It’s Hard Work Being So Fabulous
It’s hard work being so fabulous. No, I mean it. It’s exhausting. I know that’s a whopper of a first line, and while I am being somewhat tongue in cheek, I’m serious. I’m a hard working animal – I effort – I muscle into everything. I mean to be a good friend, a good teacher, worker, mother, writer, athlete – you name it – I want to be good at it. Actually, I want to be better than good; I want to be the best; phenomenal, extraordinary, outta sight, a hard act to follow. If this were a scratch and sniff you could smell the sweat, you could hear the grunt, and you’d definitely feel the exhaustion. You might even be able to sniff out the sadness – something I’m only starting to recognize. I come by all of this honestly. When I was a kid I learned how to function whether I was feeling functional or not. Our father woke us early on weekend mornings insisting that we get up and get something done. I had no idea what needed to be done at 10-years-old, but it was on us to figure it out – to get busy doing something, less we appeared to be slacking. “Get going,” he would instruct, as he poked his head into our room. I learned how to buck up, to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other and heave the hell ho. A favorite word in our family was “hustle,” which was the way you got things done. You also didn’t want to be accused of being...
But Was it Life Changing?
“Was it life changing?” my daughter, Zoe asked me this morning as I groggily sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. I’d gotten home from nearly three weeks in South Africa the night before, had managed a few hours of sleep, and was now on my third cup of coffee and it wasn’t even 7am. “Was it life changing?” “Yes and no,” I said. “Yes, of course, and no, not really.” And it’s not because I’m jaded by my recent travel to Bali last November, Nepal this past April, and the last many weeks in South Africa where I traveled with my 21-year-old daughter Ruby, and my 79-year-old mother Suzy. It was incredible to tool around in a jeep on a large private animal reserve in South Africa and to stumble into a herd of elephants taking down trees for breakfast. It silenced me to get as close as we did to the pride of lady lions whose faces were covered with blood – “lipstick,” our guide called it – after they’d just taken down an impala – a kill we’d seen them circling for, heard them attacking deep in the bush, and watched them emerge from afterwards. It was ridiculously amazing to watch a mama rhino and her baby lumbering along a shady dirt road, taking their time as our vehicle kept a safe distance behind. The closest I’d ever gotten to these animals – cheetahs, giraffes, rhinos, leopards – was in magazines or on T.V., and it was both oddly wonderful and disconcerting to be so close to them. One day we drove right up to a...
The Parting of the Veils
I keep wanting to text my younger brother Wally, who is recovering from surgery in Los Angeles. I keep wanting to ask him, “What’s it like now?” to find out if he’s still standing in the light that shone when the veils parted two weeks ago, when a football sized tumor…