When Kay and I were kids living in the far-flung suburbs of Sydney, we used to dream of living in New York City. The appeal, to me, was specifically being able to order Thai food at 3am. Now, of course, my digestive system rebels at such outlandish notions. I do eat home-delivered Thai about once a week, but at a civilized hour.

That said, my daily life in this very dense neighbourhood is far better than long-ago lonely teenager could ever have dreamed. Yesterday I bumped into Ann Hughes and Jakie, Julia’s future husband, as I exchanged library books in the Mission branch of the SFPL. I got home in time to take Claire to wushu, and then I put on gardening gloves and attacked the weeds in our flower bed. Gilbert and Ada came out and found me there, so Gilbert went off to run errands while Ada helped me in the garden and Julia sat on the stoop and made up stories to entertain us. And then we all went to collect Claire from wushu. Did I mention she has her green belt? No? Really?

I’ve been sleeping erratically, waking at 4am and drowsing fitfully until the alarm goes off at dawn, so it was a bit surprising that last night, squashed between Importunate Cat and Julia, I had the best night’s sleep I’d had in ages. Not to mention an elaborate and escapist dream. He was an exiled North African prince. I was a cypherpunk anarchist whose help he sought, but instead I subjected him to long lectures on the evils of kleptocracies. We lived in a sunny north-Mediterranean city whose skyscrapers could be raised on pneumatic lifts to avoid tsunamis. You know. That old story.

We all woke very late and had to scuttle to get to school in time for the bell.

you should have warned me that Julia gets, uh, rather *excited* on chocolate!
she is in the front room yelling, “fight like a man Dre”
and “YAY DRE!!!”
yaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!
she’s on the purple chair jumping up and down.
and screaming!
it’s pretty funny.
Not sure she’ll ever fall asleep. ever. for her whole life!
I’ll let you know how this all turns out.

New horse in the barn. 15 years old, longtime show horse, purebred Oldenburg gelding. Lesson with Colin on Sunday morning. Colin rode in the Seoul Olympics. It is at once shaming to be the worst rider in the lesson by far, and inspiring to be in the lesson at all. Colin always has something trenchant to say, like a Zen master. This time it is that I am hanging on with the backs of my thighs. If I stop doing that, my heels should sink.

Which reminds me of an exercise we’ve been doing lately: three-loop serpentines at the rising trot with no stirrups. The point is to make you stop hanging on with your legs. Of course when you think about it, if you can’t hang on with your legs, and you don’t have any stirrups, the only way to rise to the trot is by periodically levitating. Which is impossible. We do it anyway.

I bounced around on Archie’s back at the canter until I suddenly found a place to sit like a centaur. I should have bookmarked it, because after every fence he stuck his head between his knees and bucked. I only just barely stayed on each time, but kept going out of childish pride. The challenge was to keep my heels down and my hands quiet. I tried. Colin said: “I can see that you’re trying, and no trainer can ask more than that.”

Afterwards I said: “I was pretty sure I was going to eat dirt.” “You had me worried a couple of times,” he said, grinning.

Francis asked what it’s like to have lessons with an Olympian versus with a regular mortal, and the answer is: they’re the same, only the jumps are higher and you’re expected to do everything to a much higher standard. But we walk, trot and canter on each rein exactly like beginners. It would be very boring to watch.

I rode Archie again on Tuesday night and he didn’t buck much. I had more trouble getting him to move off my leg. But I also got a little bit of nice work out of him. I forgot to blog one particularly good ride I had on Omni, where I started to get a feel for keeping the reins alive and having a conversation with him through them. I tried that on Archie as well (smarting from a comment of Colin’s, perfectly fair, that I let my hand go dead sometimes) and he seemed to respond.

That feeling of surging forward into contact, with the horse round and soft under you and no coercion anywhere, just flow: it’s good. I went a whole hour without mourning the tsunami victims or being sick with fear for my family. It’s an unforgivably elitist pastime, I know, but nothing’s better at forcing me to let go and live in the moment, attentive to the phenomenal world.

Archie is a hugger. He will rest his head against your chest and you can put your arms around him and hold him and breathe into his mane. He reminds me, a lot, of Alfie and Noah, the best horses ever. Sarah says he’s too nice to stay in the lesson program long, and not to get too attached. Check.

I keep forgetting to mention that while we were up at the Big Yellow House I figured out the secret to happiness. It is to make enough money without hurting anyone, if you can; to work humbly at something impossibly difficult (like fiction or equitation); to find the people you can love unconditionally and love them with everything you’ve got; and to play games with them. Hence the world-historical importance of Carcassonne and mahjongg.

I didn’t promise that it was going to be original.

I happened to be online when both the Christchurch and Honshu quakes took place. Christchurch was unbearable, of course, but Honshu – I checked quake.usgs.gov and saw the magnitude at 8.9 and thought, nah, that’s gotta be a typo.

If only. Then after I glanced at headlines on Saturday morning that suggested Fukushima was under control I told Claire, with whom I had been discussing the internal design of nuclear reactors, that it was going to be okay. How hard am I kicking myself now? I daren’t even bring it up again. It was another example, and 2011 has been freakin’ full of them, of the sheer hubris of having a kid. You engender these lives that you love past all reason, far better than you love yourself, and you send them out into a world with leukaemia and tsunamis in it. All you can do is bite your knuckles, and hope, and tell them over and over again how perfect they are, how magnificent and unlikely, how whenever you look at them, it feels like the sun is coming out.

You have to set up college funds and lean on them to do their homework and practice their piano and teach them table manners and force them to eat a frickin vegetable at least once in a while: and you must ALSO shower them with your love as if the life they’ve had so far is all they are getting, as if they’re going to walk under a bus tomorrow. Gotta be the ant AND the grasshopper, every second, without fail. Or else.

I ordered an emergency kit off Amazon. I tried to figure out how I can fit NERT training into my already impossible schedule. I kissed them goodbye this morning. But I honestly don’t know how I can do this. I want to grab my little family and run away with them to somewhere safe: but the image I always had in my head of a safe place was -ha! – Christchurch, New Zealand.

I want my mum.

Mister Teatime is Elton Pope from the Love & Monsters episode of Doctor Who.

Susan is Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey.

You will not be tested on this.

I can’t leave the house without five bags of stuff to donate. I’m rearranging the furniture. I’m not myself, at all.

Pretty sure this is what we all have, including Jeremy and Blanca. The girls had bright red cheeks, fever and snot noses. I have the aching joints and malaise, by which I mean I keep leaking tears and feel no hope for anything, ever. I can’t recommend it.

This is the Big House story for beginners. Everyone Speaks In Topic Sentences, and the estate is entailed in default of heirs male. I am loving it to death.

Rode Omni today. Big Roman-nosed true black Thoroughbred. He’s the one I call “The Professor” in public and “Black Beauty” in the privacy of my own dork head. I was hungover and underslept, and he likes to carry his head on one side, and buck, and go into reverse without warning; and sometimes all three at once.

But I didn’t fall off. We rode a pretty intricate little pattern, circling into one fence and rolling back to the next and jumping that on an angle to cut inside another fence. I jammed my heels down and kept my hands low and when he got antsy, I tried not to react.

It works best when I establish a good rhythm, let the obstacles come to us and keep my chin up on the landing side. Isn’t that always the way?

Right now I am aching all over. How I know I am getting my money’s worth.

From The Truth About Grief:

Allan Kellehear, the Australian sociologist, wrote in 2005, “Australian ways of grieving… are not logical outcomes of our local experience but are rather socially constructed ways of understanding inherited from a variety of dominant foreign influences.”

From Among Others:

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect us to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one…

It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

17_vows_are_made

Originally uploaded by yatima

Would marry again!!11!

Seldom has there been a more opportune book. (Opportune is a fantastic word. Let’s use it more.)

…those who felt the lowest amount of stress possess a personality trait called “dispositional resilience,” which was defined by three components: they remained connected to other people, rather than isolated; they felt that their grief was manageable and under control; and they embraced and learned from new experiences, rather than avoiding or feeling threatened by them. They were psychologically hardy, optimistic and able to rise to the challenge…

I already know that happiness is a choice. Now I am starting to believe that strength can be a choice, too.

Drew died on Friday. I’m pretty sure Tina waited till this morning to tell me so that I could have a happy birthday yesterday. (I did.) Tina is Jen’s sister. She was with Drew when he died.

Drew was another member of the big Santa-Cruz-Burning-Man-beach-party-with-dancing community that took me to their collective hearts when I moved to California. I saw a lot of them through the late nineties and early 2000s; right up till I had Claire, really. My relationship with Drew was very simple. Every time we saw each other we would give each other huge hugs and catch up quickly on what had been happening (me: marriage, a new job; Drew: cancer.)

Then we would dance.

It’s been, as you may have surmised, a challenging February. I am left with the knowledge of how lucky I have been: to have known people like Jen and Drew, and to have had friendships composed entirely of mutual goodwill. If you are reading this, then you are one of the people I am grateful for. Be well.

I will turn forty. I would describe my state as confused and sad, grateful. Bewildered.

But for all its challenges and sorrows, the present moment is almost infinitely better than the day I turned thirty.

So that’s nice.

Claire in the back of the car with a notebook and pen. “Hey mama, guess what? The eighteenth binary number is 131,072.”

Sitting in the sun at the barn as a Dopey the half-Clydesdale is led past me, and seeing him as he really is: a huge strange alien beast with a vast wise eye. Like a dragon.

Going out on the harbour with Badgerbag in the Daisy, and the marine battery failing, and us having to row back to shore. Two fortysomething Internet feminists, in a boat, marooned, capable, happy.

Dylan Thomas said “After the first death, there is no other;” but he always talked a lot of tosh, didn’t he? It’s not as if I know a great many people but in the ten days since Jen died, three other people have also died. Salome says I am cursed and I am starting to believe her. This morning’s news was the worst, at least to me; a girl I knew back when I worked at the little riding school eight years ago, the year I got pregnant with Claire. She was about eleven then. She would have been nineteen now.

I sat bawling at my desk in my office, as seems to have become my habit, and then I mopped myself up and washed my face in the bathroom and sat down and took three calls. Being a grownup can be horrible. I had no idea. But it’s better than the alternative. On the way home, crushed onto a 14L Mission, it occurred to me that she will not, now, get married or have babies or graduate from college or spend a gap year with Peace Corps or start a company or start a non-profit or negotiate a raise or sign a mortgage or do any of the grown-up things I dream of or complain about.

I had this plan that I would make lots of younger friends, so that when my peers started dying I would still have friends. The possibility of burying children was something I managed to overlook.

Sadness is not making me a nicer person.

I can’t trust myself to write about it.