Monday, May 7, 2007

My eyes are blue and resplendent.

If I had to choose three words to describe my mood right now (and for the past two weeks), those might be the ones. Blue and resplendent.

I turn twenty-one in a couple of hours (or thirteen minutes ago, if you're okay with spreading the moment I came into this world across a whole day - and I'm pretty sure my mother is glad it didn't happen that way). The truth is that I cry a lot. It's not cheap - it's just easy. I cried when I was walking back from the Creamery two weeks ago because of the pure joy of a dandelion poof that I plucked. I blame my estrogen. And now I have a friend in New York who is sending me photographs of dandelions every day ("I was taking pictures of a tangle of tulips today, a dazzle of daffodils, and I saw this one lonely and brazen dandelion. It made me think of you. Here it is."). It's all too much for me.

I'm on my second book for the summer - Everything is Illuminated, which Dean left for me on my desk when he took off back in March. I found a Peruvian dollar bill cached inside that I don't intend to give back to him. (Time to play the "See if you can spot the unintentional pun in that last sentence!" game.) It's kind of a laborious read with its relentless abuse of synonyms and the requisite Ukranian accent that slows down my mental reading. However and of course, I found on the plane today an abstract passage describing the character named Brod with which I relate. No, I anti-relate:

She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily ... None of it moved her.


It's a romantic exaggeration to say that everything moves me. But sometimes I don't know how else to think of it. Sometimes I absolutely don't know what to do with the bright, urgent happiness I get from the smallest and the largest of things. Sometimes, though, I'm not "brimming" even when I know I should be. Like today - instead of going to the living room to spin with my two beautiful nieces, I kept repeating the lamest and deadliest of all mantras - "I'm too tired." What? What is that? Here I am, mourning such episodes of childhood loss as Flying Alone for the First Time and Having My Bedroom Converted to an Office, and I refuse the petitions of these uncomplicated pilgrims? I mean it when I say that something changes every time I come home. My parents added a brand new room in the fall, in fact, and today I half jokingly told them that it was the most familiar place in the house. I'm so afraid of being an empty nester, distracting myself with this and that around the house to forget the fact that my children are grown up.

On the other hand, I see my mother, and I see love, and it's okay. This house is just a space. Nothing to get sentimental about. That's something that I never understood about my mother when I was little - I was an extremely sentimental child, evident in the fact that I still cannot throw anything away. And while my mother is as loving and gentle as they come, she's not sentimental. She just loves. She loves the thing she's in, and when it's gone, she lets it go and loves what's coming up. Her youngest child is turning twenty-one and yet she's not entirely offended. She's always been able to see that life is valid even when it's not like a movie.

On the other other hand - during summer 2003, I said that I didn't think my junior year of high school could be topped in general radness. At the end of my senior year, I ate my words most sincerely. This situation is repeating itself. This stretch of life from when I joined the Board (and by that I mean joined a band of merry friends to whom I swear eternal fondness) to now, my twenty-first birthday and thirty days before Elder M comes home, has been both overwhelming and brilliant. Now I've learned, though - things only get better. Good as it is, things always get better.

I am overcome.

[/string of emotional posts]

4 reason(s) to click here:

Anonymous said...

I sort of know how you feel about the cryie thing.

A few weeks ago I watch the sandlot with ... Mr. Breakfast Cereal, and I cried at the end. I think it was because I was sooooo excited for baseball season.

-CJ

Thirdmango said...

I'm happy that you're happy. But if you are brimming a bit too much, purchance you could let some slip into my bowl. :)

Anonymous said...

Happy birthday, fellow traveler. I'll see you in a little under two weeks with comestibles in hand.

(By the way, "comestibles" is a pretty silly word, if I do say so myself.)

-soon to be not Little Pete???

Heather said...

It's like a chicken soup story. Or maybe something out of Reader's Digest. It also makes me feel better that I cry all the time. Like it's good. Aww. I miss you, Krebscout.