remind yourself every day…

Today I’m a little annoyed with not getting as much done in a day as I would like to.

I’m a little annoyed that that’s happening a lot of days.

I know it’s natural. Some might even say a positive sign. Better to have too much to do rather than too little, I say.

But since Jan. 1st I’ve been obsessed with setting goals and making sure I’m sticking to them. This is the first time I’ve really set goals. Not resolutions – but goals. But when I choose to do something… I sit down and outline the goals, highlighting points to keep in mind and even making notations for self check-ins that we’re doing what we need to do to reach the goals.

And when I maybe don’t see those goals accomplished on Jan. 2, I also consider myself a slacker.

I’m not writing this just to pat myself on the back but the truth is sometimes you do have to pat yourself on the back when a pat on the back is due and to be completely honest, I think it’s due.

There’s a lot going on right now that’s not perfect but … for the record …

In about three and a half months, I have changed the way I look, feel and move. That’s a lot. And it’s no small feat.

It’s not the size so much as the fact that everything about me feels fitter. And every day I notice a little something getting a little stronger. Push ups get a little bit easier and walking lunges holding a 25 lb. weight over my head is not impossible.

But it’s not even that.

It’s that I find a way to do something – every day.

It’s that when I’m driving, I look for ways to practice box jumps, in parks, on porches … When I hear about a workout or a competition, my first thought is a mental jump at the chance. “I gotta do that,” I think.

Competition is no longer scary or rooted in a self-defeatist attitude. It’s fun. And it bleeds into everything else. Work. Home. Play. It’s about getting better. Getting stronger. Getting faster. Getting smarter. Getting kinder.

It’s about not sucking at life… to be perfectly honest.

I have to remind myself of these things on these days because it’s easy to forget when it’s Jan. 4 and you’re still not the amazingly awesome person you plan to be 361 days from now..

If you’re going to get anywhere – You gotta remind yourself you’re amazingly awesome enough from the start.

a letter to…

Ten years ago today my grandpa passed away. It was the first real close loss I’d experienced. Each year, right around this time, the days feel a little more intense. The air is a little sharper. The colors a little richer.

Here’s what I have learned. Loss is a great many things. But to me, most of all – it is an opportunity to take on an awesome responsibility. That responsibility is like taking the baton in a race. We take what you’ve handed to us and we push forward.

This is what I have learned. With absence there is the opportunity for presence. To fill what’s gone. With all the beauty of what has been.

This is what I have learned: The best memories are carried on in the weaving of new ones.

This is the picture I would talk to you about. I would talk about how I panicked every time I sent a story or a paper in to press. I bet we would have the best conversations about this. I could talk to you about the press all day long.

This is what I have learned: Learning is important. Learning is everything. I didn’t learn enough from you so I have made a point of learning for you. I learned a lot about your wife. She’s pretty awesome. And I learned we both like to write about food. I’d give anything to have tasted that pizza with onion and the coke that you had on the kibbutz that time.

This is what I have learned: To know when to be certain. I’m pretty certain you’d be pretty proud of me now. Filling up these last ten years with everything I learned from you.

Cheers, Grandpa.

old haunts

I’m staying in this weekend. This weekend, which is one of my favorite weekend of the whole year. Normally I would position myself outside somewhere to watch little kids shuffle through fallen leaves dressed as robots or M&M’s or fuzzy little animals.

I’d watch the expressions on their faces, some excited, some expectant, some horrified and some genuinely confused as little pieces of candy get tossed into their bags.

I love Halloween because it reminds me of all of my Halloweens. It’s the fun holiday. The holiday that usually doesn’t come with family spats or tiring road trips to whoever’s house for a long day of family catchup where nobody wins and everyone comes home exhausted. On Halloween you just come home with candy.

But I’m staying in. I’m not out on a friend’s porch or out enjoying the best part of the holiday, the part where you dress up like you’re reliving your kid days but drink adult beverages until you can’t stomach anymore.

Nope. I’m in. I’m in because lately everything seems to be blur. So I’m making an effort to slow it down. Though it all still seems like a blur. Just in slow motion.

And somewhere between cooking up some dinner and cleaning the kitchen I realized I almost let this holiday rush by without watching one of my traditional seasonal films, “Practical Magic.”

Not the most artfully done cinematic feature, no.

About ten minutes into it, though, I’m back in Pittsburgh. I can taste the city on my tongue. It tastes like steel dust, bitter and dark gray. I shiver against memories of a torrential rain storm that left me soaked clean through to the skin, a winter storm that blanketed the city – leaving just me and a homeless man daring to brave the streets long before dawn. Me on my way to work. He, lost.

I’d been so lost myself, so alone the only place that gave me comfort was the library next door. “Practical Magic” by Alice Hoffman had been on display because previews for the movie had started to show up in theaters. I picked it up and lost myself in it.

I read it once. Then twice. Then three times. First, the book is far better than the movie. I let the return time lapse and the library charged me late fees. They racked up as I kept the book close. I feasted on every paragraph. Heavily detailed, the words were delicious and descriptive. They were like candy.

Better.

They were like caramels.

I identified with the dutiful but incredibly doubtful Sally, who always followed the rules and felt even her own heart wasn’t a safe bet. A far cry from the adventurous and vibrant life of her sister, Gillian.

Sans a sister, tonight, while watching, I think of my best friend and miss her so much it makes me ache and I start to wish I had gone out to be around the noise.

When the movie ends, I grab my copy from the stacks. Of all my books its spine is the most worn. Its pages are bent where I’d marked all my favorite spots with paper clips. Some pages have markings where I read and reread over passages like:

They both always wished for the same thing when they were sitting on the roof of the aunts’ house on those hot, lonely nights. Sometime in the future, when they were both all grown up, they wanted to look up at the stars and not be afraid. This is the night they had wished for. This is that future right now. And they can stay out as long as they want to, they can remain on the lawn until every star has faded and still be there to watch the perfect blue sky at noon.”

It all means more to me now than it did in that little studio apartment in a city I have no desire to return to again. Where everything tasted despondent and desolate. But that’s how most things go. It all means more later on. Once it’s all changed. Once the sky brims with color even on stormy days and the colors of the leaves will lift any spirit.

This is me, staying in. I am in but the mind is living it up. It makes me nervous and twitchy to not be doing a million things at once. To not be filling every second. Living in the moment is for suckers. Doing so opens the door to missing out on actually being that moment. Fluid and fleeting.

I flip through the old pages and read. I won’t do any more tonight, though there is plenty left to be done.

Instead I’ll remember a younger me who flipped through an ordinary book one fall afternoon and wanted to write paragraphs that read like lyrics, stories that stick with you long after they’re done.

Here’s to those moments … and of course, midnight margaritas.

reflecting…

Like so many Sunday mornings, I turned the key to the front door of our building and stepped into a quiet newsroom. I sifted through the papers on my desk and turned on my computer and set my bags down on a chair.

But when I sat down, turning my attention to email and setting up the live streaming news of Sept. 11 coverage off to listen to as I worked, I had to stop and take in the unexpected personal magnitude of the moment.

I’ve told the story at least nine times before. How I watched the coverage with my family and a set of wide eyes that September morning. How we waited anxiously to make sure all were accounted for, including one aunt in the South Tower and one on the ground just below. How the day fell to night. The green convertible I’ll never forget with the kids in the back holding an American flag, flapping strong in the wind.

How I sat for hours that night watching the families stand before news cameras, speaking through tears
begging for any information about missing loved ones.

I always go back to those families. I always go back to them because they’re what made me realize we are living stories and where there are voices that have been silenced, we must speak the words. We must tell the story. So many stories would go untold as only the victims themselves could tell them. Stories of birthdays and holidays and achievements. It was that realization that sent me into journalism.

It had taken me a long time to figure out what I wanted to do. To put it into a classification. And that night, sitting alone with my grandfather in the middle of the night watching footage … I always associate the moment with my grandfather. He would pass away two months later, while the country’s collective psyches were still raw, suddenly on a more direct level, mine was stripped again.

But this time I could see the story. In the moments when family members passed through the room, gathered at a table, huddled together in the bitter November air smoking cigarettes, I could see it all. For the first time.

So this morning, I realized that 10 years after the day that opened me up to what I wanted to do, to who I am, I was sitting at a desk doing just that, being just what I’d wanted. Maybe it was on a smaller scale than my biggest dreams. But when you’re doing what you love, you don’t get hung up on the technicalities.

And it’s what had me tearing up today.

Ten years is a marker. It’s when you look back and take stock of what filled those years.

When I look back, I look back on two significant events that took place just a couple of months apart and I can see that at the very least, I spent that time frantically filling the loss. The loss of innocence, the loss of a grandfather.

We lost innocence on Sept. 11, 2001.

But the thing about loss is, it’s not a permanent state. It is an unfortunate reality. Sometimes it’s a page. Sometimes it’s a chapter. Sometimes it’s a loss of time. Sometimes it’s a loss of life. Either way, it is an absence that needs to be filled. Sometimes we don’t know with what but that doesn’t really matter. Just fill it with something good. Something comforting. Something warm. Fill the absence with purpose.

Because loss also begs responsibility from the rest of us. To do, not dwell. To live so that life is not left in vain.

We lost innocence on Sept. 11. Two months later I lost a family pillar and I filled both losses with purpose. It has been my very best friend. And I realize how much it means to me because ten years later I have to make the commitment to make it a priority in the face of new changes. That’s what you do for the things you love. It’s a part of my identity, the honorable label of ‘journalist.’

When I think back … Not a single classroom, not an office or a night out or even time spent with friends has ever made me feel such as I do when I’m reporting. It’s a belonging. Belonging is the kind of thing you suffer for and search for. It’s why women sometimes marry before they’re really sure and why kids fall into the habits of the wrong crowd and men sometimes stray toward a dark path.

Everyone wants to belong but you know when it’s real because it doesn’t just choose you, it saves you. It holds you steady. And it’s not even the people in the newsroom, though they are like tribe, but it’s me and the notebook and the notes and the moments when it’s just you and the story.

People always tell me to “live in the moment” but I don’t think they even know what that really means.

We don’t just live in the moment. We write it down. We remember every second of it.

I have to say I love it. Like when a child heads off to his first day of school and his mother whispers “I love you” over and over again, through proud tears. I feel that way about what I do. And as I grow with it I feel I have to keep saying that over and over again so it never goes away.

You want to make sure it’s known. Even out of earshot. When you’re out of your comfort zone.

This Sept. 11, I think of all the lives lost, wish I could tell their stories and am grateful for whatever graces led me to this place. I think of what was lost around that time of year, I think of my grandfather and I swell with something bigger than gratitude, bigger than memory, bigger than love, as I am more committed than ever to living in the wake. Be the voice where the voice is silenced.

the art of here and there

It’s afternoons like these that take me back to my adolescence and my childhood. An unrelenting summer has given us a short reprieve and the air is just warm enough to remind me of summer days filled with lemonade, chocolate chip cookies and kadima.

If I close my eyes, in seconds they are scattered about the front yard, perched on the porch. My aunts, my uncles, my brothers, my mother and my grandparents, cars whizzing by the main street and the “thwack” of the ball against the kadima paddle cutting through all air and sound.

If I look to the right, I can see the old tree, the one that was born and bred to be climbed, with a seat built into it’s trunk.

It’s events like these that remind me of the path that came after. Then was the age of not so much knowing, when the tragedies and trials were kept away in the shroud of hushed tones. But it was brief and fleeting.

Only now am I grateful for that. After came the realizations. Sometimes they come to soon but that’s the way it is and I am truly grateful for my experiences because due to them, I am not afraid of the dark. I like the knowing and the get to knowing. I like the sound of voice, compared to hushes.

Lemonade and cookies gave way to what I would come to know for sure: happily ever after is sometimes something else entirely, children can be stolen in the night and beautiful boys with blue eyes slip away well before their time. And the most important certainty: our tragedies are just as important to who we are as the triumphs. How does the saying go? Something about the light shining through the dark…

But back to today.

Today, there is a ceremony hanging over the sorrow. That is the way it always is with visitors but this time I’m present for the visit so I feel it even more so. There are the rushes of errands, things to do, things to get done before the slam of a car door and the entrance to the airport.

I love airports. They are the containers of the world in transition. Like a snow globe, only instead of a singular city, inside is the space between. Between here and there, between where we were and where we’re going. Between the lines. I love them. I love watching people hug the ones coming home, watch anxiously the ones who are leaving.

Say what you will about the security lines and shoes – look around and love stretches from the ticket counter to the boarding hall.

At the airport, I greet my aunt and hug her and we wait for the slow, whirring of the baggage claim. She smells faintly of tobacco and honey. Maybe it’s just perfume, it’s hard to know for sure, but that’s what I’m going with. I can’t even figure how one accomplishes smelling like honey. I can only assume it’s an internal sweetness.

As we headed out to the car, I felt the ache of time. Had I been 16, with an itch for the ignition, we would have gossiped wildly, practically shrieking all the way to the car, chewing on the details of family spats like bubble gum. But now the storytelling is slow and steady like taffy.

Age and time have assumed their roles.

That’s what happens when some leave home and some stay. The visits get shorter, fewer and farther between, thick and heavy with the weight of narrative: something’s wrong, someone’s gone, nowhere else is far enough away.

That is why she’s here, that is why they come. All visits come with a reason. It’s a sad fact but anyone who has ever stayed, knows the reasons don’t matter at all.

For a block of time we all step back, as far as we can, into the old ways. We spend as much time visiting, talking and laughing. We eat one too many cookies. We soak up leban with pita. We’re in constant contact.

On a sweltering afternoon, I speed down back roads to the cemetery I used to walk through when I was young. It used to be my favorite place, so peaceful. Stones etched with history and time. I’d make up stories about “Mom” 1820 – 1853 and “Daughter” 1841-1843 in my head. But that was before I knew enough.

Now, I slip through the pathways and stick close to a stone in the ground as a crowd begins to build. I see my family gathering at the grassy edge but I don’t want to move, not just yet. Here’s another stone in my own path. The one that taught me life is sometimes unfair. Mothers and fathers lose sons and daughters long before they’re ready. The one that reminds me that pain is visible and visceral and we should really avoid causing it whenever humanly possible.

When that day is over, we’ll feel release in good food, good humor and good company. But I can not help but wonder what has all been learned. They are my family – the ones with the chocolate chip cookie, lemonadey memories attached to them – so much so I can taste the tart lemon and chocolate chips on my tongue. But I still wonder.

Every day, an experience, every experience a natural ebb of our own individual condition. I wonder it when we hug goodbye and I think to myself how awful it is it took such a visit to force me into finding for them all again when obviously … the time is there.

I love times like these. When memory merges with what is now and what may be.

in memory of …

This is not the age I first witnessed a friend of mine lose a parent. It’s is something I’ve seen happen to friends of mine in the past but perhaps I was too young or the instances were too sudden, that I was left unsure of how to relate to the situation.

But this last year it happened again, not long ago, and then again this week. Both were cases of courageous battles. Both took me back in time to reflect.

Often when those words are used, a “courageous battle,” the perspective is a courageous battle lost against whatever the illness.

But I hate to think of it that way.

Despite the outcome, I think of these battles, fought by those I know and many I don’t, as hard fought and won – from the minute the diagnosis is on the table and with every breath after.

When that is the case, “they” are the gentle giants who have mobilized countless men, women and children to devote countless hours to raising funds, walking laps around a track and pushing for support in finding cures.

They are the inspiration that fuels those at the microscopes and petri dishes to press on.

They are the indelible mark.

When it is a friend who has lost a parent, regardless of how, you relate in a way you wouldn’t with anyone else. There is no comfort. There is no understanding, if it has not happened to you and only then even, a limited grasp, as understandably, we are all different.

Still you relate. If you’re like me, you respect those surrogate parents who have likely cheered you on, maybe they gave you your first job, remembered you and welcomed you into their home. They are, much like our own parents, superheroes to which no harm or illness can befall.

But still, it does. And sometimes they do, too.

Each year, so many fight for the research and cures of so many diseases. Whether our loved ones are stricken with cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease or any other illness, we must be steadfast and diligent in those fights, however we choose to participate in them.

Because the loved ones we’ve lost are not losers but rather, fallen heroes. And what we fight for are not just ends to their diseases but also their memory.

Flipping through photos of my friend’s mother this week, I came across one of her I’d never seen before. Slightly out of focus and pixilated, she was walking along the beach, a camera in her hand and the ocean behind her.

What she was watching was well out of view. What I saw was a woman so definitely participating in the moments of her life. That is something very hard to achieve. It’s something worth asking of ourselves. We live, we love, we laugh, and we do plenty. But are we really participating?

I’m not a fan of the ocean. But next time I’m there, I’ll think of her.

I choose not to view this world as one that is lived in the absence of – but rather one we live in that was made all the better for those who have displayed nothing short of sincere bravery.

Here’s to those friends. Here’s to their parents.

Here’s to taking a moment and thinking about who the world may have been made all the better for, to you.

less a big chunk of faith

There is something to be said about stories like that of the People v. Casey Anthony, although, I’m afraid it is not said enough.

Stories like these, which captivate a nation, do so I believe for a very important reason. They are, I think, a spotlight shed upon the dark paths, so we may keep them as a reminder when we choose our own.

I hesitate in commenting too much on the trial, my personal belief of guilt or innocence or my personal feeling about the celebration taking place among the defense team even as I type this - with bottles of champagne reportedly overflowing at a restaurant table across the street from the courthouse, where the lead defense attorney Jose Baez claimed “there are no winners” today.

Instead, I prefer to see this case as a searing and painful portrait of how we, as a society, fail.

And in this case, we failed a child. So that’s worse.

And it’s nagging at me. More so than any highly publicized court case in recent years, this one has left an indelible mark.

Recently I sat down with our local prosecutor for an interview.  A few days before that, I’d been in the courtroom sitting just a few feet away from him as a judge heard motions in regard to the sentencing of a man convicted of raping his eight year old daughter. Twice. The defendant’s claim of innocence was so ridiculous I won’t even mention the details of it here.

Those are the things you hear sometimes that you don’t tell your family or friends when they ask about your day. Those are the stories you try not to go to bed with. That give you a perspective on the world. Sometimes it feels like a downside to the job. Sometimes it feels like the whole point.

I asked the prosecutor how he kept from getting jaded and he admitted it’s hard at times. He smiled and shrugged off the question. He hikes, he said. He stays active. He just tries not to let it get to him.

That’s all you get sometimes.

There’s a feeling to walking into a courtroom. Like you’re in justice’s house. There’s a sense of security there. That even if you hear the words ‘not guilty’ when you think otherwise, you can rest secure in the system and that it works. Sometimes when I’m annoyed with everything, I find comfort in going in to cover court proceedings for an entire morning. It’s routine. It’s regulated. It’s rooted in right and wrong.

But I don’t feel that way today. Not because I am certain of any stranger’s guilt or innocence but because I believe today was an example of how a jury originally designed to be one of our peers, is no longer so. Because we’ve grown apart as far as peers go. We’ve lost an ability to reason.

And when it comes to the mysterious death of a child, we’re willing to give that lost life maybe 10 hours of collective thought. And then we’re done.

When a child is taken too soon, the pain of that loss is felt by all those who have loved them purely forever. It settles into the bloodstream, rests in the tissue and ingrains itself in bone. You can see it overwhelm the body in mid conversation. It shakes the voice in the back of the throat and releases itself in the form of tears falling upon only memory.

That kind of loss knows no time.

It seems as though we have become so detached from one another, so intent on our own sensibilities we’ve forgotten what it means to be part of a collective society. And today as if that wasn’t bad enough, inside a Florida courtroom, children were put on equal footing with adults. They took the little ones and they said, “their value is no more, no less than the rest of us.”

We have gone too far in our avoidance of responsibility under the guise of claiming we are simply refusing to judge. Superficial judgements come all too easily. And yes, it’s easier to feel “you are wrong” than it is to stop and first ask the question, “what is right?” But we don’t even ask anymore.

There have been so many things, so many events in our world that have tested my faith in the future. And yet, there was always a light. Always that belief that in the end, we come together. Even at the end of a tragic day in September 2001, with so many lives lost at the end of the day, it was decency and humanity beneath the ash.

But today I can’t find the collective humanity. And that frightens me. Today, I find the future scary. I am jaded and uncertain of my peers.

Even more so – today I find myself less a big chunk of faith.

I can’t help but feel we failed a child today.  May God help us in failing no more tomorrow.