Lasagnas and other lifelines

Sometimes I want to write to you, The People, and I don’t know exactly what to say but I can start with the rich green of the trees in May in Boston or the stacks of boxes and chaos in my apartment the week before we move to our new place.

I could tell you I am so excited to get out of this little place and into the bigger place. I could tell you I’m glad to be on more solid ground than I was a few years ago: building a life from almost-scratch takes so much time.

The richness of life, this is what I want to tell you about the most. How my friend James brought me Treehouse beer which you can’t get anywhere other than the Treehouse breweries. That was nice and there was no occasion. He just brought me a few IPAs when he passed by Treehouse in central Mass and gave them to me when we ran around Mystic Lakes – a beautiful route, 6.67 miles round trip from my door.

How sometimes I cry on the living room floor when it’s been a hard time and how I lean into it, accepting the tears which is the only way through and out and up, and then it passes and I stand up and wash my face and walk to the store to buy pad thai ingredients. How our one-year-old godson calls Raja “pad thai”. This makes us giggle because pad thai is not necessarily easier for a one-year-old to say than Raja.

And how Raja and I woke up early on Saturday to chop onions and carrots and add the ground beef and make the bechamel sauce in a separate pot from the ragu and assemble two pans of lasagna and bring one to our friends who just had the tiniest baby you’ve ever seen.

Born a month ago at five pounds six ounces, he’s a bit bigger now, but he has skinny arms that lift off his tiny chest like little chicken wings and was born at Newton-Wellesley hospital, where I was also born, so I told him that I feel like he and I have a special little connection there.

Lately I have been seized with dread about the shortness of life and I’m not sure why this came over me so strongly. Everything began to feel scarce: will I have enough time with my beloved people? Will I have enough time, in general? Will I be able to write all the books and songs I want to write? And have all the children I want to have?

Some people I used to love fell out of my life many years ago and I don’t have any conclusions yet about that.

This weekend is Memorial Day and Walden Pond will be swamped and they’ll probably need to close the parking lot so I’ll need to go early if I want to get in my open water swim and start training for that triathlon this summer.

Several friends have offered to help us move, and we thanked them but turned down their offers because we got movers: Raja has a herniated disc right now and I’m not that strong, physically speaking.

And I just need to tell you about the salted chocolate walnut cookies at Butternut Bakehouse and the tiny fuzzy cygnets over at Horn Pond. Raja and I went walking there the other evening when the light was perfect.

Also about how when my friend James and I ran around the Mystics, we saw a raven swoop to pick up a live sparrow and eat it whole. That was sort of gruesome.

My long, long ago college fling released a beautiful album on Spotify and I had sort of forgotten about him and his band and then I remembered about him just in time to be pleasantly surprised by the new album release and then I was happy I’d remembered. The songs are warm and gorgeous and in this way, old loves can come back to you and time is not so final, so scarce, so terrifying actually. When you think about it.

When I listen to this album, I feel envious because I want to release my own album but I don’t. I say I mean to, I plan to, I intend to, but the real honest truth is that my guitar gathers dust in the corner of the living room.

The guitar lines on his album however flit around like little birds when I’m in the old Corolla I bought from my parents more than four years ago now, when I moved back from Jordan to the US – the first of two such moves – and after that first move I thought I was back in the US permanently but I wasn’t.

But I sing these songs now in my car, especially Sunday mornings on the way to church for whatever reason, and the warm and gorgeous singing always makes me feel the richness of things so closely, viscerally, like I could reach out and grab the actual rope of life. So I do actually do music, in that sense, and I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

It’s a time of upheaval for me and Raja – the boxes are stacked precariously and you can hardly reach the back door of the apartment anymore. Half the pantry is packed and the other half is strewn about everywhere. I don’t know that I left myself enough pairs of unpacked shoes to get to Friday, when we move and reverse the process, and unpack everything hopefully in a logical and organized way that makes me feel altogether more calm moving forward.

And it’s a time of upheaval for Us, The People – what with the ongoing war in Gaza (and Many Other Things but that is the one that presses in on my consciousness most of the time these days) and the two old, boring white men running for president.

So I’ve been thinking about What Knits Us Together: the ground beef and the bechamel sauce, lasagnas and IPAs, the offers of moving help, the chicken wings of newborns and the fuzz of the cygnets over at Horn Pond, salted walnut chocolate cookies and guitar lines that flit around like birds on a Sunday morning.

This is the very real and touchable fabric of life, not the shimmering sheen of something you can’t put your finger on, which, of course, is time and how it passes.

I can’t touch that, can’t shape it, can’t even make sense of it really. But I can tell you all the shades of green in the trees on the far side of Horn Pond when you look across it as the wind is whipping up tiny waves, and I can tell you that that sparrow we saw really struggled for life before it got eaten.