To Where Does Cool Move?

My friend Stef is putting her condo up for sale which she did not consult me about, rendering me embittered, sulky, and tying a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS around her building so no one will want to buy her unit and she and her adorable fam will have to be my neighbor forever. But I'm happy for her, especially because I know she's moving to a more junior town for all the right reasons. "We're not saving anything living here," she said, "And it would be so cool to be able to be saving, to be able to explore Montessori [for her daughter Mbel]."

It really would be cool. Would it be cooler than cool?

As I look around our place with the spiral staircase which Baby Girl is inevitably going to take a skate down since I myself who has mastered steps over 28 years have already skated down...As I consider the attributes of our home's location: Close to the T, within walking distance to everything you could want, a 10 minute drive to the airport, I begin to consider all those attributes as part of our Cool Urban Life. I love the life we have cultivated here, but the priorities are shifting, sometimes rapidly, sometimes as slow but large glaciers roving over the peninsulas of my twentysomething desires.

We have no plans to move any time soon, but I feel its imminence in a way, and I'm okay with it, I have to be okay with it. I've got a cool girl to be providing for, and she's worth the sacrifice of a spiral staircase.

Even if she is not a genius...

she's a cute little Easter egg, isn't she?

Full of It

Glee. It is a 2nd grade spelling word. Double consonant. Long double "e." It's sort of a throwaway word. A synonym for happiness, but why use "glee" when you can just use "happiness"? The difference, I feel, is in the actual pronunciation. You have to smile when you say glee. It's hard to get out the glee without the smile. It's almost onomatopoeic. Glee!!!!!

Still, it's kind of a disgusting word, isn't it? Glee? It's worse than a Mr. Roger's expression. It falls dangerously in Barney territory, and that, frankly, is a scary zone where everyone appears to have done a great deal of things with balloons and whippets. It's one of those words that rhymes with way too many other words and lands squarely in giddy songs about trees and bees and knees and downhill skis.

But yesterday? Honestly. For a few moments, I experienced this tingly feeling of contentment that I could only characterize as gleeful. I felt glee because my life was just the way it was. I was just sitting on the hard floor, laden with exerballs and goldfish cracker crumbs, reading a book to Baby Girl whilst smelling the mix of yogurt and Johnson's shampoo in her hair and I felt such glee.

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The people I admire most are not the ones that do earth-shattering things with their time and talents or the ones that are just cozy with what they have, but those that do both. They take what they're given and never stagnate, and continue to grow grow grow, but even when every proverbial Uno hand is a wild card Draw Four and the color changes to precisely the color they don't have in their hands at all, they never stop hoping and they never shirk the feelings of glee whenever they may come, which is usually the unlikeliest of yogurt-shampoo scented of times.

***

Yes, my kid is carrying a basket with a basket inside.

Grief Begets Good

I'm supposed to be finishing my flash lesson which I'm presently four weeks behind on for my online course. But I can't seem to will self to do industrious. I'm feeling heavy and cerebral and I've been feeling this way all week. The holidays. Do they ever force a kind of plastic happiness on you? Do they ever compel you to push all that grief and distress all the way there under the tree skirt, because you are meant to think those feelings are immaterial?

Because I think those feelings should be allowed to coexist there with merry and bright and eyes all aglow, without being tagged Scrooge. Without a Bah Humbug Dismissal.

I've been hearing of so many painful things happening in the lives of my family and friends this week. I won't list them like a rap sheet of tragic. But I won't Polyannalyze them away as if they should be marginalized because it's the holidays.

At the heart of this season for me is a spirit of sharing, and sometimes it is our burdens that are meant to be parceled out so that somehow, the sadness truly can be divided in love.

Lately, I'm lifting up a lot of prayers all day long, and honestly, I'm having some chats with God right now that you do not want to listen in on. And yet, I am so glad that God is so much bigger than all of the stuff that this world can afford us. I'm buoyed by His assurance that His mercy is good and true.

"But though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of His mercies." ~ Lamentations 3:32

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I've got also two little gems looking up at me that remind me of one more mark of this season. The beauty and innocence of a child's belief in all that is good.