Eden M. Kennedy's Blog, page 19

me am literate

You'll be excited to hear that I've read another book. In keeping with my new habit of finding books that take roughly the same amount of effort to read as the back of a cereal box, I went to the library and was lucky enough to find a copy of Sh*t My Dad Says. That's right! I checked out a copy of someone's Twitter feed! It's like the Universe heard my plea and gave me the literary equivalent of a "Sanford and Son" episode.



By which you should understand that it was surprisingly good. Justin Halpern smartly takes the shit his dad says and weaves it through what turns out to be a fairly brisk and unsentimental look at growing up as his father's son. His father is one of the bluntest men I've run across in quite some time, apart from the one I married and am currently spending the rest of my life with.

For example. The other morning I dug out two pairs of jeans I'd bought at the Lucky Jeans outlet because my two favorite and, actually, only pairs of jeans have grown thin and full of holes. I put on the first new pair and marched around the house in them for a little while to break them in. They are somewhat high-waisted and kind of full in the leg but snug around the crotchal area. (I know, I just made them sound like something Garry Shandling would wear.) Jack came home and was making an espresso–he goes to the job site early and then comes home mid-morning for breakfast–and so I started strutting around the kitchen like some sort of shameless, middle-aged hen.

"How do you like these jeans?" I asked wiggling awkwardly. As I do.

"Are those the jeans you just bought?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I don't like them," he said.

"What?" I said. "You don't like them?"

"Do you want me to lie?"

"No, but look at the butt!" I turned so he could see my backside. "The butt!"

"They're comfortable, right?" He said "comfortable" like you say Hitler or diarrhea.

"Well, actually, they ride up a little and I have concerns about a camel toe situation."

But because he'd said all he had to say about my new jeans, he turned away to make some toast and focus on keeping a fucking roof over our heads.

"I'll put on the other pair!" I shouted, running down the hall. I put them on. "These are the ones I thought were too young for me!" I shouted from the bedroom. They were straight but not skinny — I didn't want to look like Joey Ramone, for God's sake.

He liked those, and they're actually even more comfortable than the "comfortable" jeans, and sometimes I hate my husband because he's always fucking right about all this shit.

Have yourself a guilty little Christmas

I spent a deliberate amount of time this holiday season thinking about how to be grateful. I was trying to get beyond, "We're so lucky to have heat and jobs and three kinds of cheese and cable TV." We are incredibly lucky to have all those things this year, but I was hoping to get below that, to dig underneath the stuff and find something less (and thus, I suppose, more) tangible.



I didn't completely succeed. I succeeded enough to conclude that I am a Hard Nut to Crack. Earlier this year I was fortunate to spent some time up at the White Lotus. I talked and laughed and did yoga and jumped into a pool of freezing-cold water and then fell into the hot tub with all my clothes on. I sang and I was silent and I breathed and I wept and when I was done I had sudden, unexpected, overwhelming sense of how lucky I am simply to be who I am. I felt like my whole being was a throat, like I was a strange but uniquely shaped instrument that words flowed through, and I wasn't the origin of the words, but my shape shaped the words and I was so lucky to have this particular shape so that these particular words could come out in this particular way.

I imagine there's probably a drug you could take that would lead to a similar realization, but instead I chose to let moving and breathing and whatnot do their hammering at me and voilà! They cracked me open, but now, only a couple of months later, I've simply grown a brand-new candy-coated shell to protect my insides from the outside world. I feel like a snail or a hermit crab or a small animal with bad eyes that hates the sun.

So it wasn't gratitude that swelled up and flopped over my belt this holiday season. (Yes, I may have eaten seven pounds of Christmas cookies last week. What are you implying?)

Instead, having missed the gratitude train, I hopped on the bus to feeling disgustingly overprivileged. Vilely comfortable. People the world over are living on beans and covering themselves with tarps, yet we have not just warmth but firelight, and not just cable but Netflix, and my son has a radio-controlled helicopter that it took a small group of neighbors to rescue from the roof of a nearby garage. We have stuff and friendly people who help us recover our stuff! And we're all alive and riotously healthy. Except for the hamster, who's still in the freezer. (Poor Wheelie, waiting for the ground to dry out before he can R.I.P.)

A friend who volunteers at a shelter told me a terrible story about a man who came to Christmas dinner there last Saturday. There was no bus service on Christmas Day in Santa Barbara. As a result, people who don't have cars had to hitch a ride or hoof it, as did one particular man who walked from Highway 154 to the Unitarian Church so he could have dinner. It's about 4 miles, or a ten-minute drive. A healthy person could walk it in less than an hour. On crutches (the man was on crutches because of his foot cancer), it did not take ten minutes, it took roughly eight hours.

After doing all that work for a delicious meal and a warm bed, he could probably teach a doctoral-level course in gratitude.

I don't know what you're supposed to conclude from all this. I was feeling pretty rotten because on Christmas Eve I discovered that a good friend had died in 2009 without me hearing about it, someone I'd lost touch with but had fond feelings for all the same. I'm suddenly feeling like everyone's dying and it's all happening before I've finished loving them. Goddamnit!

Here are two beings who love each other with all their hearts.