That Night

My first thought was "Now I've done it. I've finally done it." 

It was similar to the feeling I had at age 16 when I totaled the family car while making a right turn on red. That time, despite having crushed my parents' Vega to half its size, I was able to walk away uninjured ("Get out of the car! Get out of the car!" people were screaming.) This time, I could only acquiesce.

My second thought was "I have no idea what happened, but I appear to be in extremely competent hands." 

I remember the flashing lights of an ambulance and many hands on me and being on a stretcher, but I'm not entirely sure which of those memories took place on the street, which were in the ambulance, and which were of being unloaded at the emergency room. As things started to come together more, I knew I was in the ER.

By this time, I must have figured out I'd been in a bicycle accident. The last thing I remembered—as "memory" itself haltingly reformed—was leaving the office with my bike, walking it across L Street, and turning onto the bicycle lane. Or maybe it came back to me later. But that's the extent of the events preceding the accident that ever have come back.

I remember having a neck brace put on me and being reassured by someone that it was just a precaution, that I didn't appear to have a spinal injury. I was asked if there was someone they could call. I don't remember saying the words, but I apparently came up with my brother's land line, a number he'd had for more than 20 years (and that he's since changed; I do not know his new number by heart).

At some point, as medical personnel started stopping by, I found out I'd fractured my right elbow (I always say "fractured" instead of "broke" because that was the word first used in my presence), knocked out a tooth and maybe damaged more, and cut up my face. 

An ENT (again, who introduced himself as such, so I'll never forget his specialty) stitched up my face—two gashes around my right eye, one on my upper lip where a tooth or teeth went through. I'd never had stitches before (at age 52, never been treated in an ER, never spent a single night as a patient in a hospital). The sensationless sensation of thread being pulled through tissue and tugged was new to me; at the same time, it reminded me of numbed dental work—that impression of major construction going on not quite here but in a room next door, the mysterious vibrations and structural manipulations of space felt all too viscerally.

My brother arrived in the emergency room and told me D was on his way. I was calm (drugged), probably apologetic, definitely immobile, and appreciative of what felt like order around me. 

I'd be spending the night (no kidding), and we were waiting for a room.

My brother manned iPhone central at the foot of my bed in the ER, communicating with our sisters and with his wife. At some point, D arrived, smiling, tender. My brother, D, and me—the trio who'd been with my father when he'd died at age 92 a year and a half before. This was the first time just the three of us were together since that day in July 2012, though I wasn't thinking that then. (I'm thinking it now.)

My injured right arm rested painless and immobile in a splint or brace across my chest. At some point, I met the orthopedist who would operate the next day. A young guy in his thirties, as young as my regular doctor, whom I'd seen just a few days before for a checkup at which all was well.

All evening long, I listened to gentle information and was ministered to—my first experience with the utter surrender of control entailed in the receipt of trauma care. Somewhere down deep, grief and sadness awaited their entrance, as did patience and fortitude, Sharks and Jets on opposite wings. But for now, the only thing required of me was to wait.

Later that night, when I was settled (oddly content) in my hospital room and my brother and D had left for the night, I was near-dozing when another doctor came into the darkened space—a dentist (dental surgeon, it turned out), closer to my age than the young orthopedist. He was nice, had grown up in Washington like me, and we talked about the high schools we'd gone to. All evening at the hospital, despite having no idea what had happened to me on the bike lane, I'd been able to converse relatively lucidly with anyone who came up to my bed.

He touched my shoulder in a comforting way. He examined my mouth and told me a tooth next to the one that had been knocked out was compromised and would have to come out as well. I thought he was referring to an upcoming procedure, but he started jiggling the tooth right then with his bare hand. I said, "You're going to pull it out now?" Saying it was already crumbing in his fingers, he tugged, as if removing a splinter, and it was out, leaving the root behind.

He said, "We'll take care of you." Then he touched my shoulder again and said goodnight.

Colors of the Day

Friday evening, I completed a two-month refinancing process, something I'd been dragging my feet on, simply because of the pain-in-the-neck of it, but D. helped me get on it through his gentle prodding. I'll save a lot of money and now have only one monthly payment instead of two.

It's just a few days past six years since I moved into my condo—the time has gone fast. I still can scarcely believe I own my own home. 

Truthfully, it's not only mine but also a living gift from my father in his final, fading years, guided to write a check by my sister, who with her husband made two contributions as well, unbidden. And D.—whom I didn't know when I bought the place but met within months—has also has helped me make it what it is, generously facilitating a kitchen renovation two years ago and celebrating with me every day the things of beauty or usefulness—new, from my family, antiques from strangers' pasts—that have come to fill its spaces.

There's so much I have yet to live into here. I can't make time slow down, but on a quiet Sunday like this, I can look around and appreciate what I have.

We have seen a million stones lying by the water,
You have climbed the hills with me
To the mountain shelter.
Taken off the days, one by one, 
Setting them to breathe in the sun.

—Judy Collins, "Since You've Asked"  

— 

(Wow, my walls are really not yellow like that!)

Begin Agin?

If you glance over at my blog roll on the right, you’ll see something called Begin the Vegan, a very short-lived project I started when I went from vegetarian to vegan about two and a half years ago.

Ask me today what’s one of the things I’m most passionate about, among the most fun elements of my life, the subject that’s part of my consciousness pretty much every day, and being vegan—planning dinner, shopping for shoes, buying a rug, picking a shaving cream, and did I mention planning dinner? (I love to cook!)—would be at the top of the list. Yet I haven’t blogged about it since July 2010.

I knew it was perhaps overly ambitious to start a second blog when this one had just come back from a dormancy of 15 months (and has since endured another lapse of almost a year). But I was game to try, and for a few months it helped me articulate my feelings and discoveries about my dietary evolution—which have continued unabated since then (of course they’ve continued—they’re feelings!), though one wouldn’t know it. I just hate to think it appears I’ve lost interest.

What I’ve lost is the impetus, and the courage to start again with the very real possibility that I could stall once more. Then I’d have two sputtering engines in my literary driveway.

In the meantime, I might have written about a get-together with college friends a year and a half ago where I brought a delicious vegan cake I made in honor of our collective 50^th birthdays, and the first thing one friend said when she tasted it was “How many eggs are in this?” Or the next get-together with those friends earlier this year when I made the same cake (because one friend had missed the first gathering), and the cake was an embarrassing, damp-centered dud. But I bit my tongue and remembered Julia Child’s culinary admonishment from her fabulous memoir, My Life in France: Never apologize!

I could write about D., who has been nothing but accommodating as he himself has evolved to a mostly vegetarian diet since knowing me and a vegan-friendly (and appreciative) attitude toward my cooking in the last two to three years.

I could write about the fun (and frustrating—Candle Cafe, I’m talking about you) cookbooks and blogs I’ve discovered. (I’ve added a few of my faves to the roll here.) The things I’m willing to compromise on (ratcheting down to merely vegetarian when dining out with friends or as a guest at someone’s house, afternoon tea with D.) and the things I’m not (meat!). Or the fact that my sister and brother-in-law recently became vegan for reasons of their own and what it’s like to have compatriots in the family even as I try not to let others in the bloodline feel self-conscious about their own cooking, which I can still enjoy (see compromises above).

I could blog about all of this. But I haven’t even looked at Begin the Vegan in nearly two years, until today when I went there to see when my last post was.

So why am I blogging about it here?

New Yorker cartoon from NewYorker.com.

The Light Is Like a Spider

I was reminded by NPR that National Poetry Month is almost over. A good exercise for me is to seek out a poem I've never read before that has meaning for me, so here is the result of an instinctive and spontaneous search that resulted in something very lovely. The author is Wallace Stevens.

Tattoo

The light is like a spider.

It crawls over the water.
It crawls over the edges of the snow.
It crawls under your eyelids
And spreads its webs there—
Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes
Are fastened
To the flesh and bones of you
As to rafters or grass.

   There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow. 

Rockwell Kent (1882 - 1971), "Home Port," 1931

For D.

Getting to 50 . . . and Beyond

This is cheating, but I can't think of a better way of summing up what my folding bike means to me than what I said in my Christmas letter in December:

"On my 50th birthday [in September], I bought a bicycle. I haven’t owned one since my Schwinn banana seat. A bike has been on my mind for a long time (D. and I ride every summer on Cape Cod, where I’ve rented mine), but it’s taken me a while to admit it’s okay for me to have one. (Don’t ask—it’s like the contortions I went through before I gave myself permission to move from the Maryland suburbs to DC 16 years ago.) This bike has changed my life. It’s a folding model, perfect for my tiny “urban cottage” (D.’s second home, mine being his lovely house in, guess where, the Maryland suburbs). I had no intention of using it to commute, but within a month I was riding to work, mostly on bike lanes, weather and other factors permitting. You’d recognize me—I’m the one who obeys traffic signals. The obvious feeling is freedom, but it’s not the main part. For years I’ve had dreams I’m on a bike, but the sensation is the accomplishment of getting somewhere on my own power. I wake up feeling, Wasn’t it cool how I got there?"

Smoke and Metal

"He was asking for memories, too young to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh."

These are two typically beautiful and apt sentences from a novel I finished last night, The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst (about whom I've written before). It's largely about memory and versions of a life (one life in particular, that of a World War I poet); the mystery of what we can never know about someone because we're at the mercy of what he or she chooses to reveal; and the secrets that the satellites of people around that person keep, which we're often powerless to pry open.

Here's another passage that rang so true to me. This scene takes place in 1967, outdoors in the shadow of a party; Paul has never been with a man before, and Peter has more experience. They're in their early twenties.

"He'd brushed against Peter uncertainly as he giggled; now Peter's hand was round his neck, their faces close together in the spidery light through bushes, their eyes unreadable, a huddle of smiles and sighs, and then they kissed, smoke and metal, a weird mutual tasting, to which Paul gave himself with a shudder of disbelief. Peter pressed against him, with a slight squirming stoop to fit himself to him, the instant and unambiguous fact of his erection more shocking that the taste of his mouth. In the fierce close-up and the near-dark Paul saw only the curve of Peter's head, his hair in silhouette and the ragged crown of bushes beyond, black against the night sky. He took his cue from his movements, tried to mimic him, but the sudden stifling violence of another man's wants, all at once, instinctive and mechanical, was too much for him."

It's been only a little more than four years, but D. and I already have different memories of the night we met, even argue about the date (easily—and often—provable thanks to calendars and journals, but still). What I was wearing, whether we actually danced that night or the next, when we kissed for the first time. I've written about it (not here but in an unpublished essay), and even I discovered—after I finished the essay—that I'd misremembered important details (specifically when D. first met my parents).

I'm not sure I can say how any of it really happened, what's metal and what's smoke.

Fragments, a Return

This weekend my siblings and I started hospice for Dad.

It's been almost a year since I wrote in this blog (I'm a little shocked but not totally surprised to see). In that year, my mother's condition has remained mostly stable, which is to say that 13 years of dementia quietly rolled into 14, with no major changes from one to the next. Tonight when I was talking to D. and my brother and sister, I described her conversation as a bagful of disconnected words, sentence fragments, gestures, expressions, questions, phrases, and moods all shaken up and spilled out. I just ride the wave of what emerges— "Oh, no—not that!" "Really?" "I know." "Yeah, I'm Billy." "Don't cry—be happy." "Want to sing a song?" When I'm with her these days, I rarely feel anything but loved.

On Friday, we got a report that Dad was drooling and going in and out of consciousness at lunch. There was more to it, but that was the most alarming development. Most likely, in retrospect, he was probably having an ischemic attack, one more of the stealth mini-strokes that both he and Mom have experienced over the years, she for a much longer time.

He has declined markedly in the last four to six weeks, sleeps most of the day when left to his own devices, eats little and irregularly, and rarely converses at all except in single words. We'd already been taking the initial steps of moving him into memory care (the wing where Mom has lived for the last year and a half), but this turn of events sealed the deal. Among other benefits will be better monitoring of his diet and hydration, although the accompanying loss of independence makes me sad.

Hospice quickly entered the picture, and at this stage it seems essentially just another level of care, one that's more sensitively attuned to his weakened condition and making him more comfortable. It will start out at least once a week but will probably increase somewhat from that according to his needs as the hospice personnel get to know him and us. Nowhere near round the clock . . . yet.

As D. put it recently, my father is winding down. It's very hard for me to look full on at what that means.

When D. and I were falling asleep and talking about Dad last night, D. said, "I'll miss him." That brought tears to my eyes because I really believed him—he's been a great friend to my father—and it made me think about how much I'll miss him, too.

Do You Remember?

D. and I went out for our weekly Silver Diner dinner with my father tonight, Thursday, because we'll be away in Provincetown this weekend. Dad was very quiet, but I didn't have any reason to think he was unhappy. In the car on the way there, I asked him if he had any New Year's resolutions, and he said he couldn't think of any. Then later at dinner, D. asked him again, and Dad said, not with irritation but with a small, shy chuckle, "You asked me that before—I can't think of any." (I can't either!) It's sometimes surprising what he remembers from moment to moment.

After we said good night to him, we popped in to say hi to Mom in the memory-care wing. We weren't sure she'd be up, as it was 8:30, but we found her poking around the hall in her nightie and slippers. We took her back to her room and turned on a CD to get her relaxed. It took only a few minutes to coax her into bed as the music played. We kissed her good night; D. said "I love you" and told her we'd see her in the morning—a lie but a benign one. I had told her I'd see her "in the daylight," unnecessarily staying on the factual side of the fence. We will see her in the daylight, just not tomorrow's.

Here's a picture of me and my father tonight in our tissue-paper crowns after opening some British "Christmas crackers" D. had brought.


And here's what we left playing when we said good night to Mom:

Dearie, do you remember when we
Waltzed to the Sousa band?
My, wasn't the music grand?
Chowder parties down by the seashore
Every Fourth of July . . .

Dearie, life was cheery
In the good old days gone by
Do you remember?
If you remember,
Then Dearie, you're much older than I.

Dear Friends

I had to edit my holiday letter down at the last minute when I realized that the type, reduced to fit on one page, was too hard to read and there really was just too much of it for anyone to put on a mantelpiece with the other cards. But maybe not too long for this mantelpiece. Here is the unedited version (and yet also slightly expurgated for the purpose of my semi-anonymous blog), which gives a fuller picture of my experience of 2010 than the version my friends and family received in the mail. Happy New Year to anyone reading this.

***

This is the first holiday letter I’ve ever written, but all the kids seem to be doing it now and since I continue to resist Facebook, it’s the least I can do to update you in a more substantive way than my brief notes of years past. 
 

Sometimes it seems it seems my whole life is dictated by the cyclical nature of my job. For about a week and a half every month, work is very intense. My job is almost completely portable, and I often work in the evening or on weekends during those periods. When people express concern about getting a late-night e-mail from me, I say that editing with a fire in the fireplace, a cup of tea, and my dog at my side beats working in a spooky, abandoned office at 11 p.m. I think of my job as solving problems, small and not so small, which is very satisfying.

I continue to teach, though I’ve been on a break since June and will return in March. I’ve come to believe my true calling is more as a teacher than as a writer. I did, however, complete an essay in November and have already had it rejected. So—two accomplishments checked off my list (ha ha).

In the spring, I had grand jury duty, which took me out of the office three days a week for two months. Even I’m a little amazed I managed to get my job done. It was an educational experience despite the fact that 75 percent of it was repetitious and tedious. Also despite the fact that most of the other 22 jurors were cliquish and sophomoric. We heard nearly 200 cases, almost all drug-related, many presented in less than 15 minutes. I was most surprised to learn that prosecutors in DC Superior Court are, by and large, just as young and attractive as they are on Law & Order.

During this time, my mother—who has had dementia for 13 years and been in assisted living since 2008—fell and broke a bone while wandering at 6 in the morning. After rehab, she moved into “memory care,” which has turned out to be a mostly positive step for her and she’s doing well relative to the unrelenting nature of her condition. Dad lives in the building’s general population and can see her whenever he wants, as can I and my siblings. My partner D. and I take him to the Silver Diner every weekend. I’ve slowly become better at not measuring the success of such an outing by Dad’s talkativeness or silence or by any particular words of appreciation but by the pleasure with which he devours his All American Burger Basket and the curiosity in his eyes as he surveys the people, lights, and activity around him. 
 

Both of my parents have passed age 90, and my father’s own dementia, which began more recently, has started to progress more noticeably. It occurs to me that my brother and two sisters and I are now the caretakers of our parents’ memories. With most of Mom and Dad’s pasts lost to them or jumbled, we likely know all we will ever know of them—their childhoods, their travels, our own births. These stories we’ve memorized or simply absorbed over the years are entrusted to us for safekeeping as surely as the snapshots of fuzzy-headed toddlers on beaches, the letters and diaries, the pictures of a newly married couple slicing a cake nearly 60 years ago. 
 

The four of us have been getting the family house ready to sell sometime in the near future—sorting through possessions, holding a yard sale, making repairs. One thing I know for sure: I’m lucky to have siblings I get along with, and I can’t imagine how such tasks would be bearable otherwise. 
 

My partner D.’s older sister passed away in November, and if I didn’t already appreciate the gift of having siblings I love and respect, D.’s relationship with her would be a lesson. He was her caregiver for the last 11 years since he moved her up to Washington from Florida, just as he had been for a period in the 1980s when he moved her to be near him in New York. One of the first things he ever told me when we met three years ago was that she protected him when they were kids, and he owed her the same when she became sick. That’s when I knew he was a generous and worthwhile man.

We’ve had a lot of fun this year, from seeing the extraordinarily moving and imaginative play War Horse in London (coming to Broadway in the spring) to trips to three of our other favorite places—Provincetown (three times, with another coming up at New Year's), Vermont, and New York City—to trolling flea markets and antiques shops whenever and wherever we can. His job as a dance professor and director of the arts scholarship program keep him very busy, and he’s a much-loved mentor to many young people present and past.

D. and I each have homes we love—his house in the suburbs (less than five minutes from where I grew up) with its lovingly tended gardens, my House at Pooh Corner condo in the city. I recently sent Doug a passage from a New York Times article about this year’s National Book Award winner in fiction, Jaimy Gordon: “Ms. Gordon, 66, has taught writing for almost 30 years at Western Michigan University and lives by herself in a two-story house next to a lake here. Her husband, Peter Blickle, 17 years her junior, teaches German at the university and lives by another lake, about a 20-minute walk away. His wife goes over there most evenings with her dog and they have a glass of schnapps.”

The subject line of my e-mail was “See, we’re not so strange.” D. replied: “I wish we had the lake and the 20 minute walk instead of a 20 minute drive! Let’s do the schnapps.” The truth is we’re not schnapps drinkers, but we share a pot of tea every time we get together.

This month marks the end of my first year of being vegan—the most fun and profound development of the year, full of discoveries, creativity, and good food. Like many, I never thought I’d be able to be vegan, even as it became harder to argue against it. Then I read the nonfiction book Eating Animals by the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. The fact that Foer may not even be vegan himself (he never says so, though he is vegetarian) speaks to the power of his writing in that it had the effect of changing my life. I sensed before reading it that it was what I needed to make the leap. I wanted the push. 
 

In some ways, my life feels more expansive than ever, in others more stripped down. Without denying the stresses and uncertainties of life, both impressions feel welcome. I wish you happy endings and beginnings of your own.

So Runs the World Away

Thanks to Diablo for sending me the following poem by Mary Oliver, a resident, as it happens of Provincetown, where I recently spent a happy week and a half.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

***

I spent many hours with D. biking the trails in and around Ptown, including the magnificent Cape Cod Rail Trail, which we hope will someday extend all the way up the Cape to Provincetown. I haven't owned a bike of my own since I was a child but am on the verge of buying my first adult bike. This is thanks to D. and the roads we've ridden together over the last nearly three years.

While on the Cape, we had a very nice visit with a former grad school professor/writing teacher of mine and his wife. He retired a few years ago and moved up there about three years ago. I used to see him at least a couple of times a year at various social or literary occasions but hadn't talked with him at length since his move, so it was nice to reconnect. One thing I told him was that he was a big influence on my teaching, as, among many other things, I learned from him that it's okay to teach from notes, that no one will think less of you if you refer to them. In fact, I still write out notes before the first session of every workshop I teach, and later sessions if I'm teaching an essay I haven't taught before, but the interesting thing is that I refer to my notes less and less. It's the writing of them that imprints them.

One of the last times I spent time with my old teacher and his wife was at a Josh Ritter concert at the Birchmere, probably in 2006. Now in his late sixties, he's a huge Josh Ritter fan. As it happened, I had just downloaded Josh Ritter's new CD, So Runs the World Away, onto my iPod before my vacation. I was just listening to it the other day and was struck by its style, so different from his earlier, more classic singer/songwriter mode. It's kind of epic sea shanty meets art song. I need to listen to it more.
I started this post almost two weeks ago (through most of that last paragraph). And just tonight I bought a novel, Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, whose title reminded me of Josh Ritter's and then of this unfinished post.
The book I have to finish before starting that one is Rosanne Cash's memoir, Composed. I just finished a lovely chapter about six months she spent living in London at age 20 and 21, and that chapter ends on a note of wistfulness about friends and mentors she lost touch with over the years, some of whom she reconnected with later in moving and unexpected ways, some of whom died before she had a chance to.
I hope to see my teacher again the next time I'm passing through.

Foreign Countries

Greetings from Provincetown. The last time I was here, it was New Year's, the population closed in on itself for warmth. It's now the height of summer—tattoos breathing for the first time in months, vacation beards sprouting, people relaxing into each other and themselves. One of the notes in the guest book of our condo, from two men, adds a P.S.: "We held hands walking down the streets of Provincetown." A big duh to anyone who has been here more than once or who is from a big progressive city, but a revelation when you've never done it before anywhere. The same couple: "It's like coming to another country from our beautiful but conservative Maine."

D. and I saw the Swedish movie The Girl Who Played With Fire last night. Excellent, complex, disturbing, but as far from Ikea's cheerful dining rooms and entertainment centers as you could imagine. Though Ikea is, funnily enough, among the credits.

Come Fly Away

Greetings from the Hotel Roger Williams in New York City, a brief escape during a busy and stressful time. I had to come to Manhattan for the weekend to have a moment to blog. Blame eight-week grand jury duty three days a week (at the midpoint as of yesterday), the usual work chaos (now compressed into two days a week as well as evenings and weekends), trying to keep up with teaching (my one break from which is this weekend, hence the trip to New York), and a family crisis -- Mom fell, was hospitalized, and is now in rehab. More on that when I have time to reflect.

Plan for the day: the new Hester Street Fair, the vegan bakery BabyCakes, maybe lunch at this longtime favorite of D's, dinner at the vegan restaurant Candle Cafe (I have the cookbook), and tonight Come Fly Away.

If It All Fell to Pieces Tomorrow, Would You Still Be Mine?

Last weekend, D. and I took a drive up to Adamstown, Pennsylvania -- Antiques Capital U.S.A., I'll have you know -- and as we were wandering through one antiques mall, "Take It to the Limit" came on over the sound system (antiques malls play '60s and '70s Top 40 more than any other genre of music), and I realized that that song evokes the 1970s -- not just the decade but my experience of the decade, whose latter half corresponded exactly with my adolescence -- more than any other song, period.

One of my sisters, my next-oldest sibling, loved the Eagles, so I heard a lot of them then. "Take It to the Limit," besides being a great radio sing-along when you're alone in the car, takes me back in an instant to the winter of 1976. (To confirm that my memory was placing it correctly, I Googled it just now, and indeed it was released as a single in November 1975.)

Nothing momentous happened. I was a high-school freshman in a Catholic boys' school. My sister and I were the only ones at home; our older brother and sister were away at college. It was a time of puffy down jackets, hair parted down the middle for guys, velour shirts. When you're 14, the shy youngest of four, you spend a lot of time observing your siblings, hearing about their dates, their friends, the concerts they went to (Jackson Browne, Little Feat), the movies they saw (Love and Death, Barry Lyndon), the parties, the summer jobs and the trips to the beach. Sometimes you fantasize about a time when you'll do all of those things -- see an R-rated film, have a girlfriend, get a down jacket or a velour shirt of your own.

You spend years learning about desire.

Next thing you know you're a fortysomething man wandering through an antiques mall in Amish country with your fiftysomething boyfriend -- surveying the Depression glass, the Stangl dishware, the back issues of Life magazine in plastic sleeves, the tchotchkes of way more generations than your own -- and a '70s pop song full of unabashed falsetto urgency comes on from somewhere unknown and fills you with an unaccountable longing, followed hard by a strange kind of pure satisfaction that where you are is just good enough.

Winter Weekend

I didn't have to do any digging out during the snowstorm, because I'd taken my car in for service Friday morning and was allowed to leave it there after the work was done (though how and when I'll be able to get it home from the suburbs and find a space to park in my neighborhood, I'm not sure). Others in my condo beat me to the shoveling on and around our property (about which I feel somewhat guilty). My ventures outside have been mainly to walk the dog -- multiple times a day -- so I've seen the snow's nature, in the air and on the ground, change over the last two days, like a a body blooming, coming into its own, slowing down, then yielding to the onslaught of footprint and tire.

I baked and cooked -- pancakes, muffins, bread, pasta with avocado and tomatoes, Irish oatmeal with apples and cranberries. And I ate.

D. and I have been apart, separated by the weather, like lovers on separate continents, though we're only a handful of miles away. He's finally on his way over as I type, having braved the roads, the Metro, and the icy streets.

Mom and Dad's phone service and cable -- their only connections to the outside world unless one of us is visiting -- were out for a time, but they're back up. This weekend I had a good excuse to have no obligations to them, other than checking in (when it was possible). So I had that rare thing: a weekend at home, where I got to walk and sit and doze through full cycles of sunlight and dark; scents of breakfast, lunch, dinner; the intermittent scrape of shovels on pavement, like an animal's insistent pawing to be let inside.

Winter Light

We arrived in Provincetown this afternoon around 3:30, and it was already turning dark by 4:45 as we wandered through town. It's a lot quieter than either D. or I expected for New Year's Eve (though we didn't expect excitement or crowds). You get a sense of what it would be like to live here year-round. You'd need to find your comfort and light largely from within your own hearth -- and the beauty around you. I joked to D., "Maybe we can get ourselves on the dinner-party circuit while we're here." (We leave day after tomorrow.)

We're back in the hotel room right now waiting for our 9:00 dinner reservations. And after? Who knows -- maybe that piano bar we walked by every night the last two summers, the rousing strains of "Memory" and "Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine" never quite succeeding in tempting us inside.

As last summer's vacation wound to a close, I was overcome with a feeling of deep safety in the remoteness of Provincetown, the paradox of security embedded in what is truly a sense of being on the edge of the world, the outermost reach, the very tip of the crook of a beckoning finger.

Happy New Year.