won’t you celebrate with me
in praise of weak ties
Around this time last year, I was already fully vaccinated — a welcome bit of peace of mind, since I had been teaching in person the whole year — but almost nobody else was, including Tom. It was strange, moving through the world feeling like I had a minor superpower. Not invincibility; having read up carefully, I of course knew I could still get it and spread it. But as someone who lives with a handful of small health issues that could cause big problems if I were to contract the virus unprotected, I was grateful for the layer of protection.
Yet it was also like dwelling in a limbo state, and that was the state in which I spent the spring, trying to finish writing Salty. I think when you read the book, you’ll see that state of mind on its pages, manifesting as joy and disease, hope and the fear of hope. I was writing about other women with other lives in other hard times, but every author is always writing, at least a little, about herself.
I don’t retain a lot of memories generally, but that whole spring is a bit of a blank space, in part because I just really didn’t know what world I would be living in from week to week. It was light, and also dark.
But what I remember most is that, my newfound minor superpowers acquired, I felt a little more confident about entering public spaces like, I don’t know, cafes and beer gardens, and ordering something to bring out and enjoy in the cold sunshine. I found myself striking up very minor conversations with bartenders and baristas and feeling almost tearful when I walked away. It had been so long since I had a conversation that wasn’t planned (on Zoom, in my classroom) and with someone I knew. Since the spontaneous conversation with the vaguest of acquaintances, or a stranger.
I was reminded of that feeling a couple of weeks ago, when, omicron having all but fully subsided here, I stopped into a bustling French bistro in Hell’s Kitchen (our name for the neighborhood to the west of Times Square) to grab a quick brunch before I went to a Sunday matinee of Black No More, a much talked-about off-Broadway show for which I had a ticket. I had forty minutes. I perched at the countertop and ordered a bowl of poached eggs and vegetables, and a cup of black coffee, and a bottomless passionfruit mimosa.
An older gentleman sat to my left, and smiled and told me the mimosa was very good. A minute later, his friend returned from the bathroom and they kept eating and chatting. I finished my eggs and was still hungry and started to ask the waitress for toast, but the man stopped me and said, “You want the fries. They’re the best fries.”
Well, he was right: I did want them, and they were the perfect bar fries — shoestring style, not too many of them, crispy but not overcrispy, salty and delicious. I ate them so fast that he missed that I’d even gotten them when I turned to thank him. He asked me why I was on this side of town on a snowy Sunday, and I explained; it transpired he and his friend were church musicians who’d just finished their shift at a nearby parish, and were grabbing lunch before they went to their evening gigs. They wanted to know where I write, and we laughed, in what is a very familiar conversational beat to me, about how similar “Vox” sounds to “Fox” if you say it out loud in a busy restaurant. They wished me a good time at the show and hoped we’d bump into each other again.
It’s the simplest thing in the world, the kind of interaction that you can have twice a day in New York if you want, just eating some five-dollar fries at a bar. It’s also the best kind of conversation. Nobody has an angle or is trying to get anything. You’re just delighted that another interesting human you’ve never seen or talked to before has crossed your path. They might never do so again. But the camaraderie that comes from just being alive, at this moment — having survived to this point, to be able to sit in a snowy bistro on Tenth Avenue and bask in the kindness of strangers.
Some time in summer 2020, the bandshell in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where we usually have amazing outdoor summer concerts, was laying empty; the season had been cancelled. But somehow an installation art piece went up that quoted Lucille Clifton’s poem won’t you celebrate with me, which is about feeling joy for the person she’s managed to mold herself to be, in the face of all the ways the world wants her to fail. The final lines are what were posted up on the arch of the bandshell:
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Been writing
Spoke with my friend Isaac Butler, whose new book The Method is an absolute romp and a must-read, about why the Oscars are so fixated on rewarding people who play real-life icons, or who go to absurd lengths to portray their characters.
Also answered, with as much good humor and a bit of snark as I could muster, 9 big questions about this year’s Oscars (ranging from “what’s an Oscar” to “why didn’t my favorite thing get nominated!!”).
Been reading and watching
Last night Tom and I, in need of something totally brainless, threw on Going the Distance, a 2010 romcom that he worked on for a couple of weeks. We laughed a lot more than we expected to! Also, it’s an interesting artifact of the raunch-com era, lacking all the Apatow bro-iness but clearly made for that audience.
I also have been watching stuff for an upcoming piece (I saw The Batman this week, out next Friday, and then re-watched Joker on Friday). So stay tuned.
I am reading just piles and piles for research, but I also picked up Haruki Murakami’s short story collection Men Without Women — the one that contains the short story “Drive My Car,” from which the movie was adapted — and it is blowing me away. I guess I’ve only read Murakami’s nonfiction book on running and writing, though I hadn’t realized. His use of language! It’s incredible.
Odds and ends
I am gearing up to get on a plane for the first time in six months or so (since Toronto last September) and it’s really weird how hard it is to remember how to pack? I picked up some packing cubes today even though I never really use them in the past. We are in the midst of planning a long European sojourn this summer, so they’ll come in useful either way. What’s your travel hack?
Speaking of: No newsletter next week, as I’ll be traveling. See you in two weeks!
Enjoyed this? If you’re feeling it, I won’t object if you buy me a cup of coffee. Writers need fuel.