The trick

“The trick, my dear, is not getting what you want, but wanting it after you have it.”

–Kate Hepburn, “Love Affair”

The Good Life

You must always have something to do, something to look forward to and someone to love.

(My father’s advice on how to live the good life, rather,making good with a life that can be very, very hard)

Step Aside

The world turns aside to let any pass who knows where he is going.

~Epictetus (60A.D.-120 A.D.)

And if the world just isn’t complying–you know, doing the requisite back flips and somersaults for you–see what happens once you sport a head of fabulous hair! In my stubborn refusal to pay upwards of $350 for a half head of highlights (absolutely unconscionable), I have found yet another bargain-basement priced color and cutting wizard. Click on “Belle’s Guide” and “Belle’s Hot Picks” for the scoop. 

New York, The Gulf, St. Germain

The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught… [But] I wanted worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence—the dual glories of human life. I wanted what the Greeks call kalos kai agathos, the singular balance of the good and the beautiful.                                                                          ~Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Great beauty and goodness and divinity exist on the crowded Broadway sidewalks, in the sugar sands of the Gulf, within the gold and perfume and polish of the boutiques in the quartier St. Germain. I know this, I know this. But what about the Magic Blend? Please, Lord, tell me it’s just as attainable as that over-priced bag of beans at “Starbucks…”

Paris Education

Paris obsessed. I know, I know. I’ve been accused many times. The decadent, delightful, tasteful and luxurious mesmerize me. The men bewitch me. Remember this?

“You have a princess neck,” he says, trying to roll his tongue around the “r’s,” soften them up to suit my American ear.

“I do?” I demur, trying for a moment to be the good girl of years past. At present, I’m very busy being maudlin and analyzing my big city life across the pond.

“One meant for a string of diamonds. Pearls on Sundays.” A slow sip of the Calvados and he continues staring.

It is some weeknight in October and I am stroking the blonde hairs on my neck and the old, tanned Frenchman next to me is thankful for the breeze off the Seine and his Cubano cigar and the forgiving light cast by “Flore’s” awning. The golden hue takes ten years off and he knows it. Without a pause, he asks me to write my phone number on his crisp, linen kerchief.

“Ahh, but you won’t answer your phone,” he says, suddenly coy.

“Of course I will.”

The Frenchman and I continue exchanging lies.

Why not? Joan Didion told me that, “I could stay up all night and make mistakes and none of it would count.”

I just can’t seem to stop the Gallic dreaming. A momentary, budget-minded reprieve: The “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900” exhibit at the Metropolitan. I needed to be indulged for the price of an entrance fee. I needed to keep my old flame alive when the January days seem as quick and as cold as the end of my 20’s. I needed the fantasy before babies, marriage and all that wonderful domestic nonsense comes into my life.

I wore comfortable shoes and a “museum dress”—a black wool turtlenecked thing that can be terribly sexy or card catalogue frumpy. Depends on who you ask. Paris seemed to like it. He looked down at me from the wall, framed in gold and filigree, and asked when I was coming, how I would paint him. In a dream of concentration, I looked to the ceiling and read,

The general effect of Paris, taken through an artist’s eye, and into an artist’s brain, is to educate that eye and brain as our American life cannot.
    –Chris Pearce Cranch, 1853 

Be patient, I’m coming.

Discipline, Discomfort… Kid Leather Boots

I haven’t written about me and the city in so long I hardly know where to begin…

The weather, fantastic. Was it really 70 degrees on Saturday, Broadway warm and breezy?

My friends are delightful as ever, one after the other gleefully announcing that their boyfriends and husbands delivered late Christmas gifts—babies. Yes, all the lady friends are enceinte and tragically unable to share a bottle of “Hitching Post” with their twenty-something neighbor. But, I’m elated for them (and wisely stockpiling my booze money so I can afford birthday gifts for all the Virgo/Libra babies comin’ to town).

The boots in that Madison Avenue window have gone on super sale. I can finally afford to channel Catherine Zeta-Jones, circa “Zoro,” in black kid leather and jaunt over to “Payard” for my ritual post-shopping indulgence—a pistachio macaroon and an espresso, tight.

That’s my superficial January. My reflective January—the one that makes me consider my mistakes, my clean breaks, my desires, my regrets—is a little more complicated. Is it possible to start anew? Do I need to reconfigure my dreams in order to make them more attainable? Are we all making grand promises in the month of January simply to mitigate the previous year’s failures? Or, can some of us (read: me) really stick to our favorite maxims, the ones typed out and tacked to the refrigerator between our First Grade school picture and a “Tiffany’s” jewelry advertisement?

“Discipline is remembering what you want.”
“In life, do not run away from discomfort.”

Here goes nothin.’

24

“All of us struggle; all of us respond to struggle. In our secret being we are all tormented by the uncertainty, seldom more than in the glowing victories of youth: What if I fail? What do they do when they find out I’m me?”                                                                                           (Willie Morris)

(Monday blues… sad and feeling sorry for myself. I’ll try for something more upbeat tomorrow…)

Digestif

“Cousin Brookey, what about stoppin’ at a ‘rub and tug’ to help me digest my General Tsao’s?”

–Alabama Cousin exiting”Joe’s Shanghai” in Chinatown

(The reason for the blog hiatus: 5 visiting cousins, 1 aunt. Sorry for the lack of posts! Back next week!)

Never a Harsh Word

“Southern women are never guilty of saying anything lewd or crass. As long as we stretch out our words to three syllables or more, it all sounds just lovely…

“You could say shit but why would you when ’shee-y-it’ sounds so much better? Jesus, or ‘Jyee-suy-sus.’ And then we have damn or ‘daa-yam-muh.’

“Y’all think I’m on to something?”

(A little cocktail talk I picked up during my North Carolina vacation… Flying back to the City tomorrow evening…)

Optimism and the Heroine

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”

–Joan Didion (of course)

And, may I ask, when does y’all’s optimism begin to fade?

(My thoughts to follow…)

A Kiss or a Stone?

"[Him] kissing your hand may make you feel very, very good but a diamond and saphire bracelet is forever."

--Lorelei Lee, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"

Blind & Brave

"There's a certain power to naivete. You don't know what can be done and can't be done. You just go for it."

--Jeff Bridges, actor

Funny Way 'a Talkin'

"Somehow Northerners have the vague idea that Southerners are just like them, except for their funny way of talking... I know I thought that. Seeing Truman with the [others], however, I realized that there is a whole shared experience in being Southern."

--from the biography of Truman Capote, "Capote," by Gerald Clarke

Dreams

"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."

--John Updike

Majesty

The girl had to learn everything for herself, and she became involved in various situations and some of the first bloom wore off. However, there was bloom to spare... She was faintly tall, with fine rather large features, eyes with such an expanse of blue in them that you were really aware of it whenever you looked at her, and a good deal of thick, blonde hair--arresting and bright...

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Majesty"

Tennessee & Truman

Question of the day: Why can't I write like Tennessee Williams and lead the life of Capote?

Pedro Says...

"Everything that isn't autobiographical is plagiarism."

--Pedro Almodovar

Ms. DuBois

"I don't want realism. I want--magic!"
--Blanche DuBois, "A Streetcar Named Desire"

A Sentence a Day...

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

--Ernest Hemingway, "A Moveable Feast"

A Young , Worshipful Beginner

"…[New York] is still a city that calls to his ‘young, worshipful beginners’ from the Corn Belt and Mississippi…”

–E. B. White