On the sunny side of the street.

One of the thousand independently sufficient reasons to live this life must be its constant newness.  That's got to be near the top of the list.  Even its oldness can be new.  I've been hearing jazz for 26 years, and somehow I never noticed this glowing old standard -- copyright 1930 -- until this week.  I know the words sound saccharine.  But there is depth to it.  Listen: some of the turns in those chords describe pangs of sharp melancholy.  Ah! those first bars of every chorus, that I III7 IVM7 VII7 vi. Remembering hopelessness, yearning for present joys to stay, accepting that times will be dark again, and that they'll be good again, but they'll never be quite the same flavor of good, and ultimately celebrating the gift of this day along with a touch of lament at its passing.  THAT is what that I III7 IVM7 VII7 vi says; that's why the song can be taken seriously.  It is triumphant and optimistic.  But it has been around the block.  It knows whereof it speaks.

I must have listened to this song a hundred times this week.  There are lots of wonderful recordings of it by different folks; I've picked the incomparable Ella.

On darkness and storytelling.

I keep thinking of this piece, Leap, by Brian Doyle.  And of his premise -- our premise, right? -- that we doggedly persist in the face of cowardice by knowing and telling and breathing our loved ones' stories.  Our stories.

Of course it's too soon to know what this thing means, or how we'll look back on it, or what should have been clear.  What there is now, as near as I can tell, is confusion, compassion, and some pretty incredible stories of grace under duress, including some from my friends, who were there.  Also little declarations of stubborn solidarity from New Yorkers, bless them.  I don't know how to deal with loss.  I don't know what to say to those coping with loss right now.  But we can tell stories.

Meine Schwester.

Anne LaMyrl Sandholtz, as anyone who knows her can tell you, is brilliant, compassionate, thoughtful, creative, articulate, curious -- she is, ahem, literally a peach. She is also my sister. She is also Jesus’ sister, and will be spending the next year and a half telling everything she knows about him to anyone in Portugal who will listen. This project is bound to produce stories hilarious and life-affirming and heart-wrenching and true. She has promised to tell us about them in her letters, which will be posted on her blog, which I recommend to you, gentle reader:

asandholtz.blogspot.com

Hurrah for Israel.

Somethign.

Somethign in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover.
Somethign in the way she woo-ooos me.

Weird song, right?  I don't even know how to pronounce the words in that song.  There's probably a reason George Harrison didn't write that song.  I bet part of the reason is that he was writing with a calligraphy brush on some kind of a vedic parchment at a monastery in Dharamsala instead of typing on a laptop.  All I know is, if it had been twenty-first century Wayne typing that song on a laptop, it would have come out "Somethign" the first seventeen tries.   Guaranteed.

I'm a Millenial, or whatever they're calling my generation; I mean I've been typing on computers since AIM was The Thing.  But somehow there are still words I use all the time that my fingers stubbornly will not learn how to type.  Maybe these words actually mean sometihng[SIC!].  Maybe there are subatomic particles out there called questinos and informatinos, just dying to make themselves known by shooting out of my typing fingertips.  Maybe wtih was a conjunction favored by Shakespeare before the rule-bound grammarians in the 18th century legislated it out of existence and history.  Governmnet, I'm convinced, is a euphemistic profanity employed by libertarians, along with its close cousins governemnt and governmetn.  (Governmetn's great, actually -- I may follow the libertarians on that one.)  What all these words have in common is that they have valiantly resisted the most dogged attempts to eradicate them from my first-draft prose.

I twice heard Brian Doyle say, If you want to be a writer, learn how to type.  Mr. Doyle, I'm trying so hard.

Time travel.

Hell, I'm convinced, is not a physical place.  It is a customer service hotline.

The vein-throbbingly maddening call I made to my mobile carrier today was the culmination of a series of vein-throbblingly maddening interactions I had with various customer service representatives over the last few weeks.  This must be part of phone companies' strategy -- each employee is trained to mislead you in a different way, and to inform you that whatever the previous employee told you was wrong.  As the wrong turns build up and twist in on themselves, they constitute a labyrinth of policies and fine print and exceptions, and as you try to explain your way through it to the representative on the other end of the line, you feel like a mental patient, and decide to cut your losses and hang up before you lose what little sanity you have left.  They're dastardly.  Their schemes are masterly.

But today I made it past that threshold, out into the insane realm on the other side.  Throwing prudence to the wind, I stayed on the line, using stronger and stronger profanities until I was transferred to "John".  And then a miracle happened.  John listened.  John responded.  As I carefully walked John back along the convoluted trail of bread crumbs detailing my blind struggle against the customer service hydra, one fee after another fell away like scales from my eyes.  It felt good.  A past-due bill of $121.60 became (over the course of 29 minutes and many soothing, faintly accent-inflected words from John) a non-past-due bill of $38.

By the end of the call, I was brimming with such gratitude that I had to know more about my angelic benefactor.  I asked John where he was from.

John: "To be honest, we're in a different century."

me: "You're in a different century??"
John: "Yes, a different century.  We're in the Philippines."

I told him he had excellent English (which had been emphatically true for the first 28 minutes of our conversation), hung up, and praised God.

Spit and sweat.

My shoes are still squelching, my hair is still sopping, Rooney’s earnest, hormonal guitar riffs still jangle in my ears. I just got back from another running date with the river in the rain at night, and before anything else I just have to record that the alluvial world is rich and fertile and wet and just lends itself to being alive in. Being alive in it, in fact, feels great.

Put the ghost in my sail.

Here's one of the days when happy endings seem like a foregone conclusion.  The ice is breaking up over the Charles in gorgeous fractals.  Café Pamplona serves Spanish tortilla.  Brainy youths walk around talking to each other about Hebrew and Math and the Baldini sisters, one of whom butchers fish for Legal -- that was the exact word this youth used, who I overheard talking about the Baldini sisters.

Do you love Boston, I was asked recently.  I hemmed, I hawed, and I answered that I like it.  I like it more and more, such that falling in love seems likely but not certain.  Today, though, I've been lofted by a potent gale of breathtaking infatuation, to which the L-bomb seems the only possible response.  Love.  There, Boston, I said it.  Love love love love love love.  And I mean it.  

Here's one of the days when everyone I meet seems brave and beautiful.  I know a girl who loves Boston so much she wants to have twin girls so she can name them Wellesley and Waverley.  Okay, let's not get carried away, but still: the immutable fact is that it's 60 degrees in Boston on 30 January 2013.  Did you hear that?  Twenty thirteen.  I know it's arbitrary, but this year has a different air than the one I just lived in, a different smell.  It fits better in the sleeves and in the shoulders.  There is a manageable number of people who I know well enough to learn, say, what they want to name their twin girls.  Gentle reader, I'm naming mine Georgia and Wren.  People are good.  Christ plays in ten thousand places.  Here's one of the days when the world begins.