Happy Sadness

Everything happens in the warm months. I get restless and yet I’m forced to be tied down—apartment lease renewal time. I want to play but there is endless work to be done—pages and emails and proposals forgotten in the winter rush of parties. I want the comfort of an old love but the rush and excitement of someone new—a man whose day has not yet begun until he’s sent me a love letter or two.

“Happy sadness”—this feeling is cyclical for me and begins once the spring pollen has settled and the summer heat encroaches on the sidewalks, seeps into the old, downtown apartment buildings, causes the perspiration from my cheeks to bead and slide down the expanse of my back. I long for something more—a thing out of my reach and extraordinary—yet I’m somehow settled and satisfied with the act of wanting. My state of desire and anxiety are palpable, delicious. If my mood were a meal, it would be a plate just short of decadent—fettuccine in a bath of butter, a single sliver of white truffle atop the nest of noodles.

Bill Buford’s masterfully executed book, “Heat,” describes Mario Batali’s journey and ascension to the top of the culinary heap. And, much to my delight, he describes Batali’s solo travels through Europe and his subsequent periods of “happy sadness.” Buford and Batali seem to say that the sentiments feed each other, help each other, allow each other to peacefully co-exist.

“For his part, Mario remembers [Europe] as the last lonely time in his life, a sustained pleasurable period of melancholy, ‘a happy sadness.’ [He was] longing for company but recognized he was better off without it.”

And so here I am in the city, with my hot breezes and stinking garbage and glorious outdoor bars and bistros, both contented and cheerless. I want more but nothing at all. I need someone new but hope for the old. I put on a silk sundress and pray for the relief of autumnal breezes.

Mrs. Child and Her Sieve

If your life were a blurb on the back of a book jacket, how would it read?

Don’t think of this as your high school comp. teacher asking you to write your own obituary. Consider it an exercise in sifting life down to its little moments of ecstasy. What--and who--are you going to remember? The Foreword and book jacket cover of Julia Child’s, “My Life in France,” simply states,

“This is a book about some of the things I love most in life—my husband, Paul Child, ‘la belle France’ and the many pleasures of cooking and eating.”
A man. An emotion. The daily joys of life.

Mrs. Child began her book (along with Alex Prud ‘Homme) at the ripe age of 91. I’m sure there were innumerable moments, delights and people to consider. They all beg for a mention in her culinary memoir. The people that she eventually chooses to write about are immortalized in culinary circles. And the others, well…

My “quarter life crisis” (courtesy of the imitable, ingenious singer, John Mayer)—my mid-20’s—have been a sentimental sieve. I’ve cut people out of my life. I’ve added a few new faces. I’ve met men that I adore. I’ve met many more men that I abhor (at least, I detest what they stand for). And, still, there are those people that float in that nebulous world of personal purgatory—do I like them, trust them, really know them? Rather, after reading some of Mrs. Child I can ask, “Will they be part of the book blurb?”

God willing I’ll figure myself (and my needs) out by age 30. Until then, I’m still searching for that one sentence that sums up me, who I love and my life’s ecstasy...

At the "Gulf"

The gas station was the sexiest—most real—place in town. Puttering up to the “Gulf” gas sign perched above the bayou, Mamma checked her blonde hair in the rear view mirror, dabbed at her lipstick and finally exhaled. The delicate little wrists dropped into her lap (palms facing skyward) and her head— full of recipes, dry-cleaning stubs and “to-do” lists— tilted back, relaxing into the black, pleather head rest.

The air was thick with humidity but, finally, light with worry.

Mamma liked being served—she was quite good at it. Even at age 6, I enjoyed watching the men tend to her, put her at ease, buzz around the car to fill up the tank, wash the windshield, dip into the special cooler and offer us 6 ½ oz bottled Cokes. Peppery and alive—everything tasted and felt better on those afternoons. My favorite attendant at the full-service station was the owner’s son, with eyes as calm and blue as the gulf water just beyond the bayou. I learned how a man could make you feel. I learned about chivalry. I learned that a woman really could do everything on her own, but why would she want to?

Strong Hope

Strong hope is a much greater stimulant of life than any realized joy could be.

--Nietzsche

I’ve been bad by not writing this week but I promise that I’m up to something good… As soon as things are more concrete, I’ll let y’all know. Big City Life musings to recommence!

Metamorphosis

“Rien n’est perdu, rien n’est cree,’” said the chef.

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created,” repeated the assistant, pausing along with the chef so that these words might be recorded in the small, spiral-bound notebooks that each student held on his or her lap. Puckering his mouth to complete his thought, the round little Gallic despot contintued.

“Tout est transforme,’ he said.

“Everything is transformed,” said the translator.
Molly O’Neill, in her fun, fabulously well-written foodie memoir, “Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food and Baseball,” writes not just of the chef, but of the writer, painter, musician… See where I’m going with this, my dears? Every creative soul has to struggle with the reality of repetition, reinvention, recreation. NOTHING is new. Your perspective, however, can be unique.

I'm a young woman living in Manhattan, a stranger to its social systems, hierarchy and nuances. Yes--of course this story has been told before. If the point were to impart completely new information and small-town-girl-hits-the-big-city revelations, it would have been imperative to give up after the publication of Ms. Didion's earliest essays on the subject. When people look at me over their cocktails or communicate with me through the gray wires and say, "It's soooo over... A single girl living in Manhattan recounting the travails of dating and media madness? Please." I want to ask them what completely original artistic project they have accomplished to great critical acclaim? What dreams have they realized on a grand or small scale?

And, yet, the dissidents might be on to something…

Metamorphosis. Ms. O’Neill uses this powerful word to describe what she underwent with the aforementioned chef in the venerable city of Paris. Maybe it’s time for me to finish my thoughts in Gotham, fly the coop and move with my Chef to the City of Lights… Paris.

"Like the other thirty students, I tried to scribble down everything the chef said. Unlike my fellow students’, however, my notebook did not also contain the telephone numbers of potential lovers, the addresses of dance clubs or the train schedules for weekend jaunts to the Loire Valley or Burgundy. I had neither the money nor the time for such frivolity. I was twenty-six old… Paris was serious business, and I recorded every sight, every taste, and every word. 'Everything is transformed,' I wrote carefully in the same felt-tip marker that I’d formerly used to write poems."

Life Liberated

4am Saturday night and I am startled out of my sleep. I lie there, in wait, expecting to hear a crash of lightening, a burglar snap the cast-iron bars and burst through my window —something loud and definitive.

But, nothing more than a rustle of leaves...
The early rain was good for the air and the neighborhood. A strange, cool breeze prevails.

And then she begins. I hear the woman’s staccato cries of pleasure. They’re lusty and clear and ring out against the sides of the buildings that surround my garden. I’m repulsed… then intrigued. I push myself up in bed, resting on my forearms, not sure if I hope for her to continue or end.

Her lover wills her to carry on and my opinion is null and void—silent and distant and tucked beneath a silk coverlet and feather bed. The moans and screams continue.

“Will you two shut up? Do ya’ hear me? Shut up!” a man from a neighboring building yells through his screen, out into the Saturday night air. His angry voice and heart-rate are wasted.

The couple keeps the pace. Nothing is done out of spite—the sincerity of her moans tell me this—for they’re in a separate world of naked skin, closed eyes, darkened rooms. Somehow, I’m happy for them—the twilight noise nothing more than another eccentric quality of my SoHo.

This is who I’ve become. Slowly, slowly New York has made me more accepting, indulgent, laissez-fair to the whims and qualities of strangers. The South (the South where I was raised, anyway) lacked tolerance. As I grew older and moved away from the pack (and the debutante, cotillion and mardi gras dances), the judgements hightened. Coffee and tea hour after the Sunday service was a catfight of gossip, rumors and jealousy.

To this, I say, keep your sanctimony and burned coffee. I'm doing just fine with a dirty martini and a taste of the liberated life.

Magic & Minutiae

And, what’s it like? How does the air smell, the ground feel beneath your feet once you’re inside a building shrouded in mystery and legend?

Anti-climactic dose of reality—the Fifth Avenue and 48th Street "Scribner" is now the makeup emporium, Sephora. But, the new building—the "Simon & Schuster" on Avenue of the Americas and 48th—is strikingly grand and cool. Beige and cream marble dominates. The elevator bank is huge and when you’re whisked to the Scribner floor you wonder about the Frank McCourts and Annie Proulxs before you.

Why am I here?
What god blessed me to make this journey?
To what secret room do they whisk away my thoughts and worries and memories-- bind them and distribute them as galleys?

Magic.

Magic is made in that building. You feel it when you walk in and then you taste its absence once you step back out onto the avenue, into the normal air with normal people who exhale their worries and everyday minutiae. A woman pulls at her panties through her skirt. A man checks his watch in frustration, yanks at his tie and picks up the pace. My phone rings—it’s Fernando the building super and he’s waiting to fix my dishwasher.

Wait! I want to go back in! I want to grab one more book off the shelf to take home with me. My editor and the editor-in-chief already stacked me high with half a dozen slick hardbacks but I want more to tide me over. I look at my visitor’s pass—it’s expired. Move along, Belle, into the Midtown twilight, try to smell the cool magic that still clings to the books’ ivory pages…