ON THE WAY DEATH COMES, THE CLUNKY TOOLS WE USE TO SEE AND TO LIVE BY, AND THE MESSINESS OF LOVE
Wednesday Nov 21, 2018
Dear Sarah,
My mind is in a different space this week — as I suppose it must always be from week to week — and I’m not sure I know where this letter will go but I’m putting pencil to paper. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and tonight M and I were crossing a street with the right of way and a car came careening around the corner toward us on a red-running left turn. The car was coming very fast and I screamed, genuinely screamed, and put my hand out and screamed for him to stop, and he swerved around us and continued on, no look on his face of apology or even caring, I don’t even think he braked at all. On the other side of the street we came in from the freezing cold to a warm Japanese restaurant and it was a second shock to go from screaming at a fast-approaching car to sitting nestled in a restaurant in mere seconds. It made the eyes water, and while it didn’t exactly feel near-death, we both, I think, had the feeling that that was very much how death would come, suddenly and unexpectedly, coldly, without even considering the brake pedal. Our dinner was soothing but it takes a little wind out of your sails to feel like someone might have just taken you out minutes ago. When that kind of thing happens I want other people to join me in feeling incensed, to open their car doors while they’re stopped at the red light so we can say together, “Can you believe that guy?!” I looked through the windshields of waiting cars on the latter half of our crosswalk adventure and they all stared straight ahead, seemingly impassive. I wished I had thought to gather his license plate number, but what would I report? “This man is a real asshole!”
Thursday, Nov 22, 2018
I’m returning to my letter to you on Thanksgiving night, and my brain isn’t yet soaked in tryptophan because we traveled on Thanksgiving day and we’re going to cook dinner and stuff ourselves tomorrow. This time of year — the entry into the winter holidays and the dark days and the long evenings — is a time when I start to think of change, looking toward the new year, and the clear opportunity it presents to make adjustments small and large in how my days and longer stretches of time look. I am clear with myself always that every day is such an opportunity — you can’t always wait for a new year to roll around to make important changes — yet the new year is still an obvious opportunity to rethink and to try new approaches. It’s a reset button begging to be pressed. So this time of year, the longish lead-up to the new year, is a time of thoughtful dreaming and planning, especially as days on holiday and away from the usual rhythms offer some space to think differently (which we’ve talked about before!).
I’m thinking of your letter from last week and the bifocals that would let us shift back and forth between the individual-scale lens, where we are immersed in the sharp details of our minute-by-minute life, and an astronomical view, that would remind us that the big picture is really big, and that we are individually small, a speck, a pixel, a grain of sand in time and place on our globe. I was thinking very literally about how our eyes are tested at the ophthalmologist — I’ve had my eyes tested before, and in the past year I was there when my father’s eyes were tested, watching the process, a few months before he had a stroke that changed his vision again, obscuring the view out of his left eye. The machine seems both very advanced and antique, archaic — a set of turning wheels of lenses upon lenses that the eye doctor rotates through a series of turns as you try to decode a distant mix of letters — click: is one or two better? Click: two or three? Click: two or four? The clicks proceed and your view through the lenses is put through its paces; a series of tweaks to the view come together to yield some recipe for a vision corrective, a pair of glasses. But the machine show you how finding the right lens requires testing all these small moves — this plus that, over and over. It makes me think that the glasses themselves are perhaps the reminder — the view that was made possible through all the nuanced tests and clicks — but who thinks of their eye exam every time they put on their glasses, and who, how, can remember always to think of themselves at the right moment, and then to think of the big picture at the right moment? I like it when the tools we use reveal the complexity of what we’re working through, show the steps it takes to move from one kind of view to another.
I’m thinking of Giorgia Lupi’s work that you referenced and I’m still thinking about it — it’s particularly meaningful to me to see the steps and the processes, choices, inspirations, provocations behind data and its collection and visualization. Maybe I like the idea that shifting between views — the human detail and the astronomical — is clunky and calls attention to itself a bit like the eye test lens wheel. Perhaps we are always giving ourselves, or are lucky enough to be receiving, these clunky reminders that not only the new year is a time of change, but every day is, too, every moment we bump up against each other and have a chance to smooth things over or to shimmy a new lens into place and say, actually, this view works better, or differently.
This was a loose-threads kind of week and I’m sharing them with you as they are, knots and all! I’ll pluck at them again next week, and think more about all that we’ve written in the past weeks.
Until then, talk soon,
Your friend,
Eva
November 23, 2018
Dear Eva,
I am sitting in my favorite local coffeeshop writing with Jonah again today. To my delight, he has been repeatedly asking to come back for another writing session since we first tried it together last Sunday. I have been dreaming of the day he would want to do these sorts of outings – the kind where we are just quietly alone together, independently thinking and working but where the mere presence of the other makes the time richer. It feels like the kind of mom-and-son time together that you know is special even as you are living it. We are making a creative ritual together. I imagine a Black Friday 15 years from now, Jonah home on a college break, and the two of us sitting at this same wooden table with lavender Italian sodas and our laptops. The thought puts a lump in my throat.
I know you are spending today feasting with family, but I keep imagining you sitting in your apartment slowly building your casket. The thought brings a smile.
--
Ironically – or maybe it’s not irony so much as the nature of parenthood – I have had to pause in writing this letter because Jonah had a meltdown. He accidentally ripped his paper when he was erasing a word, and the injustice of it all was too much for the boy. The tear in the paper was not that big, but he was so upset by it that he started erasing everything on the page, tears streaming down his face. Now he is lying with his head on the closed notebook on the table, his story about a ninja named “Black Belt” completely erased. He intermittently raises his head up to tell me that he wants to throw the notebook away or to say, “Can you at least put this notebook somewhere other than my room because I never want to see it again!” He is mad at the notebook and at the eraser. They have wronged him.
There is nothing like moments like this to remind you how hard it can be to simply be a human, even with all of the privileges in the world.
--
Another interruption, this time to pack up our belongings and drive home in silence with a sulking child in the backseat. When we got home, he told me he would see me in two hours and even then, he would still be mad. He is now upstairs stomping around his room, loudly proclaiming he hates himself.
This is, quite literally, a perfect picture of parenthood. A poignant and tender moment turned to senseless drama in a flash. An outing with so much promise gone completely awry. A reminder that even a wise six year old is still a six year old. When we first had Jonah, I used to have a really hard time with experiences like this that required squaring the close proximity of bliss and agony, the way you end up so often being almost simultaneously in awe and aghast at your children. But at this point, I think I almost relish the messiness of it all. It helps me keep in mind how imperfect we all are and how loving someone has nothing to do with idealizing them.
Until next week, my friend!
Sarah