December 24, 2020
Happy Christmas eve, friends! It’s been two weeks since I last wrote and never did I ever think that in this year I’d be saying I didn’t have time to write because I was busy being happy. I got my first Christmas tree in eight years and decorated it with ornaments I made - cutting the LOVE emblem from a Philadelphia koozie my roommate left behind, running a thread through my NYPL decal, and turning every holiday card into an ornament so that your faces were part of my Christmas joy. I got a free menorah set from the local Chabad and lit the menorah every night, reciting blessings and inviting my family over for latkes. I baked SEVEN KINDS OF COOKIES and delivered them to friends around the city today. I shipped Christmas gifts early enough that I didn’t need express delivery! Tonight my children are coming over for dinner and I’m so wildly grateful I don’t know where to start. Here’s a photo I took on the Columbia campus as I made deliveries today. May it delight you as much as it did me.
December 25, 2020
This morning I started my day with prayers and meditation that turned to joyous weeping and continued with a beautiful day of family. Why do I feel so wobbly tonight?
December 26, 2020
Really did not see this letdown coming. Pray, meditate, walk, reach out. How tf am I going to make it through the next three months? Can I watch Ted Lasso again?
December 27, 2020
Yay it’s Chiefs game day! Oh, I can’t get it on any of the fifty-leven channels I have? Please remind me not to watch Mr. Robot when I’m in this mood.
December 28, 2020
I’m staring down the business end of three dark months of winter how will I survive when will the vaccine come I should have kept more cookies I’m so grateful I didn’t have long term COVID complications a walk will do me good thank G_d my friend Hope called. People! Yes people are the answer.
December 29, 2020
Why did I wake up thinking of every failure of my life and then begin imagining all the ways this current stability and equilibrium can go wrong? HELP! I wrote in my journal and it was both a prayer and a demand.
December 30, 2020
Something shifted today. Yesterday all I felt were the cosmic losses and today it’s as if my container grew and they’re all still there but the growth is there too. We are so frail. How do we hold this much death, cruelty, indifference without shutting down? How do we embrace the joys wholeheartedly without constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. If we CAN’T FUCKING BE TOGETHER how do we share the gains and come alongside to hold the losses? How can I live in community when I am mostly alone?
December 31, 2020
Last night someone on Twitter said they weren’t taking any chances with this year, so today I cleaned my apartment from stem to stern. I put a period at the end of the last sentence in my journal and bought a new one. I cooked black eyed peas for tomorrow, took out the trash and the recycling and shook the dust off my feet as I walked to my children’s apartment for dinner, an early champagne toast, and a game of Rummikub. And in the darkness walking home I let go of the past yet again, assented to however long this roller coaster lasts, looked into the unknown, and said the mantra I learned from an acting teacher which has served me for 20+ years—All will be revealed.
January 1, 2021
“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
And yet…
Were it not for the bumps of the past week I would have shared two beautiful pieces of writing with you and they were such gifts to me that I cannot imagine leaving them with last year.
My friend Sandee wrote about her legendary mother on this, the second Christmas that she’s celebrated without her. No one who met Toni Hill could forget her spirit, her knack with Christmas lights, and her embrace of life, despite losses that would break most of us. Yet, hard as it is to write about those we love best, every one of those qualities are vividly portrayed in this tribute.
Passersby would slow down to stare and neighbors drove by annually in their golf carts to marvel at what this woman could create, on her own, on a corner lot in the Panhandle.
My Twitter and now IRL friend Aaron Randle is another Kansas Citian living in New York. Last week he penned a piece for his former employer, The New York Times (ever heard of it?) about how sports helped him survive a truly brutal year, and oh did it resonate.
Pragmatism, science and common sense — your head — tells you that playing sports in a pandemic is a foolish idea. The heart says otherwise. It doesn’t make sense, but what has this year?
Happy New Year, beloveds.