Archive | Essays

Red Is the Magic Number

I’m doing Suleika Jaouad’s 30-Day Journaling Challenge and so liked the results of today’s assignment that I’m copying it here. The instructions: randomly open up a book, write down the quote your finger lands upon, and write 20 minutes using that prompt. (If you know any of the people in this piece, I duly apologize.)

“The red she pointed to was this sort of proper maroon. I didn’t want proper maroon. I wanted bloodcurdling scarlet.”—Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming

I used to be a conscientious red objector. In the 90s I was certain it was a color I couldn’t pull off but I think that’s because I only knew ugly reds. Ones with too much blue and brown in them—dead colors, dried blood colors. New England colors. Then a friend who was destined to only be a friend while I was at my vainest and most superficial (age 29, peak Saturn return) asked me to be her token bridesmaid. She didn’t say “token” but the implication was clear. I was to be the one wacky bridesmaid whose presence proved she’d been doing something interesting in her NYC years. (She hailed from Virginia, was practicing law in NYC, but was destined to raise four blond children back in Virginia, where’d she pretend her law degree and non-Ann Taylor wardrobe had been a folly of her misspent youth.)

So by token I mean the only Northerner. The only Jew. The only girl who hadn’t been a high school bestie or a sorority sister or something equally perfunctory and tribal. I was the only oddball yoga teacher travel writer flaneuzy. Like I said: token. Continue Reading →

We Walk Alone

Lately I’ve been walking right before bed–not just a few blocks, but miles and miles.

I’ve always been a big walker; everyone in my family walks a lot. Even before I moved to NYC three decades ago, I walked everywhere—-through Boston and its surrounding towns and, later, through Philadelphia and its insufferable suburbs. People I haven’t seen in twenty years will message me: I saw your parents walking down Route 16, four miles from their house. Whenever I visit my grandparents’ Northern Massachusetts town, I run into elders who say: I remember them walking everywhere together.

The difference, not to put too fine a point on it, is I walk alone. Continue Reading →

Metaphork in the Road

On Tuesday I was receiving back treatment from my craniosacral healer A., a lovely Italian (not Italian-American) woman who boasts a decidedly un-American unflappability. I was still fresh off The Breakup and on Day 2 of a period that really had wings, as my punny British beau used to call days of extra-heavy flow. (Sanitary napkin joke for those not in the know.)

“Are you feeling crampy?” she asked, and I shook my head. “But then I’m not feeling much of anything,”

She raised her eyebrow. “My sense is there’s quite a significant uterine release happening.”

“Why not?” I said grandly. It was true I was having my heaviest period in years, but that dovetailed with my theory that, post-age 45, periods are more triggered by strong emotions than hormones. This was a decades-long relationship I was releasing even if, after more than a week of crying and storming, I’d slipped into a comfortable numbness.

A second later, I heard before I felt an enormous whoosh—an electric current running through my body as if I’d been shocked. It shot from the top of my head (the crown chakra, the entrance point of heavenly consciousness) to my pelvis floor before it spread to my hips.

“Wow,” I started to say when A. interrupted me. “I’m sorry, Lisa, but I think I’m going to faint.” A second later she crumpled to her knees Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy