Linnetontheleaf

Most weekday mornings and evenings, I am on a commuter train through northern NJ into NYC and back. I’ve done this for an astonishing 20 years, and have mostly enjoyed it (except when the trains don’t run well), as there is lots of interest to see along the way, not just suburban backyards of sandboxes and swingsets. Today I made a partial list.
Stretches of incredible graffiti on the walls of the track cuts — I have some censorious elderly misgivings about graffiti, but sometimes it’s so ingenious in its design and eye-popping in its color that I love it anyway. I especially appreciate the humor of scrawled remarks such as ‘my mom thinks I’m at a sleepover.’
A parking lot where dozens of day laborers gather every morning to seek work. Movers, landscapers and contractors who’ve hired them report that they are excellent workers.  I find this touching, sad and wholly admirable: working like this, far from home in the US, is the best way to support their families (I bet nearly all the money is selflessly sent home to Guatamala, El Salvador, etc.), whom they can now never see.
I’m also touched by the little scenes which reveal homely human habitation of the most industrial areas along the route. There’s an old-school picnic table outside a foundry, where I often see arriving workers sitting chatting with their morning cups of coffee, a companionable scene.
The Meadowlands, after decades of industrialization and pollution, have been cleaned up in recent years, so that they now support lots of wildlife, including several nesting pairs of osprey. I’ve seen the occasional majestic white-headed osprey perched on a power pole, also countless egrets, cormorants, blue herons and red-wing blackbirds. Bald eagles are also said to nest in the area. Isn’t that nifty, just a few miles from New York City?

I was recently lucky enough to spend a couple of days in New Orleans, though with the very specific and limited goal of visiting a college with one of our offspring, so we confined ourselves to Uptown and didn’t have much time for sightseeing. (Or even for music or dining, NOLA’s two great triumphs.) Still, I found just walking down the street to be a highly aesthetic experience, because the balmy air was deliciously, seductively perfumed with the scent of confederate jasmine and gardenias. Where I live in the NE near NYC (zone 6 for you gardeners), these are diminutive houseplants. In New Orleans, jasmine vines clamber over walls and fences in jungly billows, and gardenias grow to be the size of minivans. Both are laden with flowers, luxuriantly spangling their dark glossy leaves. It’s like being in the world’s finest perfumerie, though no human creation could match the sweetness of these fragrances.

I’ve been preoccupied with a work situation today which is really preying on my mind. It will probably blow over and be forgotten quickly but feels major at the moment. I wish I were stronger-minded and could push these intrusive troubled thoughts aside, but I rarely can.
I recently had a little lesson in priorities, however. I had a pretty severe health scare and spent a couple of days anxiously awaiting test result. During that time, I found, nothing else could shake me: all that mattered was that lab report. I barely batted an eye when I dropped my phone in the toilet!
It shouldn’t take worrying about alarming lab results to get one’s priorities straight, but I guess sometimes it helps.

Ever heard a child make an adorable comment which totally changed your view of something?  Seeing things through the wondering eyes of a newer resident of the planet can be refreshing and delightful. Our son was especially good at this when he was little, constantly delivering messages from the new, unfamiliar world which he inhabited.

One day he spotted our parish priest walking through our suburban town. Having never seen him street clothes, only in clerical robes, our son had formed a comical misapprehension, we learned when he excitedly pointed him out to us as ‘the king!’. I also loved his comment when he first glimpsed the New York skyline as we drove towards the city, which was suddenly laid out before us in all its vastness. Gasping in awe, our little boy exclaimed, ‘a castle!’.

I learned so much from hearing these precious comments every day during our son’s young childhood.  They reminded me to continually cultivate a sense of wonder.

I recently cleaned out a file on one of my computers which contained a number of personal items from my children’s younger years — among them, several invitations to theme birthday parties of which I have almost no memory. I brought up first one, then another, asking myself, ‘did we really have a Mean Girls birthday party? a  dinosaur party?’ It’s unsettling to have no recollection of these milestone family events!

I assert that I actually have a very good memory (my family is always astonished by the specific details I can dredge up about people, places and incidents in our past), but that there’s just too much to remember!  Even precious memories are constantly being crowded out by new events and information — like that scene in  Inside Out where workers weed out the old to make space for the new in long term memory.

The process is inevitable, but I wish I had better conscious control of it — instead of agonizing over that speeding ticket, the time my boss reamed me out, or the argument with my spouse, how much better it would be to savor recollections of those birthday parties!

I started this blog, oh so long ago now, with such high hopes! I’ve always written (both as employment and for pleasure) and hoped that blogging would open new doors for my work. But I was surprised to realize how vulnerable I felt exposing my life and feelings online. It made me question whether I was really a writer, if I wasn’t prepared to lay bare my personal secrets. Too distressed to continue, I eventually abandoned the project and resumed my hermit ways.
But helplessly, obsessively, I kept writing — it’s an addiction, a form of therapy, an outlet, a pastime, a friend. In my four decades of putting pen to paper and fingers to keys, I’ve amassed shelves full of journals, long accounts of family trips, essays, poems and song lyrics. I admit that I am powerless over the written word!
So I’m reviving this blog, with a more outward focus this time (since I found personal revelation so uncomfortable), in the hope of finding readers for the words I’m driven to write.

Having written all my life, I thought blogging might be a good outlet for me. I admired how Julie Powell had brokered her Julia Child cooking project into a book deal, and thought maybe I could follow suit on some level.
But I was surprised to discover myself strangely shy online, unwilling to reveal enough about myself to make Linnet very interesting! I didn’t realize how much I cherished my privacy, and how unwilling I was to expose myself and family to public scrutiny.  And unfortunately, these hermit-like impulses seem quite antithetical to blogging!
I considered this a failing at first (a uniquely 21st century one), but have gradually accepted that I’m just not cut out for a tell-all sort of project.  Maybe not even a tell-some kind of project!

But there must be alternatives, surely, that will keep me writing publicly without making me so intensely uncomfortable, and my new year’s resolution is to find them.  So the Linnet will live, I hope!

Heading south again late this week to visit several of my mother’s most cherished friends.  When she died, I realized that I didn’t wish to detach from her social network, which had nourished me nearly as much as it did her — so that will be our summer vacation this year.  Altho I’ve been totally unhysterical and philoscophical about my mother’s passing, it is hard to imagine being with these people without tears.  Cathartic tears perhaps?

I continue to think about the changes I want to bring about as a result of my trip to Costa Rica.  It took a while, but eventually I realized that what was so appealing was the PERSON I WAS THERE.  Someone more adventurous and liberated.  Can I be this person at home?  That is the gezornenplatt!

Costa Rica was a dream, a dream that might change my life.  You know all those novels, movies and songs where people go to the tropics and lose their inibitions and discover their true personalities?  That very nearly happened to me.

Indeed, it seems that it may STILL happen to me.  Something about the novelty and charm of the experience  made me realize the extent to which I have been resisting much inner guidance, perhaps living a false life.  Once I’ve mulled it over sufficiently to be sure I’m not making a drastic mistake, that must be corrected. 

Stay tuned — when Lucy Honeychurch starts to live, that will be something to see.

I have just experienced a brief but serious medical scare (one of those heart-stopping calls in which they say they need to follow up on a little something they noticed in your routine screening), and am still weak with relief that the worries proved to be nothing.

As such things often do, it’s put the world back into clearer perspective for me, and I’m grateful for that.   Almost worth the days of anxiety to have this renewed discernment about what’s important and what’s not!

We’re off to Costa Rica next week, a different sort of vacation for our family — we usually go to Europe and look at churches and paintings, but we’re doing eco-tourism in CR, a complete switch.  Sloths and monkeys!  Coffee plantations and volcanoes!  The Pacific! 

All this and my health too — I’m a lucky woman, and lucky to KNOW it.