cups of kindness

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Editor in Awesome Women, Being young, Breaking Bad, Fireworks, Friendships, Grieving, James Gandolfini, Lou Reed, Love, Marriage, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, New Year, Northern Ireland Culture, Rites of passage, Robert Frost, saying goodbye, The Sopranos, Themes of childhood, Time, Writing

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Auld Lang Syne, fireworks, Fleetwood Mac, Happy New Year, Holiday, James Gandolfini, lou reed, magic and loss, Maurice Sendak, New Year, Patti Smith, Robert Burns, Robert Frost

“Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.” Patti Smith

Grafton Street, Dublin. November 2013

How do I begin to put the stuff of the past twelve months in a box and tie it up in a big red bow? Just begin. Pluck out a memory and wrap it up. Move on to the next. Handle with care. It’s the perfect day for it, New Year‘s Eve, a day designated for wrapping things up, for reminiscing and resolving; for Auld Lang Syne and kissing strangers; for holding on and letting go. For loose ends. For fireworks.

There was more to 2013 than its last forty-six days; there was a time when we were three instead of two. Like lightning bugs, the memories flash. Ken tapping his feet at a Fleetwood Mac concert this May, marveling at the genius of Lindsey Buckingham, wondering what Lindsey must be on and if he could get his hands on some of it. My fiftieth birthday and the wood floors I’d wanted for two decades in this little house finally installed. Expense be damned, I wanted it to feel like a California beach-house underfoot. Art supplies for Sophie’s summer college class. Binge-watching Breaking Bad in late summer. The three of us watching on my computer screen, an animated film in which a frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak gives his final interview, each of us in tears when Sendak tells the interviewer,

Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you . . . Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.

Ken squeezed my hand at that part. I can almost feel it. I wonder did he feel that Mr. Sendak was speaking for him too? Now tears. But wait. Another memory and a smile. He with a wink, “Are you ready for Tony and the boys?” every night at 8PM when HBO re-aired the entire series of The Sopranos.

And then, unthinkably, big, invincible James Gandolfini was gone. And then Seamus Heaney. And then Lou Reed. Lou Reed. Ken didn’t want to talk about Lou Reed dying. But, Ken darling, did you forget we cannot have the magic without the loss? Two weeks later, you would be gone too, and if I could have just one more conversation I would tell you it is all going to be alright, because the loss of you, and all the pain of it, will never trump the magic. Never.

Yes. 2013 has been what a friend describes as”a full year.” A year lived fully. A cliche, maybe, but it has been a roller-coaster.

~ Photo by Adam Shaw

Remembering my first time on The Big Dipper roller-coaster at Barry’s in Portrush, I must close my eyes to better see myself again hurtling through the North Atlantic air. Curls wild in the wind, mouth agape, eyes squeezed to block out light and noise and fear, and me half-hoping to stay aloft forever, because ”coming down is the hardest thing.’’

At the top, breath suspended, I wait for the world to fall out beneath me. A sudden plunge at shocking speed has me convinced I am plummeting to my own death. But not yet. More unpredictable twists and turns await, above and below. White-knuckled, I am clinging to the bar, only half-believing there is enough life in the clickety-clacking, old machinery to set me down again on solid ground.

When it’s all over, I am free to return to the midway, albeit a little green around the gills, unsteady on my feet. As he helps me out of the car, I hope no one but the weather-beaten carnie can tell I am not as confident as once I was.

This New Year’s Eve feels tenuous, and I am settling in somewhere between Tom Petty’s”Learning to Fly” and Robert Frost’s lovely “Birches.”

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

Neither do I. Nowhere would it go better than a place where I can find myself held up, daily, by the kindness of people who have walked in my shoes, who feel my pain. People who know a thing or two; people I may never meet but who hold me in their thoughts and prayers, who light candles for me in faraway places, who say something even when they know not what to say. For reading, for remarking, for taking a step or two on the hard road with me. Thank you. We are forever bound in a human chain.

May 2014 shimmer for you and yours.

Yvonne

Grafton Street, Dublin, Ireland

james gandolfini with the wild things now

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by Editor in Actors, Art, Children's Books, Gary Shteyngart, HBO, James Gandolfini, Maurice Sendak, Memoir, Soundtracks of our Lives, television, The Sopranos, Themes of Childhood, Where The Wild Things Are

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Christoph Niemann, HBO, In the Night Kitchen, James Gandolfini, live your wild and precious life, Mary Oliver, Maurice Sendak, mother daughter relationship, NPR, Terry Gross, tony Soprano, True Romance, Where the Wild Things Are, Words of Wisdom, Writing

The-Sopranos-wallpapers- The only non-book on my bookshelves is the Sopranos DVD collection. Apropos that it sits among some of the most compelling stories ever told because, as Gary Shteyngart says, The Sopranos is “storytelling for the new century.” And, a good story lasts forever.

Every night at 8PM my husband asks me, “So are you ready for Tony and the boys?” and we tune in to HBO to watch, again, a re-run of an episode we have seen before, knowing what’s going to happen but nonetheless lured in by James Gandolfini’s charisma. So it was surreal to watch his Tony Soprano fight about money with Edie Falco’s Carmela on Wednesday night, knowing he had died in Rome earlier that day.

Before Tony Soprano had even been created, James Gandolfini was playing the part. As he says in a 1999 interview, he was playing thugs, gangsters, murderers,

the roles you’d expect a guy who looks like me to get.

Brilliantly. I saw the makings of Tony Soprano in Eddie, the hitman hired to keep an eye on Demi Moore’s character in The Juror, and Gandolfini may as well have been auditioning for The Sopranos as Virgil in True Romance. In the latter, Gandolfini’s performance crackles with the kind of murderous intensity that makes Tony Soprano the perfect villain. Vicious and violent, I could barely watch the scene with Patricia Arquette where Virgil meets his end – quintessential Quentin Tarantino. Still, even though I know Tony’s capacity for unimaginable brutality, I have been charmed over and over by his playfulness, the smiling eyes, the sheepishness – duped, like many of his victims, by a relatable and likable vulnerability. Tony Soprano remains invincible and untamable. Immortal. Is that what makes it so difficult to accept that James Gandolfini was with us for the briefest sojourn, dead at 51?

The actor and what he leaves behind for his baby daughter, has me thinking about my mortality. My daughter does not read this blog. Not yet. So young and wise, she tells me that because we are here for only a short time, her plan is to save my writing for later. When I am gone, she will open the jar. This beautiful strategy to counter the missing of people likely to go before her, reminds me of the frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak‘s final interview. Illustrated in this animated film by Christoph Niemann, is the purest expression of mortality I have ever heard, Sendak’s impassioned entreaty:

Live your life, live your life, live your life.

Hearing Maurice Sendak tell the interviewer, “Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you,” is especially poignant knowing that he died just over a year before James Gandolfini left us. I think Maurice Sendak would have missed the man with an appetite for life, the actor whose best and most heartsome performance may have been as the voice of Carol in the film adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the story of Max whose punishment for behaving badly, is being sent to bed without any dinner. Subsequently, he sails across an ocean to a place where wild things roam. When he returns home, it is to a happy ending, with dinner waiting and still hot.

As the disembodied Carol, the range and inflections of Gandolfini’s voice, are as masterful and nuanced as hose that flutter across his face as Tony Soprano or any of the other wild things he has portrayed. Like grace notes. As Carol, however, he is a different kind of monster, the very embodiment of the complex figments of a child’s imagination, those of Max who has run away from home. I suspect that every child knows where the wild things are. In my case, I remember my mother telling me not to let my imagination run away with me when I fretted about the dark, or death, or disappointments big and small. Fueled by these wild things, I sailed off by myself many times, but always found my way back home. Just like Max.

And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all

1016636_640475832646822_1236994437_n Bitterly disappointed, raging at Max for not being king, for wanting to leave, Carol chases him, lunges at him in one of the scariest scenes of the film, “I’ll eat you up!” he roars. Carol loves him so, but Max must go. Thus, the heartbreaking farewell as Max sails away from the solitary giant on the shore, howling its grief in the voice of James Gandolfini, a voice silenced too soon.