Fridaville » love

Begin with Red

nikki — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 21:54:09 +0000

The cushy lining of the uterus. The angry cry at being pulled loose. My favorite story of Little Red Riding Hood and the shivery feeling I get when the wolf steps into her path. Hell fire where I will probably end up unless I’m saved, which I am a dozen times at the altar of my youth by a trumpet-playing preacher. Twelve years old and yearning to be swept off my feet by Jesus. Until I meet David when I’m 13 and wearing a red dress and red shoes the first day of high school and he is leaning, lanky and broad-shouldered, against the wall checking out the new girls in the freshman class. “Hi, Red,” he says. And that’s how it begins.

Bird Brains

nikki — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:04:35 +0000

I’ve been watching the gang of hummingbirds that gather on my daughter’s porch in Yosemite, dining on nectar all day long, getting a sugar high on life. They’re smarter than I am. Lately I’ve let work and worry turn me sour, and I’m trying to remember all the sweet things about my life and what I used to like about myself. For instance, I used to be a funny girl, able to laugh at myself and make others laugh, too. I miss that person, so I’m trying to remember to apply the 5-year perspective to situations that I blow out of all proportion: Is [insert crazy-making scenario] really, really likely to make a difference in my life 5 years from now? Usually the answer is an unequivocal “no,” which frees me to deal with it in an entirely more relaxed way and to separate what is worth going to bat for vs what can walk on by. Sweet!

Bridge to the Weekend

nikki — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Oh darling Friday! I love the relief you give me of work well done for the last five days, your red wine and chocolate, your promise of pajamas and fuzzy socks, your 2-hour special on Elvis so lost and broken, your twinkle lights turned on outside, your command to stop thinking about exercise missed or opportunities lost, your promise of a completely unelevating novel waiting on the bedside table, your tantalizing come-hither murmur of all the work I can get done on Saturday or Sunday but not tonight, your time out from duty and must-dos. Sweet Friday, if only there were two of you a week.

My Heart Still Looks Like This

nikki — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:10:00 +0000

On my way to have drinks tonight with a friend whose significant other left her flat, I wondered why our hearts just keep splitting open like green wood even though we’re supposedly dry tinder now. For my own part, even though I have recently had a bone density test, EKG, shingles vaccine, pneumonia shot, flu shot, colonoscopy and long-term care insurance discussions, I am still the same 16 year old girl who lay awake every night with my heart pounding over the possibility of love standing underneath my bedroom window wearing a khaki windbreaker and a scar on the side of his face. And I hope I always will be.

Things I Love

nikki — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:22:00 +0000

* Sunglasses because when I wear them I feel invisible. It’s not movie-star hiding-in-plain-sight. It’s “If they can’t see my eyes, I’m a camera.” And red because it’s the antidote to my standard black.

* Uncap Hendricks Gin, and there’s a hint of herbs, sun-braised fields, cucumbers and what I think it might smell like to ride through the Polish countryside on a farm cart at dusk in the summer of 1935. In fact, “Encounter” by Czelaw Milosz is a poem in a glass…sad, nostalgic, full of longing for a lost beauty.

* Virgin of Guadalupe candles. I would love to believe, but I just don’t. But the wanting keeps me lighting her candles just in case.

* Hula glasses. I never wanted to go to Hawaii. Thought it was touristy, gimmicky, Don Ho-ish. And it is. But it’s also the smell of flowers that floor you when you get off the plane from the shrink-wrapped mainland. It’s hiking through bamboo forests. It’s the vistas of the Pacific that make your soul sough in and out with the waves. I can’t wait to return someday.

Succulent

nikki — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:12:00 +0000

* CRUSH: Marlon Brando wearing Levi’s in The Wild Bunch (MasterCard using his image to shill for them, not).

* TASTE: Roasted caramelized cauliflower

* LUSH: the shower after hot yoga

* ESCAPE: Peaks Island, Maine

* EYE CANDY: Lighted globes

* LISTEN: “Wild is the Wind,” by Cat Power (sad and succulent) and “The Eternal Seduction of Eve,” by The Real Tuesday Weld. (sensual and succulent)

* MUSE: Jack Kerouac’s Rules of Spontaneous Prose, cut out of Utne Magazine (I think) years ago and carried about with me every time I’ve moved. Still hanging on my mood board. Online list found via Secret Notebooks, Wild Pages. Print it out, hang it up where your eye will catch it daily.

What Allures Me Now

nikki — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:14:00 +0000

* The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys. The Thames has frozen 40 times in recorded history, and Humphreys has written 40 tiny stories based on events that happened each time the river iced over. It’s poetic history.

* This pin from Lochers.com is so cheeky and deceptive. It looks like something a proud mommy would wear…until you lean in a bit closer.

* The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I gulped it down in one furious read. If you belong to a bookclub, it would be a great choice.

* Spinning. I tried it a few months ago and hated it. Tried it again this week and suddenly got interested. Didn’t fall in love with it, but all of a sudden I loved that my body could do it and that I’m soaking wet and psyched when it’s over. We’ll see if I can keep it up. And going to a class first thing in the morning means exercise is OVER for the day. Hallelujah.

* This ring from Bjorg jewelry. They say they’ll have a U.S. online site soon. I’ll be there!

6 (Un)important Things That Make Me Happy

nikki — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:41:00 +0000

Tina Tarnoff of Thought Patterns (love her papercuts!) tagged me, and I feel like one of the popular girls at school…even though I’m still not completely sure what being tagged means in blogworld. But the task is to make a list (one of my favorite forms of writing) of 6 (un)important things I love:

1. when dogs smile because I wonder what they’re thinking (“…can’t wait to roll in that dead bird I found behind the house. I’ll pretend to be asleep in the sun til she turns her back and then I’ll make a dash for it before she catches me.”)

2. online coupons from Barnes & Noble…so many more during this recession!

3. Turning the sprinkler on my plants and watching the birds that come to take a shower and dart in and out of the spray.

4. a plethora of pillows on my bed

5. the perfect shape and subtle scent of Crabtree & Evelyn avocado soap– I stockpile it in case they discontinue it.

6. getting home just before a thunderstorm breaks and feeling safe and snug in the midst of the sturm und drang.

The Spirit of the Place

nikki — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:27:00 +0000

My guardian Buddha has lost his nose as the result of being knocked over by winds or maybe the neighbor’s cat. I like him better this way–as if his spirit had been tested and tried. As if he had ended up in this raggedy, weedy garden bed and was making the best of it. As if he’d been around the block and had a hundred stories he could tell about what he’d seen. This is no pretty boy Buddha but one that has withstood a few freezing nights and too many unbearable southern August noons. A Buddha for someone who has been broke but not broken, someone’s who’s often lonely but not giving up on love, someone who has a hundred stories about what she’s seen.

“the unregarded river of our life”

nikki — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:09:00 +0000

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life;

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force

In tracking out our true, original course;

A longing to inquire

Into the mystery of this heart which beats

So wild, so deep in us–to know

Whence our lives come and where they go.

[from The Buried Life]

When I was walking across the drawbridge to the barrier island near my house, I stopped to take a photo of the marsh and Intracoastal Waterway and the scene suddenly made me think of “The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold. How strange to have words from a Victorian poet time travel into such a setting, but somehow it seemed perfectly fitting, absolutely right. When I first read his poem in an English Lit class years ago, I felt an immediate recognition, as if someone had a key to my heart, and I could feel the tumblers clicking into place. I wasn’t alone in being overcome by some “nameless sadness” when I was with a lover; someone else had wondered if one’s deepest self could ever be fully known, even by those we love the most. It seemed a wholly modern poem, remarkable for its insight into the human psyche, the hidden self we all long to reveal, to share with another. Reading it again recently, it seems as fresh and moving as it did the first time I discovered it. We all have that longing to be known, to be recognized for who we really are, not what we seem–the constant hunger for it can drive us to God, sex or celibacy, work, food or drink, NASCAR, politics or piling up money–the substitutes are endless. Lucky Matthew Arnold, that it drove him to poetry.