My Sleeping Kids Think it's an Hour Earlier

Okay, hear me out. There’s going to be some payback for this consolation on the other end…Like, say, in about 30 - 40 minutes when I have to wake my children in their cozy beds and explain that it’s 7:45 Am, not 6:45 Am. We will already be running late for school at that point.

BUT, for the next 30 minutes, I still get this time — in the nook that used to be the pantry that now houses a small desk and a bookshelf — the first room of my own in twelve years, since before I was married — and where I’m greeted each morning by the sole light across the way.

I get this sliver of darkness, and the blues shifting in the sky as the sun rises.

And that’s really the point right?

To be in this moment.

I’ve felt, for the past two weeks — as the health scare of coronavirus has escalated — that I’m riding a wave: the ones I tried to catch as a kid in the salty Atlantic, at Ocean City, on a boogey-board with my older brother.

When hours just passed, before I had any regard for time.

That feeling when it catches, and the water propels you in whatever direction it wills.

I don’t usually feel this surrendered to all of my plans being tossed in the air and canceled and rearranged.

Maybe it’s the camaraderie of us all riding this uncertainty together.

I feel oddly at peace. I don’t even write anything in my planner at this point (Yes, I still keep a paper and pen planner).

I am absolutely in this moment, here at my desk. The sun has fully risen.

I will wake my kids and start our day, wherever it takes us.

No, not yet. I think I’ll let them sleep for five more minutes.

Moonstruck

Well, it’s been almost five years since my last entry. I thought about deleting the post from 2015, as not to highlight this long gap. But what is my resume if not a series a lengthy meaningful pauses?

So, heck, let’s highlight it! Because that’s the truth of it right?

How you can place a cup of coffee on the counter, meaning to get back to it, but it actually takes you five years to get back to it. And it’s cold, the coffee. And you’re not thirty-six, you’re forty-one now, and your son who was an infant when you placed down that cup is now entering kindergarten, and sometimes — yes sometimes — it just takes that long to get back to it. And I’m here to affirm this truth!

So, let’s get to it! This week’s consolation: Moonstruck.

Could this film be any more life-affirming? It could not, friends. It could not be any more life-affirming.

This movie is so full of grit, and passion and Cher and Nicolas Cage at their absolute most astonishingly gorgeous and just vessels for this tale of life and love and family and second chances under a New York City full moon.

How had I missed this movie in the actual 1980s? No matter, I caught up on it while laid-up with a cold.

The consolation, of course, of a cold: watching a full movie in the middle of a week day.

I can not recommend this one more emphatically.

Also, those gorgeous twin towers in that past cityscape.

And Cher’s resplendent curls.

This film not only stands the test of time, but — like us — with age, it just gets better.