, for a heartbeat, for an instant she will rise from the ranks of the insignificant and become known. That her name — Gladys Glover — will be on everyones lips.

And so she gathers her life savings of a thousand dollars and purchases a billboard in Columbus Circle with her name in gigantic letters. She is thrilled. For one week, the name of Gladys Glover is spoken about, wondered about, gossiped about. She has done it. She is famous. She is thrilled.

Until she is not.
**

This week I unexpectedly find myself temporarily anchored in the city I’ve loved for a lifetime. The lights still beckon. Towering night lights from my window soothe me still.

So many years ago like so many others I cartwheeled head over heels into the arms New York. Like a skittering handful of jacks spilled from a cupped palm we hit the ground hard. What a place! We would make names for ourselves. We would be famous! The city would be ours. We craved it. We loved it.

Look up, we’ll see the lights of the Empire State, of the Citicorp, of the Chrysler! Look down we are expert at spying lucky pennies to scoop into our pockets. Hurrying hurrying hurrying we scurry furtively from street light to street light, huddled into great coats, slogging through slush.

Judy Holliday looked up and unexpectedly saw the lights in the eyes of Jack Lemmon. I looked way up and unexpectedly found mine in a pair of warm, kind eyes behind a pair of round tortoise shell glasses.

How many times had we walked obliviously right by each other, on 2nd Avenue? Amsterdam? 72nd Street? And yet, finally together we were swirled into a wunderkammern, our own cabinet of exotics and wonders, filled to the bursting with baseball cubes and board games, subway signs and teapots, pokemon card after pokemon card and book after book after book after book. So so many and never ever enough. Our lives together are a wunderkammern – a collection of weirdnesses and wonders, jumbled together in a way that makes sense to no one but us. But it’s ours.

My name flickering in lights? Why? Why when there is so much else?

In the way it was meant to happen it happened to me. In whatever way it is meant to happen then, it should happen to you.

Post #61: Sprung from Joy

Cindy Frank life choices, middle-age, musings, personal philosophy, reinvention, renewal , , , , ,

img_9756So naturally, against all odds of sanity, I went and did it.  Tossing aside the whole curriculum for day:  ruminations about Scout and Atticus gently pushed aside, Socratic discussions about the military prowess of Hannibal and the ethical conundrums of Cato and Carthage quietly reburied, mystical revelations of the Sistine Ceiling  temporarily shrouded.  We all needed it.  A screeching halt to the studies of the present for a zip line into the past.

With a snap of a switch the room was mote filled and dusky. My class comfortably settled into their seats like souffles sweetly deflating by an oven door opened a few moments too soon. An old movie. A perfect film.  A Christmas Carol, Alastair Sim version, 1951.

Over three full class periods,  we were all swept back in time to Dickens’ 1840s London and the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a tale worth telling again and again.

You know the story as well as I do.  A crotchety, miserly old man, furious with with life and with the world around him,  is visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, Christmas present, and Christmas future. And he is changed.

At last with a whirr and a click,  the movie ended. I left the lights low. There wasn’t a sound.  And  suddenly from the back of the room, from the darkness a voice rang out, “So you tell me, Mrs. Frank, just what took that man so long to figure out how to be good?”

Hmm. To tell you the truth, I was wondering the same thing.

So here we are, hardwired into the present.  I’m late to work, I’m fussed about getting to the grocery store, I should have responded to that last phone call, I haven’t cleaned out that closet.  I meant to read the book.  That bill is late, the gas gauge is on empty, I need to make  dinner, I must fold the laundry.

Where am I going?  Who is mad at me for what? Where are the cats?

Most readers or viewers think, I think, that Scrooge was terrified into reforming his ways and living life as it was meant to be lived by the glimpse into his dank and horrible future.  But what if  it’s the return to the the loving and warm memories of his sweeter past that  truly changes Scrooge?  Perhaps Scrooge changes because of the reminder of love. Not the specter of fear.  In other words, it’s the memory of beauty and kindness that allows Scrooge to live and be embraced by his present and to move him forward.

Was Scrooge’s error to flatten his life,  making his present all encompassing, instead of what it truly is, a breath, a heartbeat, a mere whiff of time narrowed between past and future?

So what took him so long?  What takes any of us so long? 

Mired in the present, I push myself toward memory a lot. I think about memory not because I’m afraid of forgetting the happinesses past. Wrapping myself in the afghan of memory for me is a celebration of the joy of remembering. I remember to recapture joy.  Moreover, I am an expert at sieving memory, retaining all that is meant to be retained. And that joy is what hopefully catapults us toward the future.

So in the new year, a season of hope and of light. join me and raise a glass and  toast to the goodnesses of the past and to power of memory.  Be bold, be brave. Recreate your past world to create the world anew. Fling yourself forward, sprung from past joys!

A Taste for Jazz and Lime-Vanilla Ice

Cindy Frank family, friendship, kindness, life choices, memory, middle-age, personal philosophy , , , , ,

img_6499To honor the memory of my cousin Martin Slobin, z”l, I am reposting blog post #14 from February 24, 2015. We lost Marty on December 6, 2001.

With love to Marty and my Aunt Bess, z’l and my Aunt Rose, z’’l.   Cherished.

***

I was one of those precocious little Suzuki violin kids. We were schooled strictly in classical music, that is, as soon as we could scrape through Mississippi River. My first violin was quarter size and our early training involved marching around the room trying to keep the violins tucked under our little chins. Tiny violins bounced everywhere. But music really exploded for me on Sunday afternoons when I got to watch Bill Kennedy at the Movies on WKBD-TV channel 50 in Detroit. Bill Kennedy was the faded, slightly pompous former B movie actor who hosted the show. He had this one great scene as a tennis pro with Bette Davis in Dark Victory, which he referred to often.   It was here that I watched my first musicals: Top Hat, Singin’ in the Rain, Meet me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon. This was the music, these were the songs that I really fell in love with, the ones that stuck in my head.

Someone noticed.

That person was my cousin Marty.

He wasn’t at all the type of person you’d expect to notice things. But he did.

Marty was my mother’s first cousin. He shared an apartment with my two great Aunts. my grandmother’s sisters, Bess and Rose. My grandmother lived alone in the apartment across the way. My sisters and I would always see the Aunts and Marty at holiday dinners or be trooped unwillingly across the parking lot to visit their little apartment. It was hot in there and there wasn’t much to do except answer questions about whatever it was we were doing. The Aunts hung on our every word and beamed at us for even the smallest accomplishments. We should have feasted on this avalanche of praise and affection but we didn’t really. We felt squirmy and uncomfortable.

At some point in the conversation, Marty, Bess’s grown up son, would be summoned from his room to say hello to us. Marty’s room was a great mystery. No one was ever allowed in there. Not even my Aunts. But the door was ajar once and I peeked inside.   What I saw was a fantastic jumble of books and records amidst the whorl of an unmade bed. It was a mess, it was utter comfort, it was a refuge and a fortress. It reminded me a lot of my bedroom at home.

Marty always entered the living room slowly and bashfully even though this was his home, he was the adult and we were just little kids.

He was a heavyset man with dark curly hair. He smiled a lot. He perspired a lot too—the apartment was kept extra warm for my Aunts—so much so that his thick black glasses slid constantly down his nose. But the look of appreciation on his face, no matter if I was talking about whatever old movie I’d just seen, what music I’d played or some song I loved, was real.

I was probably self-importantly talking about some play that I’d been in at camp when he got really excited and went to his room. He returned with Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut, which he placed gently on the turntable. Marty was the first person to play “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah “ for me. I got it. It was cool. The albums that were stacked along side were by people like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane. I wasn’t ready for them yet. Not by a long shot.

At holiday dinners he usually didn’t say much. He would always wear a tie although he always looked like he’d rather take it off. If there were uncomfortable silences he would always talk and talk about how much he loved the spinach.

On the violin I learned how to play Leroy Anderson’s Fiddle Faddle and would have gone crazy with joy if I had somehow heard about jazz violinist Joe Venuti but I didn’t. I was a high octane behind the scenes high school theatre person. I did my best to keep up in chorus class. I was hurt that I wasn’t a part of the revered Madrigals singing group at Kingswood (my sister Lisa was) but I still found that I completely and totally loved harmonic singing.

I overheard that several times a year Marty would take the train to Toronto to go to Jazz clubs or Jazz festivals. I don’t know who he saw up there. Chick Corea? Charlie Mingus? I don’t remember him playing that music for us on those afternoon visits. Was he too shy? Did he feel his connection to that music too private to share? Or did he know that to truly fall in love with something you need to discover it yourself?

I had heard the stories. That he had asthma and terrible allergies. That he was babied by his mother, my Aunt Bess, who coddled and overfed him. That he wasn’t allowed out to play much as a little kid and had a way of running with his flat feet slapping the pavement and his arms flapping wildly in the air. That he hated driving and took the bus, a true anomaly in car crazy Detroit. That he was smart. Really, really smart.

Over the years he never once made one of those cringe worthy comments about “how much I’d grown.” But I knew he noticed when he said that I reminded him of Janis Siegel of the Manhattan Transfer. By then I liked songs like Sing, Sing, Sing, Java Jive, and Dream a Little Dream of Me. Progress.

After college I lived in Brooklyn before Brooklyn was cool. I stretched meager paychecks by buying groceries at Balducci’s with my Dad’s American Express card. But one night I went to the renowned Blue Note all by myself, to hear “The Divine One”, Sarah Vaughan. In that cramped jazzy space, I sat alone at the bar drinking Bloody Marys at nighttime. It was the only drink I knew how to order. But there, on that wonderful night, I actually heard Sassy herself sing Misty.

After that night I knew why Marty went to the Jazz clubs in Toronto.

I was away from home for a long time. I grew up, I worked, I married, I had children. Back in Detroit, my Aunts died. Marty was left alone. He moved to his own apartment.   Alone a lot in New York, I listened to music. On my own I discovered Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald. Peggy Lee. The Boswell Sisters.

Then Marty died as well.

He was only 55. It was from his obituary that I learned that he was a revered and award winning Political Science lecturer at the University of Michigan Dearborn, known for both his bristling intellect and unfailing kindness to his students.

It had never occurred to me to ask what kind of work he did.

Of all the stories in Ray Bradbury’s beautiful Dandelion Wine my favorite is “The Swan”. Drawn together at a soda fountain over the unusual order of “a dish of lime-vanilla ice” young Bill Forrester meets and befriends 95-year-old Helen Loomis. Despite the extreme differences in age the two form a transcendent bond. It’s clear they were meant to be together, but according to Helen, just not in this life. Maybe the next. Or perhaps the next one after that. Ray Bradbury does not leave us with a happy ending in this story but instead with a wistful, open-ended one.

Maybe this is true for lost friendships as well.

But all I know is that I desperately miss someone I never really knew at all.

Post #59: Spin

Cindy Frank inspiration, life choices, middle-age, musings, personal philosophy, Positive change, renewal , , ,

fullsizerender

First set your feet firm.  Grasp the steel curves in your hands and get ready to push. Push hard! Legs pumping pumping pumping  as you run fast, faster, fastest, around and around and around! Just when you’re about to be swept off your feet jump up!  Up! You made it. You’ve earned your moment, your ride.  Lay back, close your eyes and spin. The Merry-Go-Round.

Open your eyes and you’re just where you were, of course. Or are you? 

Spin

Outside the big sunflowers turn and turn, their faces following the sun.  It’s late afternoon and I’m staring out the big picture window, the one shielded by a thick opaque yellow shade.  It’s has  a tiny tear, proudly,  neatly scotch taped together. The rays feel so hot that they seem to melt through the window, sizzling the squares of carpet like toasted s’mores.

I ache to get a better look outside.  But as I lift the thick vinyl shade the tiny tear tears a bit  more. I should be sorry and stop but I can’t stop,  I don’t stop at all.  I love the feeling of the tear slicing upward, up and up.  I can feel the power of the rip the in my little  hands. 

When it’s over, I can’t fix it. I am sorry, so sorry.  Really I am.

Spin

My bow is bouncing through Leroy Anderson’s Fiddle Faddle, my fingers skittering over the strings of my violin like jackrabbits bounding through the woods.  The notes scatter through the air with wild abandon, flying floating, fleeing every which way, everywhere at once.  Can you keep up?  Can you catch up?  Let the notes grab you and hook you, and seep deep inside you.   Oh! Come along with me. Together we can fly!

Spin

I am sitting across a restaurant table from a man in an elegantly cut suit, owlish glasses balanced on his nose, gentle, dreamy smile on his face. The man in the Arrow Shirt ads come to life. He has ordered a gin and tonic.  I find myself ordering the same.  He chuckles, I laugh. He leans back. I lean in.  When he orders Mahi Mahi,  for reasons unfathomable I squeal, dolphin like.  Agh!  Why oh why did I do it?  But somehow he laughs sweetly and in turn I simply sigh. He thinks I like him. And I do.

Spin

On a Little League field, compact as a candy box, a tousle-haired boy bunts, then freight rains it for first. Safe!  A blink and he steals second. A breath and then he steals third!  A  teasing tiptoe from third base.  Do it! Come home!

With each spin of the Merry Go Round the memories swirl in my head.

One day, full of myself and of rhyme and before I know it, the joyful words cascade from my tongue:

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things. Of  shoes—and ships—and sealing wax— of cabbages — and kings—. And why the sea is boiling hot—and whether pigs have wings.”

—The Walrus and The Carpenter, Lewis Carroll

My son is nearby.

“I love that,” my son said wistfully.  “You know it?” I said wonderingly.  “Of course,” he replied.  “You always recited it to us before bath time when we were small.  We loved it. You remember.”

But I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember at all.  I feel a rising panic in my chest. How could I have forgotten?   Was I spinning too fast? What am I missing?

Whatever “quite myself is,” I haven’t been that at all lately.   But somehow it has seemed more important than ever that I remember every single good thing that ever happened. To gather them all and keep them very close.

To forget even one, especially one that was so sweet and important to my boy, seemed a travesty, a tragedy of absurdist proportions. I hardly knew what to do, where to turn.

His voice is soft and just for me. “Of course it’s true, “he says. “And I remembered to remind you.”

A MILLION MARVELOUS MOMENTS

Cindy Frank family, middle-age, musings, personal philosophy ,

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The Conjurer

The almond cookies bitten through, the fortune cookies cracked. Even the egg foo young was done,  each deliciously unctuous, brown-sauced bite forked, savored, swallowed.

There was only one thing left to do. Like a conjurer, my mother gracefully sweeps her hands over the table finishing with fists full of soy sauce packets.  She kicks refrigerator door open wide and shuffles the deck of sauce packets into the side compartment with the finesse and aplomb of a Vegas black jack dealer. 

There are already about hundred sauce packets saved inside. Why so many saved?  She winks and smiles. Because, you know, you never know.

The Sweetest Hour

It was the sweetest hour.  The sky was dim but not dark. The warm scent of lilacs were bursting from their buds, the heady perfume mingling with the verdant clip of newly mown grass.   Too early in the season  for the Dads and the barbeques. But just right for the jump ropes and bikes out on the streets.  Who could be anywhere but outside?  And so we were.  All of us.

The car came from nowhere and it came fast.  No one looked up until the screech of tires. Our sheepdog, Charlotte, had wandered into the middle of the street. When the car came at her she froze, to frightened to move.

But still safe. Because my mother had leapt out of nowhere to throw herself between the oncoming car and her baby, our dog.  The car just missed them both. My mother could leap? She could.  And she did.

Hudson’s Department Store

My mother’s hands, as lithe and as delicate as the wings of a moth, glide over the makeup counter, Tangee or Cherries in the Snow?  A spritz of Evening in Paris on her wrist, the scent envelops me, warms me as she curls her  arm around my shoulders.   Like identically dressed ions the three of us pirouette and skip around her, our focus, our center.  As we journey through the store I run my hand over the highways and byways of raw silk, through the satisfying bumps and  nubbles of Harris Tweed,  down deep through the soft thicket of cashmere.

If we are good —oh we are trying to be good—we will have a special lunch in the Hudson’s Dining Room.  We sit together in a banquette of green leather. Our feet dangle precariously from the seat and our toes stretch to touch the carpet.  We peek: your toes barely touch too!. Peanut butter and jelly, a cookie, a carton of milk, a slightly mashed banana for each of us. Cup after cup of black coffee from a silver pot  poured for you. Our lunch comes in a fancy bag.  There is a prize inside too but it almost doesn’t matter. What we want most is to be here, to  sit right across the table from you.

Your life is a million marvelous little moments. These are just a few. Thank you everything past, thank you for everything yet to come. Happy birthday, Mom.  And many, many more.

Post #55: The Sweetness of Nearness

Cindy Frank family, memory, middle-age, musings, parenting, personal philosophy , , ,

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“The insect does not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves.” Jean-Henri Fabre

They are all surrounded by sweetness. Diligent, caring, and oh so industrious. They burrow and they buzz, their soft fuzzy bodies bely their stingers as they nuzzle and cuddle together. Stacked in hexagonal bunk beds that lock together like legos. All equal: they eat, they rest, they live, they love.

Flying far afield they swoop and swerve, pirouetting from flower to flower. Sated, consumed, exhausted. Even so, they know they always have a hive to come home to. Sweetness at its source. It oozes thick and slow, enrobing and ennobling them, caressing them all. So very, very sweet.

Their hearts and souls beat as one.

***

I buzz busily through my day, day after day. I rattle and I roar from place to place, nervously tapping and thumping and bumping and bungling. Sated, consumed, exhausted. But there are always tiny drops of honey. I guzzle them greedily: a nod, a smile a door held open. But eventually I do come home. If I wait, if I am patient, someday soon we all will all alight here, nipping together at the honeycombs, tasting the sweetness of nearness. We are here, whenever we get here, for each other. We always will be.

No matter how far away any of us fly, the hive remains. It always remains. Welcoming to loved ones, again and again. For always.

But I miss you all. I miss you. I do.

I dream. We are all together, enrobed and ennobled in sweetness.

Soon.

Tangled Quilts

Cindy Frank middle-age, musings, personal philosophy, Uncategorized , ,

FullSizeRender (2)I don’t really remember the movie. But I do remember this scene.

At the end of Reuben, Reuben, (Tom Conti and Kelly McGillis, 1983) the two lovers are outside in a park and they angrily part ways. It’s over.

But as the woman leaves she turns and looks back tentatively to the man. He’s looking down and misses her vulnerable, longing glance. She turns away. Just as she turns away, the man looks up hopefully but sees only the woman’s back, walking resolutely away from him. And so the relationship irrevocably breaks, lives are forever changed, for want of split second of timing.

I can hardly bear it. So much conveyed in a glance. But the glances were missed. What would have could have happened?

**

I desperately do not want to miss glances. Nor do I want to misconstrue notes or emails or texts. And those looks and notes and calls keep coming at me, they come at all of us, so thick and so fast! I try to keep up—I can’t really keep up. I delay, I phumpher, I make mistakes. I know that I do. Worse, even if I am looking up am I reading that glance or that text the right way? What am I missing? What might I misinterpret? And selfishly, how fearful might misunderstanding make me? Worse still, if I err, how alone?

Interpreting glances, bold attempts to understand the clumsy, truncated haiku of a tweet, text, or an email is an art form, one made of split second timing and the kind of bravery that cliff jumpers possess.

I know it’s a kind of bravery worth cultivating. Bravery worth having.

Even though I’ve placed so much emphasis on the meaning of a fleeting glance, on possibly misinterpreting the off-hand wording of a message, there is something even more important to consider.

If you’ve ever said, “I love you”, you know. Because if one is brave enough to say those words, to feel them, to mean them, one has to be brave enough to fight through the inevitable insecurity and fear—all the missed glances, all half-written thoughts—that will follow.

A relationship is far more than a series of glances—missed or otherwise — haphazardly laid atop one another. Instead I think of relationships as wonderfully tangled quilts —those sewn together steadily, slowly, over time– which we can pull from our bags and wrap ourselves in whenever, however we need to. These are the words and the stories and met glances that knit together to tell the deeper stories of our connection, of our lives and to remind us, as we all need to be reminded sometimes, of our love.

We want our connections to be like a firm, unbroken chains when too often they’re twisted like those little metal conundrum puzzles. The kind that take patience to work through and give such pleasure when they’re completed.

Remember the puzzles. Reach for the quilt when you need it. Much love.

THE COLOR OF YOUR EYES

Cindy Frank bravery, friendship, inspiration, middle-age, musings, personal philosophy, reinvention, renewal, self-worth , , , , , ,

Some of the best things in my life almost never happened.

So there I was, nervous as all get out but attempting nonchalance by leaning against the cinderblock walls. I was waiting for my youngest son as he finished his first day of preschool.

The cool moms, to a woman clad in variations of the right workout gear, were all animatedly chatting. I longed to be animatedly chatting too but rarely managed it. I was usually uncomfortable because I could never figure out the right thing to wear at the right time or say the right thing at the right moment. To be fair, the women seemed nice. They probably were. But at that moment those women felt as distant and as unapproachable to me as the perfectly coiffed celebrities in People Magazine. This is a magazine, by the way, I profess to hate but will always read if a copy is in front of me.

As I was counting the minutes until my escape, I spotted a woman I’d seen earlier in the morning. We’d been at the elementary school helping set up the book fair, but we were rushed, we were working and we hadn’t actually met. I was sure she wouldn’t recognize me. If she did I was sure she didn’t want to bother talking to me. And so, not to humiliate myself, I pretended I hadn’t seen her. Like a little kid, I was actually staring at my shoes.

But then there were four shoes in my lowered field of vision, not just two. It was that woman of course. She said she saw me this morning at school and she also had a son in the other preschool class. She was going to take her son back to work at the elementary book fair in the afternoon. She asked if my son and were I going back there too.

We were. I said I’d meet her there. But the little boys hadn’t had lunch. So I didn’t head straight to the school. I went home. I packed two lunches: one for my son and one for hers and headed back over to the school to meet her. She reached out—I reached back.

This is the story of how I almost missed meeting the person who became one of my closest friends. And because I was so desperately shy, my son almost missed meeting the little boy who became, and still is, his best friend.

***

I was hot, grubby, and seriously underdressed when I got the call at work.   There was a dinner party at some elegant spot on the Upper East Side. The person on the other end of the line was actually begging me to come to this dinner. I was clearly a last minute fill in—she denied it. She applied some serious pressure—naturally I caved. There was no time to go home to change.

I arrived at the restaurant early, but couldn’t make myself walk through the door. I circled the block once. Then twice. Then again and again and again. Panic was rising with every circuit. I was going to bail out on this thing. I could feel it.  A million excuses crowded my brain I but couldn’t figure out which one sounded most plausible. At last, my immense sense of guilt about sneaking away overcame my immense sense of panic.   I pushed myself through the front door and was directed to a long table. There was one chair left and I slid into it. I found myself seated across from a tall, thin man with distinctive horn-rimmed glasses and a very kind face.  He was nice. In fact, he was much more than that. Had I used but one of my many excuses and headed back to Brooklyn I would have missed meeting the man who would eventually become my beloved husband, my soul-mate, the excellent and deeply caring father to our three sons and numerous cats.

***

Some of us are born knowing how to make small talk seem effortless, know when it’s proper to kiss on one cheek or two, know how to look people in the eye and really listen to what they’re saying.

Some of us are not.

I was lucky twice and who knows how many times more. But how many connections had I missed by not reaching out? What had I missed? Who had I missed? And then I realized an extraordinary thing.

I never knew the color of anyone’s eyes. I couldn’t know—how could I if I wasn’t really looking at them, focusing on them?

So I forced myself to look up and really look at people, not just at who they appeared to be but who they really might be. You can tell by the eyes.

A long time ago a woman reached out across a hallway to me and became my friend. A man with a kind face reached out to me across a table and became my husband.

It’s my turn to reach out first and wait for the reach back. When I really look in people’s eyes what I most often see is kindness.