saving my life: Back Bay edition.

I’m into the eighth week at my new job, and I get asked all the time: How is it? Are you settling in? Do you like it?

The answers to all these questions are mostly positive, but alongside them is another truth: adjusting to a new neighborhood has been hard.

My first job in the Boston area was at Emerson College, steps from the Common and the Boston Public Garden. My new job, at Berklee College of Music, finds me a mile or so from there, among the collection of brownstones and skyscrapers that make up the Back Bay.

I miss Harvard Square, where I’ve spent every workday for the last five years and which (as regular readers know) I adore. But there are a few things, so far, to recommend this neighborhood. Here they are, in no particular order:

• The gorgeous central Boston Public Library, above, a few blocks from my office. I often pop in during my workday or on my way to the train. Bonus: they have a good cafe.
• The sunny, plant-filled conference room at work, where I take my laptop as often as I can.
• The tiny Trader Joe’s down the street, which provides me with affordable flowers (when I can’t get to Brattle Square), dark chocolate peanut butter cups, and a place to grab last-minute grocery items.
• The Copley Square farmers’ market on Tuesdays and Fridays. Related: the few intrepid vendors who come out even in the rain. I miss Amanda and her tamales, but am glad for a place to pick up fresh produce.
• The nearest Flour location, which has $5 soup, decent chai (it’s not Darwin’s but it’ll do), and friendly employees.
• The Commonwealth Avenue mall: green and lovely and dotted with benches.
• So many happy dogs, walking the streets with their owners or in packs shepherded by dog walkers.
• Trident, the newly reopened bookstore down the street.
• The midweek Eucharist service at Trinity Church: I’ve only been once so far but it was lovely.
• Occasional walks along the Esplanade, when I have time.

What’s saving your life these days? Heaven knows we all need to take our joy where we can find it, right now.

Advertisements

Read Full Post »

Poetry Friday: Noor Unnahar

i want stars, strength, and balance in my soul
it’s been a while since they were last
together in me

————————

Unnahar is a Pakistani poet and artist. I picked up her collection, yesterday i was the moon, at Three Lives & Co. in the West Village this summer. (I love to go in there to browse and eavesdrop on the booksellers, and I usually walk out with a poetry collection or a novel.) I’ve been reading it slowly, and this is one of the poems that spoke to me.

Read Full Post »

This is thirty-five

 

I turned thirty-five this past weekend. And I have to admit: this one freaked me out a little.

I don’t often worry about birthdays: turning another year older beats the alternative, as my mom says. My (fairly healthy) reaction to turning thirty, a few years ago, was to take my first trip to Canada. But this birthday – falling squarely in the middle of ordinary life and a job change – felt big, somehow, in a way I didn’t quite feel able to process.

I’d debated about having a party, but in the end we celebrated with friends, pulling together a brunch in our top-floor apartment: mimosas and fruit, jazz on my old stereo, scrambled eggs and stacks of French toast made by my husband. Sierra walked in and handed me a bouquet of sunflowers; Aaron brought a bread pudding made with honey cake; 14-month-old Colette toddled around in a pink plaid dress with cupcakes on the smocked yoke. Everyone greeted me with bear hugs and best wishes. They pulled open the cabinets for coffee mugs and Fiestaware plates, and made themselves at home on the living room couches and around the kitchen table, talking, laughing, enjoying one another. It was exactly what I wanted.

I’m only a few days into thirty-five, of course, but wanted to capture a few snapshots, literal and figurative, of what it looks like so far.

Thirty-five is about a dozen gray hairs (I stopped counting after three). So far I’m happy to let them coexist with the brown and the pink streaks; you can see some of all three above. I am even a little bit proud: I’ve earned every single one.

Thirty-five is adjusting to the rhythms of a new job, in a new neighborhood across the river from my Cambridge home. Thirty-five is struggling with this change, and also trying to turn toward gratitude.

Thirty-five is still learning to own the broken pieces and wonky seams of this life, to step into both strength and vulnerability, to let herself be seen.

Thirty-five is stepping into my identity as a runner, getting out on the river trail several days a week. Thirty-five loves both the measured pace of yoga class and the change-it-up high intensity of a boot camp workout in Erin’s backyard.

Thirty-five is always reading a handful of books at once: something for review, brain-challenging nonfiction, something with heft and depth (fiction or nonfiction), a damn good story, something just for fun. (These categories often overlap.)

Thirty-five repeats a few good phrases to herself over and over again: everyone is learning. You are loved. The only thing to do is to keep moving. Summon all the courage you require. 

Thirty-five eats a lot of granola and peanut butter crackers, drinks copious amounts of black tea, tries to stay away from sugar and eat more vegetables (she has no trouble eating lots of fruit). Thirty-five tries to stay off the computer in the evenings, and winds down with a book before bed.

Thirty-five tears up often and laughs every single day. Thirty-five wears the same few pieces of jewelry that have become talismans: a necklace stamped with brave, a Wonder Woman bracelet, a matching set of wedding and engagement rings.

Thirty-five thought she’d have more answers to a few big questions by now. Instead, she is facing the reality that we are always becoming. That few things are set in stone. That even the most foundational relationships will change. Thirty-five would refute the sunny-side optimists who insist that change is always good, but is trying to agree with the friend who often says, “Change is how we grow.”

Thirty-five has learned that love and life are bigger and harder and more complicated than she ever thought possible. Thirty-five is in the middle of a messy, rich story. Thirty-five is doing her best to be honest about, and grateful for, the all of it.

Read Full Post »

Closing this Cambridge chapter

First, the leaving.

I knew it was a possibility for a long time: the job I signed on for, back in 2016, is of a type that comes up for renewal each fiscal year. This was my fourth job at Harvard, and I’d already weathered a layoff and two temp gigs – so I wasn’t all that surprised to learn, in April, that I’d have to leave at the end of June.

Even at Harvard, few things are set in stone: my time there has seen massive internal shifts, many of them for the better. This storied place, ancient and rooted, is also a place of constant movement and change.

I did my best, this spring, to soak up all the rhythms and traditions I love there: Morning Prayers, Commencement, my daily walks to Darwin’s. I had about a thousand coffee dates and sent out so many emails telling people: This chapter is ending. I don’t know what’s next.

On my last day, I walked to Darwin’s mid-morning, then went back later for lunch with a girlfriend. We sat outside, leaning against the plate-glass windows, eating sandwiches and talking about change. She had just started a new job, and I had no idea what the summer held. We agreed: change is hard, even when it’s exciting. And uncertainty is a beast.

Later that afternoon, I slipped away for a walk with a friend, and then came back to the office for my own bittersweet Mary Tyler Moore moment: packing up my bags and switching off the lights for the last time.

Of course, as a friend reminded me, Harvard isn’t going anywhere: it has survived for nearly four centuries, and if I want to go back there sometime, there’s a good chance I can. But this chapter, this particular stretch of five years where the Square became my daily ground, has ended.

I don’t have a word to sum it up neatly: like so much of life, it is full of contradictions. But somewhere between all those emails and meetings, between the headlines and the phone calls and the student interviews, between Tuesdays at the farmers’ market and Thursday mornings on the sixth floor, between frequent trips to the florist and every single day at Darwin’s, Harvard Square became my home.

I’ve landed in a good place across the river. But I left part of my heart in Cambridge, and for now, I’m making a point to get back there as often as I can.

Read Full Post »

The stories we hear over and over

I am a person who loves to hear the same stories over and over again.

Since I was a little girl, I’ve loved hearing my dad’s stories: anecdotes about family members or friends, or stories from when he was growing up in rural Missouri. We read – as many parents and children do – the same picture books over and over, before bed at night. (I still have a special place in my heart for a Little Golden Book called Home for A Bunny.)

I am my father’s daughter in this as well as other ways: I tell the same stories over and over again. My long-suffering husband and many of my friends have heard my stories more than once. And I am – as you know if you’ve heard me talk about my favorite books – an inveterate reader and re-reader.

I do this with music, too: I listened to Hamilton for six months straight once I discovered it and fell in love. I know nearly every word to a couple of Wailin’ Jennys albums (and so many George Strait songs from my childhood), among others. And lately, I’ve been listening to Headed Home, a 2015 release by The Light Parade, on repeat.

The Light Parade is Alex and Kara, two friends of mine from college who began making music back then (as Thus Far). I recently rediscovered their music, and it’s been keeping me company on long runs and train rides. I love many of the songs, but the first track – You Are Loved – is one of my favorites. I’ve been listening to it so often that its first line – you are loved with a fierceness you cannot understand – is playing on repeat in my head.

Yesterday I stood behind the communion table at our tiny church, looking out onto pews full of people I love and a few new faces I barely know. I told them about Alex and Kara’s song, and I said to them: we come together, every week, to hear the same stories and sing some of the same songs. And the message carried by many of those is the same: you are loved. With a fierceness you cannot understand. 

We come to church every week as ourselves: hurting, joyful, brave, broken, despairing, confident. We brim over with stories and wounds, and what we hear at church will – I hope – open up the way for healing and wholeness. If there’s one message, I said, that we should take away from here, one story I want to tell and to hear over and over again, it is this: you are loved. We are deeply and wholly loved.

May you know that today, wherever you are.

Read Full Post »

Summer 2018, unblogged

This summer feels like it’s both over and not over.

The hot, humid weather has been hanging on, making for some seriously sweaty runs (and commutes). I haven’t turned on my oven in weeks, and we’re still eating lots of gazpacho and taco salad. The sunflowers and berries are still out at the farmers’ market (for now), and the roses, hydrangeas and black-eyed Susans are still in bloom.

But the calendar has flipped to September. Labor Day has passed and students of all ages are starting the new semester. I’m slowly adjusting to the rhythms of a new office life, and I’ve even spotted the first few red sumac leaves on the trail.

As we head into a new season, I wanted to share a few snippets of the summer that have gone unblogged.

In mid-June, the hubs and I made our annual pilgrimage to Crane Beach, stopping for lunch at Honeycomb, a delightful cafe a few towns over.

We soaked up the sun for a while and when it got cool, we finished with dinner at Salt, which is reliably delicious.

This summer has included a lot of front porch sitting, often with books (it’s usually cooler outside than inside). We had a picnic dinner out there on the Fourth of July, before heading down the street to watch fireworks from the hill.

Since I was job hunting this summer and my husband’s schedule varies (he’s a therapist), we spent a few mornings co-working together at home.stead, a local cafe we love.

We also spent a Friday evening there in July at a karaoke singalong. The hubs got up and sang some Maroon 5; I was a contented observer, though I happily sang along with the Broadway numbers and the nineties boy bands.

Summer always brings a few out-of-town visitors, and this one was no exception. Some friends of ours (who used to live here and have moved back to Northern California) flew in for a night in early July. We all went to dinner at the newly reopened Bowery in our neighborhood. Their little one, Miss Elle, was a hit with the staff (and with us).

Later in July, my dear one Laura and her family came up from West Texas. I gave them my Harvard tour, took them to Darwin’s (of course), and we wandered the city and ate dinner in the North End.

They came back through the following weekend and we all went to a Red Sox game. We put Laura’s and my husbands together so they could geek out all night, and of course we all sang Sweet Caroline at the end.

Our tiny church has hired its first full-time minister in many years. We helped Candace move in mid-July, and had her official installation ceremony at the end of that month.

There has also been plenty of lovely ordinary: so many runs on the trail, several boot camps in Erin’s backyard and a fair amount of yoga, doing laundry and standing at the kitchen sink scrubbing dishes and humming old hymns. (Those last two – well, really all of these – are the most grounding practices I know, these days.)

No summer is complete without ice cream, and we’ve given the Ice Creamsmith our fair share of business this summer. I particularly loved their rotating special flavors: lemon custard in July, peach in August. With sprinkles, of course.

What have you left unblogged this summer?

Read Full Post »

August Break 2018: window

The sunrise out my kitchen window regularly saves my soul alive.

This morning’s blaze of glory made me think of the Gordon Bok line: “If I had a thing to give you I would tell you one more time that the world is always turning toward the morning.”

Read Full Post »