Pictures from the MIT Museum’s eccentric and beautiful kinetic sculpture collection by artist-in-residence Arthur Ganson, which Ross and I first saw four and a half years ago on a perfect afternoon in Cambridge.

I am writing about Charles Francis Richter at the moment… thinking about earthquakes, thinking about Indonesia, thinking about how a person can get used to tragedy. Thinking about how I have gotten used to tragedy. Not inured to it, not numb to it, not lacking in a desire to do something about it — just used to it.

It has been a perfect weekend for being outside.

I keep forgetting to tell you about the Bat Mitzvah we went to on Saturday (lord, those things are commitments — we were there from 10am till 2:30 in the afternoon, and it was lovely but whoo! I needed a nap afterwards). Let’s see if I can get this right: it was Ross’s mother’s cousin’s daughter who was turning 13. I used to know what that relationship was called, but I’m damned if I can remember. Maybe my mum can comment to tell us what it is in Cantonese.

Anyway, the Bat Mitzvah. It was my first ever, and a very charming one to take that place, too. It actually reminded me a good deal of our wedding — although it was bigger, fancier, certainly more expensive, and altogether more meticulously planned and rehearsed for than our wedding. They held the ceremony in the roof garden of a nice hotel in Cambridge, and we moved inside for a very delicious reception and lunch afterwards. It was the ceremony that I found familiar — it was an eclectic collection of readings, poems, songs, small ritual acts, and a fingerpinch of adorable confusion, and you could see everyone’s personalities in it. Totally worth baking in the sun for.

Sunday morning Dana and I met to wander through the grounds of the Arboretum in J.P. — another first for me, though I cannot think of a single reason why. I don’t need to tell you that it was a joy to spend time with her, do I? I don’t. You can see for yourselves.

Sunday afternoon and evening we hung out with lots of Ross’s family on his grandma’s side, in town for the celebrations. We’re very lucky to have both been blessed, for the most part, with eminently likeable relatives. We are particularly fond of Brenda and Chris, who put us up in their fabulous Manhattan apartment the night before we flew out on our honeymoon. Here’s the softly elegant B.: check out the button-bangle!

And Chris is the genius behind the pantomime we saw last year. Honestly, some days I feel like a small dull planet orbited by a million fantastically sparkly moons.

Today we bucked tradition (whose? not ours!) and forwent a Memorial Day cookout in favor of sitting on a small grassy hill near our house with coffee and books. I took pictures of Ross’s feet, aren’t you excited?

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Edited to add a picture of Chris; I love it.

The other night, after Avi said to me — teasingly, of course — that I don’t write about him enough (incidentally, you might be surprised by the number of times I have received that complaint, explicit or implied — I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone who writes about their lives for serious), I said to him, “You require context.” And he said, ” המבין יבין” (”He who understands will understand”).

Which is partly true. Jenn, for instance, has her memories. Sean probably has an idea or two in his head. But it’s hard to see what the two of us have become, out of those days. There are friendships that begin and continue in just the same way, always the same on both sides, comforting in their steadfastness. They are threads knotted around your wrist: keeping you connected to the people you were when you met, helping you hold on to particular incarnations of yourselves. And then there are friendships that not only grow with you but help you grow, until you are twice the people you were when they began. You can trace them back to their sources, but only as a river, rushing strong and sweet, is traced back to a questioning stream.

Here is a stream:

I am 19, freshly unstuck from home and suddenly free to choose the shape of my life in ways I have never contemplated. I have a boy nine thousand miles away, his picture on my desk and a promise in my heart, but did I mention I am nineteen and suddenly free? I am tremendous with hunger for knowledge and experiences and all of my role models in life are still mostly dead white men. I want to be cool, but I don’t want anyone to know I want it so I am guarded with my joy and my confusion, afraid to be too kind. I have many ideas but few ideals: I want to show the world something special, not save it. Still I am ready to stay up all night talking about the universe; that part of me is true. And I hate Brandeis — I want to be in New York City with the bohemians.

Avi is the same, freshly unstuck from an intense first love whose threads still cling about him and tall with a sense of superiority that comes from having grown fond of the way people’s faces look when he shocks them with his intelligence, his arrogance, or his lack of concern for their expectations. He is smart as a tack and just as sharp; he thinks he sees through the rest of the world, but he could stand to ask a few more questions about it first. He wears his religion and his politics with pride. He rubs everyone the wrong way so he can see who smiles instead of frowns. Still he has an air of serious sadness that peeks through his posturing; that part of him is true. And he hates Brandeis — he wants to be at UPenn with the real intellectuals.

We meet at orientation and I like the way he picks a blade of grass and chews on it while everyone introduces themselves. He likes my calm, watchful look. Looking back I can see that we’ve both fallen for the other’s defences. But within days it is us against the world, and by the world we mean everyone who isn’t as sly as we are. The only two sly and slanted people in a straightlaced school, we think.

So there it is, mostly. Avi and I spend almost every evening together for the entirety of the first semester of freshman year (by the spring the stream had already hit a rocky patch); usually several hours every evening. Sometimes I think about that fact, and realize how unusual a thing it is for two people not in love to do. But if I do not walk one way through the corridors of our grotty dorm building to knock on his door, he walks the other way to knock on mine, and then we disappear out the doors to sit on the grass, wander the grounds. All we do is talk. Neither of us is quite who we ought to be, but maybe we can see the shape of our future selves behind the smokescreen, see through to a time when both of us have grown out of our pretensions.

Maybe, but probably not. I’m pretty sure I, at least, thought I was kind of great the way I was.

Here is a river:

I am 27, working full time in a job I would have considered not even worth thinking about eight years ago, neither saving the world nor being famous. Every day I figure out ways to make meaning out of my life despite that fact, and most days I succeed. I have tasted failure for the first time but not the last, and although I thought I would die from it I now know there are few things less fatal. I laugh more than I ever have and hug both friends and strangers with impulsive affection. I am married to the sweetest heart in the world; waking in the morning my heart is gladder than you can know. I have given up on being cool, but I am still ambitious. I want to be good, and kind, and right, and human.

Avi will be the same in two weeks, and he’s on his way to a job that he might have wanted eight years ago but that he is only now wise and compassionate enough to perform well. He has shed, slowly and one skin at a time, his arrogance and his assumptions about the world, and one of the things he does best these days is ask questions about it; his heart and mind are open to love and stories and other people’s wisdom, other people’s questions. He is still smart as a tack but altogether he is softer, sweeter. He wears his love for life and for his friends with pride. I think he too has given up on being cool — almost, anyway. And he too wants to be good, and kind, and right, and human.

There have been moments, these eight years, when we’ve hurt each other or tried to hide our darker selves from each other. But for the most part, I like to think we’ve both had something to do with this water growing sweeter, with our growing up like this: becoming two friends who really do have a reason to love the person the other one is.

There it is.

Avi (who complains that he is not mentioned here often enough) is visiting and I am running on too little sleep and too much coffee. I give you his smiling face for now; later, when I have recovered from the night I am about to have (drinks with him and Ross and Sean, starting at 11pm. People, it is Thursday, I am old and 11pm is my bedtime — what the hell am I thinking?), I will write a paean. I promise. I am good at those.

• The cab driver who idled and honked, idled and honked, idled and honk-honk-honked for a good ten minutes outside our house at 5:20am this morning, annoucing his presence to a passenger who was clearly already enjoying a blissful existence in heaven, since had they been merely recently dead the honking would undoubtedly have raised them. Ross leaned out of the window to ask the guy to stop, and when he continued to beep I actually got out of bed to go downstairs and beg him to call his passenger on the phone or ring their doorbell or something, just to please stop with the honking. He stared at me blankly out of his still rolled-up window (He’d refused to wind it down. I interpreted this as a sign of fear, as I cut a pretty intimidating figure in my baby-blue Grumpy Bear t-shirt and pajama pants) and apologized half-heartedly, as if he couldn’t imagine what on earth I was so annoyed about, hadn’t he stopped after the 32nd honk?
• The woman standing just inside the doorway of the train who, when the doors opened at Park Street, turned around to push her way further in so that she would not have to step out and make way for the crowd of morning commuters who needed to get past her in order to exit at this major connecting station. “Excuse me,” she murmured, as if this small politeness made up for her absurd selfishness. I ignored her, but I would have much preferred to have sent her into exile.
• One of my colleagues at work, who is part of the same team I am on but who never smiles or responds to my greeting when we walk past each other, despite the fact that I always say hello cheerfully to her. I suspect she doesn’t like me, because she’s not otherwise a rude person — but come on. What is happening to the social niceties that we so desperately need to tie our communities together with a web of lies? I have decided to beam even more merrily at her from now on, so that her lack of enthusiasm will become painfully obvious. Again, exile would be a neater solution.
• Drivers who don’t stop at the stop line.

What, you think these are minor offences? Minor offences are the ones that thrill my soul the most with disgust. I might be persuaded to forgive murder, arson, grand theft auto, but in the face of an inconsiderate human being, I am stone cold. Stone, I tell you.

(Surprisingly enough, I was in a good mood all day today. Probably because I was able to imagine all my wandering inconsiderates honking and bumping and frowning at each other in the desert before being run over by a car that doesn’t stop at the line.)

We went to Walden Pond and I forgave the cool, shady afternoon for not being the bright summer’s day I so dearly wanted it to be. On the way home we stopped at a bakery and bought a fresh loaf of Brioche, ate it together tearing buttery pieces from it with our hands.

Things are waiting below the surface.

I think I might be addicted to coffee, as opposed to merely very very fond of it. Lately I have been getting a cup every single morning at work and today, when I went off to the museum without first imbibing, a nasty headache developed later in the afternoon that would not be banished by a certain pair of baby blue tablets dissolving into my blood. As addictions go, it’s at least not a particularly expensive one — but I am wary of someday falling prey to the dreadful sounding “rebound headache,” when caffeine no longer serves to keep at bay the boa constrictor that sometimes winds itself around my skull.

I have snakes on my mind, because today I had such a lovely 15 minutes with the hognosed snake — I can’t tell you. I’ve gotten very comfortable handling him, and it is such a pleasant feeling to have a warm, smooth, slithering creature winding itself about your hands and forearms, tightening gently to keep itself from falling, raising a curious head to taste the air around your fingers, sliding over your wrist like a friend. I’m quite sure the hognosed snake would rather be somewhere else, possibly dining on a toad, during our little sessions together — but for me it is a rare brush with a different kind of life, a very vital sort of life that doesn’t have all the boring, annoying human apparel laid over it — life distilled to sensation, impulse, and reaction. Holding that animal makes me feel connected to the old earth it ought to be gliding over; its body touching mine, I feel like a time-traveler. And I feel filled with a thousand thousand questions.