Oh. My. God. I hadn’t ever driven before in Boston for good reason, but today, because my mother, 
daughter and I were doing a less-than-24-hour conservatory tour through Boston, there I was, with a GSP repeatedly telling me to make a U-turn, my mother puzzling over google directions print-outs, and the longest red lights I’d ever seen. By the time I went around the same square of blocks four times in a row, trying to obey the tedious, sarcastic and wrong wrong wrong GPS, and we somehow — through cursing and hyper-ventilating — to our destination, I was ready to throw myself on a bed, weeping into a pile of chocolate cookie dough. Then after we talked with the admissions guy at the New England Conservatory, we had to drive to the hotel. Two miles, only four turns, but still…….if I had to drive in this city daily, I would need a daily counseling, pedicures and anti-depressants. Or I would need to do what I did later: walk.
Once my mom and daughter were settled in the hotel, I hoofed it out there, and I soon found why in the world anyone would live in Boston. It’s a great city for walking. I walked for two hours this afternoon, and over an hour after a dinner, threading myself through hotel areas, the Boston Commons, the trail along the Charles (and over the great walking bridge over a highway), an Asian area, the old City Hall, a produce market area and up and down the steep, lamp-posted streets near our hotel in Beacon Hill.
While I truly live for walking my native city — New York — and I did put in my usual outrageous mileage a few days ago — I found Boston to be wonderfully walkable with interesting turns that brough to view antique red brick building, narrow well-lit alleys of beautifully restored apartments, ducks and sailboats, quirky corner ge
lato cafes, and lots of other walkers.
Back at the hotel, I think about the last time I was here, three years ago when I was suffering from insomnia, migraines, and other little ailments, and I also walked for hours. I walked myself back to some sense of clarity and balance about how I needed to recast my life toward greater health. Three years later, I did just that — through yoga, enough sleep, better diet, and more open space in my schedule — and of course, walking. Now I walk this city in gratitude, not thinking so much that I could live here, but I could certainly walk here anytime.
Photos from the walk: The Charles near dusk, an amazing tree near the river, and the ducklings in honor of the great children’s book, Make Room for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey.
pulls of an ocean. Today I did some ocean migitation, wading into the water at Spring Lake, N.J. I hadn’t been an ocean for years, but I quickly remembered how impossible it is to keep any footing, how fierce the undertow, and how in seconds the level of the water rushes up to my head and then down to my knees. I jumped each rush of a wave, and sunk to my knees when the water pulled out the rug behind me, so glad to be back in the fast and high, backrolling and low, turn and charm of the water. This old home, this body of water, this memory and present at once. Later, back with Natalie, she said, “You were so happy. You looked like a five-year-old who went into a ‘Hello Kitty’ store or how you look whenever you see live otters.”
College
group that brings together art and activism, Artivista
yoga and celebration. At every place we visit, we write, share, and delight in the beauty all around us. When planning this, Patricia, an amazing writer and facilitator, and I looked toward various experiences that would immerse us in the creative spirit and be outrageous fun too.
Two days and a year earlier, Ken’s cousin — Woody Hesselbarth — who we loved like a sibling died from a long time endurance of a rare lung cancer. It’s hard to know what to feel, what to say now that time has passed and still, it’s as if they died just yesterday, and it’s as if they’re alive. Because we saw both men just now and then — Henry once or twice a year, and Woody every year or so — it seems they’re still out east or west. I easily see Henry milling about my mother’s kitchen in New Jersey, bending to change the trash bag under the sink, and telling me that it’s no problem, he can take care of it. I easily see Woody in Colorado, sitting in front of the giant fish tank in a Ft. Collins restaurant while we joke about how huge the platters of Mexican food are before us.
I return often to the line in Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Waking,” which Kelley Hunt and I made as the chorus in our song, “What Falls Away.” Roethke writes, “What falls away is always. And is near.” What falls away is always with us — the memory, the felt experience of knowing someone, the hole in the air they left, and if you believe (as I do), their very presence at surprising moments. Of course, as my mother-in-law told me when I asked if she could still sometimes feel the presence of my father-in-law, Gene, who died last February, “Yes, but a presence can’t touch you.”
