Friday, March 28, 2008

Happiness Manifesto: Friday

1) Happy getting up in the morning and going to work.
2) Happy drinking morning Chock Full of Butt with soy creamer.
3) Happy that it is Friday night and I'm having dinner with Dan the Man.
4) Happy that we have a block schedule at school.
5) Happy that I am now eco-Laura, though I have a lot to work on.
6) Happy that I am riding my bike tomorrow.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Friday Letter

Dear ones,

I AM HUSTLING TO WRITE THIS LETTER before my plane lands in D.C. It has been one week since our vacation in Sin City. I am listening to the Beatles Love on my iPod...I keep rewinding “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” over and over. If I close my eyes, I see the dangling, twinkling lights going on and off, up and down, on and off...while the harpsichord plays the opening notes of this song.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

I wonder if this memory is my favorite moment of the weekend?

My mind goes to the late-night, smoky black jack table. I am sitting next to a strange man who is giving me advice. Being dealt hand after hand, trying to add the numbers to 21 in my head, wondering, what is wrong with me? Why can’t I add these numbers faster? With each card played, that strange man would whisper the card I needed to make 21. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t add—because he was saying funny numbers that added to my confusion?

Somebody calls you. You answer quite slowly. A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

My mind fades to the roulette wheel where the short story unfolds. The slightly retarded man sits in his wheelchair, a drool bib around his neck. His tray table holds the cigarettes for his caretaker, a bald man with spacers in his ears resembling an African tribesman. The looming stack of chips in front of the pair is ironic as to who was fitting tonight’s gambling bill. Across the table is man in a hat, frazzled gray hair protruding. He, too, has a smoky view of the table as he sits behind yet another towering stack of casino chips.

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your hair. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone.

A large fat man sits down engulfing the chair and completing the story and adding to the cast of characters. He puts down a hundred or so and takes out a smoke. Out of nowhere appears a cocktail waitress of sorts, though I notice that she is not serving drinks; she takes out a wooden toy and begins to massage the fat man’s back, smoke billowing up from the table as the roulette wheel spins round and round and round.

Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain, where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.

The neon lights of the strip are still fiercely vivid in my mind, colors and advertisements and images on every possible billboard and sign surface. Walking down the main street is like walking through several movie sets—Paris, Italy, ancient Rome all in a row. I wonder at how much money changes hands each night? About the person who wins a hand and produces a smile and walk to the Cashier to change the chips into a mortgage or car payment? Or about the person who keeps losing and losing and losing and losing. And the heavy irony that both scenes occur at the exact same time.

I’d like to be, under the sea. In an octopus’s garden in the shade. He’d let us in. Knows where we’ve been. In his octopus’s garden in the shade...

Maybe I’d like to think that the best time of the weekend was sitting on the couch laughing at throw up stories or sharing a cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal or designing a restaurant menu. When I look around the room, I see that none of our lives are perfect. Lord knows are children aren’t perfect—wild children, wayward children, too-wise-for-their-shoe-size children. I take some comfort in knowing that we aren’t perfect and don’t pretend to live perfect lives. I take comfort that we are moving on from being Mommy and Daddy and onto the fierce road of being a road biker or mountain climber, well some of us are moving on from that phase...

I would be warm below the storm in our little hide away beneath the waves. Resting our head on the seabed in an octopus’s garden near a cave. We would sing and dance around because we know we can’t be found.

As my plane begins to descend, I just want each of you to know how much I appreciate your company. The weekend went by really slowly, as if we were making a movie.

Because the world is round. It turns me on. Because the world is round. Because the wind is high it blows my mind. Because the wind is high.

Love is all. Love is new
Love is all. Love is you.