Brooklyn Weekend Moments

I stepped in the cat's auxiliary water dish. In my apartment, its presence is one of the ways you know that it's summer. The air conditioner won't get dragged out until the next time I have friends over.

I gave the cat a deep tissue fur massage while she purred on my abs. She shifted to tuck her little feet against my hip.

After years of eschewing them almost constantly in Gchat messages and Facebook statuses, I have realized that I love capital letters again.

I put sunscreen on for a cloudy rain, and then the sun came out. On my way out, I ran into my downstairs neighbor by the flagstoned nook that holds the trash cans and chatted - she said she'd let me go "because we'll stand here talking all day." (She's right.)

Outside the library, I realized that I was running in place in salsa steps.

Norwegian black metal is fitting for a grey day run. The sun peeked out. Should I switch to Letters to Cleo or something to encourage it?

It's amazing what a shower, a pretty dress, and a little makeup does for a grey mood.

Realization during a lovely reunion with a high school friend: things happen at their own time, and you are who you are because of them. Sometimes things happen when they need to.

I snagged two framed Van Gogh prints on my block from the detritus of one of the billion stoop sales today. I asked how much they were, and the dude said that anyone who could carry them could have them for free. I staggered along with one under each arm, and nobody laughed. When I got to my building, my neighbor leaped up from his spot on the stairs to open up for me.

On my run home from kickboxing, I passed a fuzzy dachshund trying to bring its owners into the pet stuff store.

Denizens of my neighborhood are not shying away from the heat, and they are scantily clad. (I passed a small child holding up her dress to show her undies.)

Sometimes the small moments are the most important ones to notice.

Little Things

I think that the little things kept my mother going through cancer, since so many of the more traditionally important ones were off-limits or impossible. When you can't go outside, the tweeting of a bird at the window is a bright spot in a monotonous day. When all your body does is hurt, an hour nap is a beautiful thing. Three months after her death, as I spiral into one of the most suffocating phases of grief (when the Toad Cave looms behind everything I do), I notice that the little things are all that feel important, some days. I only have a small fraction of my normal energy, so I have to be proud of myself for running in the unseasonable cold when before, I did it every day. A caring note from a friend means the world.

I have been thinking a lot about how to pull myself out of the cave. I discovered that a midday bath, in my particular bathroom, is a soul rejuvenator. (Listening to Charles Bradley at the same time helps even more.) I relaxed in the bath salted water in my tub, adding more and more hot water to the lukewarm silk of the bath oils. Then I had an exquisite moment under the shower, looking at the sun streaming through the water, making its way from the skylight to my face. For just a minute, I felt like everything might actually be okay, like my mom always used to tell me.

Some of my more prosaic small pleasures include: Vitamin Water Zero, warm breezes, a cat purring, my living room on a sunny morning, my block at night.

Hisham Matar, Multilingual Selves, and Memo(ir/y) of Another

I discovered Hisham Matar by chance, on the New Yorker's podcast. I started listening idly, thinking that he was a writer my mother would have liked - she liked memoir, and tales of faraway places, especially the Middle East. I had to catch my breath when he described writing about his kidnapped father: "the challenge is trying to retain the person, and not have this event abstract them." I read this as how the hard part is keeping the person whole, or, in my case, as alive as possible. The challenge is to represent my mother as I knew her in a way that is recognizable to the others who knew her, and that is as authentic to her as I can make it.

Authenticity has always been an academic interest of mine, and something bordering on a personal fascination. When I lived in France, I wondered where my American self stopped and my French self began. I could tell that they were different. The tones of their voices were different. Their attitudes were different, too. My French self was tentative, in some ways, when words failed me, but also fairly argumentative, yet more polite with shopkeepers (as any Parisian will tell you, a pretty important skill). (Here I go again with the refracted self.)

Matar goes on: in writing a memoir, "the motor of the imagination, [which] gets excited about these black holes of not knowing, binds us to the person." The mysteries of my mother's life - the stories I have to reconstruct, the questions I can't ask, the specific emotions or thoughts to which I might not have had access - can only be filled in by me, now, and by the others left behind who loved her. We recreate her every time we talk about her, and we ensure that she will never disappear every time we say her name or picture her face or share a memory. The mystery, Matar soothes me, isn't as frightening as my mother's loss is. It's a way of knowing her in a different way, from a different distance, but it helps keep her alive all the same. 

As I write this post, I watch an Italian movie (by way of Austrian filmmakers), La Pivellina. The tale, of a red-haired circus performer who comes across an abandoned two year-old, utterly charms me. I have to look up to catch the subtitles and really understand (since, at this point, my Italian matches directly up with that of the eponymous toddler). But sometimes I let the sound wash over me, in its music that I'm not yet able to decipher. Head down, looking at my writing, I try to catch intonation and inflection. I try to guess what the characters are talking about. It's not entirely unlike trying to represent a person on a page in the way Matar describes it, particularly when you are delving into their past, a half reconstructing a story you've been told, and half inventing it.

Dharma Body

Thich Nhat Hanh says that when the Buddha was dying, he told his followers not to despair, that they still would be able to encounter his dharma body. I suppose this is one way of conceptualizing the presence of my mom's spirit that I so often feel.

I want to unpack it a bit, though. Dharma is, per Wikipedia (I know, but go with me), "that which upholds, supports or maintains the regulatory order of the universe." Based on the distinction that the Buddha draws between the physical body and the dharma body, we can infer that the latter is not corporeal. It must be what many of us would think of as spiritual, or the soul itself. But in the West, we don't have this added dimension of support for the universe.

I'm thinking of the dharma body now as the universe's scaffolding - everyone's soul/true self pitching in like the turtles in the Native American legend, each playing his or her own part in holding up the universe - or repairing it, if we want to turn to my originally chosen spiritual tradition. (I'll get to shul again one of these days, I swear). I love the way different faith and belief traditions dovetail; my mom's memorial will be a testament to that, as it fit with her beliefs, too.

Though I feel so disparate, not unified, scattered in my grief, I also know that I am being held together by certain things, and one of those is my mother's dharma body and the force of her love.