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"This Is Water"

“The moment that you feel that just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.” -Neil Gaiman

The above quote, spoken at this year’s commencement speech at The University of the Arts in Pennsylvania, found me at just the right moment. Having recently completed my memoir, every once in a while- usually while maneuvering traffic or falling asleep- I doubt myself. I doubt what I’m doing, what I’ve done. I get caught in the mindset that family, and all of the baggage each one collects over the years, needs to be kept private. I find that on my worst day, I have convinced myself that the act of revealing the worst along with the best days of my childhood, the not-so-flattering moments between siblings and parents and everyone in between, is an act of selling out.

And I am grateful for the moment I snap out of it. I remember that all families are made up of imperfect people, which inevitably leads to an imperfect family, that the structure of a house is a mask for what really goes on inside, and that we are nothing if we pretend otherwise.

I have found that the act of writing a memoir, regardless of how many people read it, is a way of stripping your existence down, realizing what has mattered and what you will never recall. It is a meditation on all of the things that you never thought were significant enough to remember.

In yet another graduation speech, one given by David Foster Wallace in 2005, he opened with this anecdotal story:

“Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

His point, which most of the speech was centered on, was to emphasize that: “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

So I watch commencement speeches when I need to be reminded of things people say to optimistic children who are reluctantly turning into adults. I stumble upon words like these that make sense of what I am doing and why. And so I take Wallace’s advice by constantly reminding myself that “this is water”, and I realize that on its most basic level, for better or for worse, the human experience is most valuable when it is shared.

Book Cover Idea...

As a distraction from all of the real work that is left to do, I have been throwing together ideas for the cover of my book!
Not super experienced with graphic design, obviously.

Bracing Myself For Christmas

This year, we tried to lay low. The last few Christmases have been tiring, if I were to sum them up. While much of the world rushes to buy and wrap last minute presents, we brace ourselves for some kind of catastrophe. It's always something, and this truth is universal no matter the household or the continent. And while we put out fires year round, Christmas seems to go up in the largest of flames, as if to remind us of the tumultuous nature of holding onto a ground that never stops spinning.

So I have learned to spot the little things, santa's permanent smile on the 30-year old cookie cutter and the smell created by anise and confectioner's sugar coming together in a modern version of an age-old recipe from our Italian descendants. And each year, we downsize, not in laughs or in experience, but in the stuff that surrounds us and seems to complicate what is supposed to be simple. In the absence of traditional religion, our focus is creating things, art, food. We move from meal to meal, inventing new flavors and clinging to old smells that inspire nostalgia when warm, and we spend the hours in between planning our next adventure, letting ideas adapt to our current mood and play off of our influences. The days of festive wrapping paper, extended family, and expectations have worn thin in an effort to keep things calm. And we have realized, all too painfully, that no matter how still you sit, nothing stops or slows down.

My sister gave birth, and every day I thank whoever it was that brought her that child. The baby girl who reminds us to smile often, whose hand on your chest or your face, reminds us that there is probably a God somewhere, hiding behind something, has lifted my sister, healed her perspective. She carries the arch of her father's eyebrows though she is too young to ask about him, and she is a perfect example of what he could have been. And on Christmas, our gift is counting kisses from a baby in footy pajamas, a baby whose adventures deserve to be preserved in the pages of a storybook.

This December, we remember the corruption and upset of the previous holiday, the sun is warm, the air is mild, and even though we have baked, and laughed, and reflected on the difference, Grandpa Michael Cassone is miles away, and nature is running it's course through his 97-year old veins. Growing up, I endured his predictable and usually crude jokes, watched him dip garlic bread in water at family dinners, marveled at his 'duct tape can cure all' mindset, and read his beautifully written account of the Italian branch of our shared family tree. And if i could, I would toss a message in the air, and the wind would carry it to his bedside. And I would ask him if he remembers the days that his children were born, if he could pinpoint the year that technology came in and trampled simplicity, if he's as fascinated by our five generations of living women as I am, and if he is ready to see whatever's next.

Our holiday evolution reads as a timeline of finding lightness, in small ways that might not be noticed by random passerby's, but has proven to our family, which consistently rises and falls in size, shape and color, that less, in the case of Christmas, is definitely more.

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